Will Starmer's military review match the threats we're told we face?

Yahoo

3 days ago

Down a discreet road, on the fringes of a quiet home counties commuter town, is a set of grey buildings worth many hundreds of millions of pounds. In one, behind a secure fence, a handful of workers are on shift this weekend, making Storm Shadow missiles by hand. Each one is worth hundreds of thousands, the product of months of work, made of myriad components.
Storm Shadows, like mini-aircraft, have been flying in the skies above Ukraine with a range of 250km (155 miles), part of the UK's backing of President Volodymyr Zelensky's efforts to try to keep Russia's Vladimir Putin at bay. The factory is calm and quiet - a world away from the fire and fury of the conflict on the edge of Europe.
We've been allowed to see the missiles up close because the government is warming up for a big moment on Monday, when the prime minister will unveil a major review of the military, the strategic defence review. Sir Keir Starmer has already said we are living in a "new, dangerous era", with a malevolent Russia and its friends hungry to disrupt and damage the West - while the White House is less eager to cough up to defend Europe.
So will this review meet the risk that politicians tell us we face?
We have gone through many years in which defence has been a lower priority for politicians and the public, largely because peace has prevailed in the UK. Since the end of the Cold War, a former minister says, "we've been going round the world making sure we are reassuring allies, and there have been some very nasty wars in the Middle East".
But, at the same time, the proportion of cash spent on defence has shrunk, and the ability of the military to fight "peer-on-peer" wars has decreased. There are well known worries about stockpiles, a lack of munitions, and weapons being decommissioned that haven't yet been replaced. We now have a smaller armed forces - one that is "hollowed out", in the words of the current Defence Secretary John Healey, who we'll talk to on this week's Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg.
Yet now, the government certainly confronts a more alarming picture - and there is a concerted focus on trying to address it. With conflict on the edge of Europe in Ukraine, a former minister says, "if you are going to credibly deter Russia, you need to persuade them, actually, if they mess around with Nato, they lose".
And that's before you consider that Donald Trump is a lot less willing than his predecessor to pay for other countries' defence, and China's "imminent" threat to Taiwan highlighted by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth overnight.
So what will next week's review suggest for the here and now, as well as the long term future? First, a caveat. The report is not published in full until Monday; it will be important to examine what it recommends. But the broad outline seems pretty clear: expect it to underline the importance of nuclear weapons and the UK's commitment to Nato, the Western defence alliance.
There will be an emphasis on modernising the forces, not least because the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of drones and adapting existing kit quickly to lethal effect. We have clues from the announcements ministers have already made about technology and protecting the country from cyber attacks.
The review, and ministers' messaging alongside it, will stress a greater need, in their view, for the public to play a part in protecting the country. A government source says "it's about making sure we think more about national resilience", and a "whole society approach" towards threats.
That is expected to include announcements about British industry creating more defence kit, expanding the cadet forces, and bolstering the number of men and women in the military reserves.
There have been suggestions of a new civilian force - a new "Home Guard" - to protect infrastructure such as power plants, airports and telecommunications hubs.
As another source says, "there is a lot of talk about resilience, a push across the whole of society, the kind we have only done twice in our history, in World War One and World War Two".
This is "not telling everyone they need to go out and build an Anderson shelter," jokes a former minister, but No 10 does want to usher in a new way of thinking among ordinary people geared towards keeping the country safe.
Whether any of these potential recommendations will change much is up for debate, though. While government sources claim it will be "transformative" and hail a "bold new vision", others are playing down its likely impact. A former Conservative defence minister suggests ministers have "massively overegged" what the review will really promise, and "we'll get a lot of things that sound great, but not many things that actually get moving".
A source involved in discussion around the review explained: "What will change? Substantively not much - there is a rhetorical change towards Nato and Europe, but it's not a major change in terms of capability - it's all pretty marginal."
The Ministry of Defence's permanent secretary David Williams has already said in public that it won't be until the autumn that we'll get specific details about exactly what is going to be ordered, spent and when.
The PM has already sped up his plans to spend 2.5% of the size of Britain's economy on defence by 2027, rather than the initial timescale of 2029. UK Defence Secretary John Healey said on Saturday there was "no doubt" UK defence spending would rise to 3% of GDP by 2034 at the latest.
All that doesn't make the problems go away.
The first is that after inflation and public sector pay rises, insiders question if 2.5% is enough to meet current defence plans - let alone the government's increasing ambition. Existing, expensive plans will remain - such as recapitalising the army, investing in nuclear, carrying on with the Aukus submarine deal with America and Australia, and the global combat air programme to build a next-generation fighter jet - which will gobble up billions of pounds now and for years to come.
Second, the chancellor doesn't want to change her self imposed rules on borrowing and spending again, so as we talked about last week, money is tight in government. Defence is already a relative winner in the review of government spending that's coming down the tracks.
Third, the PM faces a political dilemma - a pound on defence is a pound that doesn't go on health or welfare, and you won't find huge numbers of Labour MPs who stood for Parliament with the goal of giving more to the military, while trying to reduce benefit payments. Defence has long been one of the PM's big signals to the party and country that he is different to his predecessor Jeremy Corbyn. His version of Labour is comfortable appearing in front of Union Jacks, posing with soldiers or clambering in and out of submarines, though not all of his colleagues are.
And fourth, fundamentally there is a political question about whether a promise of big cash coming in the 2030s matches increasingly urgent rhetoric about the dangers we face which other allies are using to speed up defence spending more dramatically. At the end of June, Nato allies will gather for a major summit in The Hague. Nato's secretary general Mark Rutte has already made abundantly clear he wants the UK and its allies to be spending at least 3% on defence as soon as possible.
The US, the country with the biggest cheque book, wants countries to aim for as much as 5% and if it's to be less, to stop claiming that pensions, health care for veterans or other costs, can be counted as defence spending. I'm told the summit could set a new target for Nato allies to spend 3.5% on defence either by 2032 or by 2035. If that happens, the UK could seem to be lagging behind.
As a senior figure warns, for some Nato members, spending 3.5% of GDP on defence is a already a "done deal" - but the UK is still "hopping around". Almost before the ink is dry on the defence review, the government's critics may be able to warn it falls short.
Perhaps then, the government's approach is as far as it is currently financially or politically possible to go. But with the PM warning defence should be the "central organising principle" of government - the first thought in the morning and the last at night - threats to our security might evolve faster than politics.
This week there will be fierce scrutiny of whether we're really keeping up.
Numbers are down - but Starmer will still struggle to win on immigration
The