Strategic Defence Review 2025

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Excerpts

Friday 18th July 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen]

That this House takes note of the Strategic Defence Review 2025.

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

My Lords, I am looking forward to listening later in the debate to my colleague and noble friend Lord McCabe make his maiden speech.

Unusually, I will start my speech today with my conclusion. After a full year examining, consulting, challenging, inspecting and intently looking at every aspect of the defence of this country, and bearing in mind the difficult world that we live in and have to survive in, this is what I firmly believe: we are underinsured; we are underprepared; we are not safe. This country and its people are not safe. The British people are faced with a world in turmoil, with great-power competition now spilling over into conflict, with constant grey-zone attacks on our mainland, and with Russia—often with the co-operation of Iran, China and North Korea—challenging the existing world order. We in this country are simply not safe.

This review outlines graphically the threats that we face and describes our weaknesses and vulnerabilities, but it also—I emphasise that this is crucial—charts the way in which we can recreate the war readiness which alone will guarantee deterrence and safety for the future. The 62 time-specified recommendations in the report are the very minimum that we need to ensure that the country and our people will be properly safe in the future. That is why, in the report, we call for a national conversation in the country about defence and security, and the Prime Minister has endorsed that view. It has to be led from the top, and there must be no restraint on military and other people articulating the case to the country.

I acknowledge, as a long-time politician, that defence is still not sufficiently high in the people’s priorities. They rightly worry about the cost of living—a lot of which has to do with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—welfare, education and the National Health Service. Denis Healey, who I used to work with, said in 1969:

“Once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/3/1969; col. 551.]


All of us have an obligation now to change public opinion.

I preface what more I have to say about the review with some words of thanks. First, I thank the Prime Minister and the Defence Secretary for entrusting my excellent colleagues, General Richard Barrons and Dr Fiona Hill, and me to do an external review of the nation’s defence. It was a pretty bold move of theirs. This is my second strategic defence review, but the access we had to the Ministry of Defence, its people and its information allowed us to be both radical and profound in our 62 recommendations, and then to have the endorsement of the Prime Minister, the Defence Secretary, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the whole Government in accepting it.

Secondly, I put on record my thanks to the many experts who assisted us in this historic endeavour. Working with the three reviewers was the defence review team, six non-partisan experts with us the whole way: Robin Marshall, Ed Dinsmore, Grace Cassy, Jean-Christophe Gray, Angus Lapsley and finally, and importantly, Sir Jeremy Quin, who was one of the best Defence Procurement Ministers in the last Conservative Government. In addition to them, over 150 experts were involved in the review and challenge process, which was a crucial way of capturing and interrogating external views. We are grateful to all of them. I pay fulsome credit to the talented team who worked with us on this review, led by Ayaaz Nawab, Group Captain Matthew Radnall and our chief drafter, Ashlee Godwin. We had a staff of truly remarkable and dedicated people assisting us in this mission. They made a pivotal contribution to a review which, I am confident, will intimidate our enemies, inspire our friends, invigorate our defence industry and make our country safer. They can be proud of what they have done, and we are proud of them.

This is a truly transformational review. It does not tinker with the issues, gloss over deficiencies, or just marginally improve on business as usual. Our adversaries have given up business as usual, and we must do so as well. Over the years, we have allowed our forces and defences to become hollowed out. When we say in the report that we are unprepared, it is an understatement. We do not have the ammunition, the training, the people, the spare parts or the logistics, and we do not have the medical capacity to deal with the mass casualties that we would face if we were involved in high-intensity warfare.

Over the years—I suppose I must plead guilty to this as well—we took a substantial peace dividend, because we all believed that the world had changed for the better; that the values of liberal democracy had been cemented into our societies; that war between nations was outmoded; and that our military forces would be needed only for short-term, distant interventions. Sadly, we were not alone in that.

It may have been overoptimism, or at worst wishful thinking, but the brutal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Putin’s Russia three years ago was a savage wake-up call for all of us. This world we now live in has changed out of all recognition, and we have got to change as well. This review, comprehensive and detailed as it is, is therefore designed to bolster deterrence, both conventional and nuclear, by rebuilding war-fighting readiness. With a combination of homeland resilience, a new integrated force and new command structure, and by putting NATO first, we will, we believe, be safer at home and more influential abroad.

We ruthlessly examined every aspect of defence, and the review challenges preconceived notions and habits for the very different world that we now live in. We have concluded that we need a strong digital foundation and an effective digital targeting web, which underpins the lethality and agility of our forces across all five domains.

We propose a new, reinvigorated partnership with the defence industry, capturing innovation at wartime pace. With a powerful new national armaments director shaking up our procurement process we will ensure, therefore, that our fighting forces have the modern equipment that they need, on time and on budget.

The review proposes a major boost to the reserves and the cadets. It reinvigorates and modernises training, it tackles the chronic troop accommodation problems that we have, and it deals with the recruitment shortfalls with innovative new ideas. It confronts—this is important—peacetime cultures of risk aversion, lack of trust and bureaucracy. Importantly, it will capture the innovations that we all see emerging from the experience of Ukraine.

Indeed, the lessons of Ukraine do not just lie in the impressive ingenuity and tenacity of the Ukrainian people and their leaders. Britain has been in the forefront of helping Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invaders. We should make no mistake at all that if Putin prevails in subjugating his neighbour, we will all pay a heavy price. I dealt with Vladimir Putin on a number of occasions when I was in NATO. He once stood beside me and said: “Ukraine is a sovereign independent nation which will make its own decisions about peace and security”. He is now a threat not just to Ukraine but to the whole of western Europe. We have already supported Ukraine substantially, and it remains at the very heart of this review.

One of the most important recommendations that we make in the review is that defence has to be a whole-of-society matter. In a world where the homeland is already under attack, with our critical national infrastructure on a knife-edge, where over 95% of our international data comes from threatened undersea cables and 77% of our gas supplies come in one single pipeline, we cannot simply contract out our defences to the people in uniform. We need to learn the lessons of Finland, Sweden and Norway in obliging all of us to know our individual and collective roles in protecting our nation.

Let me address the question which I am pretty confident is going to be at the core of the speeches that come later in the debate. Is there the money for what we propose? I believe that there is and that there has to be, and the Prime Minister knows that as well. In the national security strategy, which was published only a few days ago, the Prime Minister says under his own name:

“That is why, as part of this strategy, we make a historic commitment to spend 5% of our GDP on national security by 2035”.


There are no qualifications or caveats involved in that statement. In the Commons, on 2 June, the Defence Secretary, John Healey, said,

“take it from the Prime Minister when he said that we will spend what is needed to deliver this review”.

He added:

“The vision of this strategic defence review now becomes the mission of this Government to deliver”.—[Official Report, Commons, 2/6/25; col. 62.]


There is no messing in what either of them said, and there will be no messing in what the reviewers hold them to account on.

Finally, I say to Members of this House, who will all travel home after this debate in peace and safety, that three and a half years ago the European citizens of Bucha, Mariupol and Zaporizhzhia in eastern Ukraine also walked their European streets in peace and safety. Then came the sudden, unprovoked invasion by Putin’s Russia and with it the depraved violence of the Russian occupiers. In an instant they were not safe, at peace or free. Ordinary European people in ordinary European streets were doing ordinary things, until they were not. That is a warning for us all.

The British people need, more than ever in my lifetime, the renewed defence insurance that this review promises. Those of us, including in this House, who know the dangers and the answer must make the case with the people and decisively win that argument. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Robertson of Port Ellen (Lab)]

I congratulate my noble friend Lord McCabe on his striking maiden speech. We look forward to hearing more from him in the future. He comes from Port Glasgow, like the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie. Admiral West—the noble Lord, Lord West—comes from Clydebank, and I come from Dunoon, so the Firth of Clyde has become the new deep state in the House of Lords.

Secondly, I understand that the contribution by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Bristol, early in the debate, was her last speech in the House of Lords. Although she did not classify it as a valedictory, it actually was the last speech. On behalf of all Members of the House, I thank her for her service to the House and wish her well in her retirement.

I turn to the noble Lord, Lord Hennessy. The Minister has dealt with him, and we welcome him back in this brief episode today. He was uncharacteristically unkind to the review by saying that it had no poetry in it. One of the characteristics of this review is that it is extremely well written. It reads well, even for the non-expert.

The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, came up to me the other day in Millbank House to say that he had read it completely. He said that it was very impressive, very readable and very effective, and, “There is not a single split infinitive in it”. So there we have the judgment of the former Archbishop of York on it. It really has been beautifully drafted, to make sure that we get the message over. We are passionate about the issues, warnings and threats and the need for what will have to be done, but our concern was that it had to be said in a language that people outside of this bubble could understand, and that has been done. I paid a tribute earlier to our chief drafter, Ashlee Godwin, who works for the House of Commons Library. She was the brain behind the readability.

We have talked about the money. I dealt with that at the beginning, and I believe that the Prime Minister has made it clear exactly what will have to be done. But the noble Lord, Lord Stevens, made an interesting point. He said that it is not about whether there is enough money or whether it will be executed, but that the question is: do we mean it? That is an important question. We are telling the British people that they are not safe. We are telling them that we are underprepared, and that we collectively have left them underprepared. They are underinsured, because defence expenditure is the insurance policy of the nation against the future. We need to get that in place and win that argument as well.

Sir Basil Liddell Hart, a great strategist of the Second World War, once said that the outcome of the battle is more likely to be determined

“in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men”.

Deterrence is therefore a matter of psychology. It is a matter of persuading any adversary, whoever that adversary might be—and there are adversaries out there—that we will defend ourselves, our nation and our values. That is what this report is about. It is a warning that we are not safe but also a prescription for how we can be safer in the future.

If the question, “Is there a threat?”, has to be asked, you have only to watch the television every night to see what is happening in Ukraine. Of course, I dealt with Vladimir Putin in the good days. I am one of the few people still alive who can stand by an open window and talk about Vladimir Putin’s sense of humour—something that seems to have completely disappeared as the megalomania has taken over. That is what it represents.

In many ways, Ukraine is the last war. We keep talking about how people are fascinated and obsessed by the last war, not the next war. Ukraine might be the last war. The next war will be nastier and more brutal, and we need to be ready for it. We must try, through building deterrence and war-readiness, to deter any future adversary from taking on the British nation, because the costs of war will always be much greater than the costs of preventing it and building deterrence.

That is what this review is all about, and we need to get that message over to the British people so that it becomes a much more important issue for them. It will be too late if the lights go out, the hospitals close, the data centres melt because the air conditioning has been turned off, and the people turn on us collectively and say, “Why the hell didn’t you do something about it before now?” This is a warning, but that warning has to be heeded. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.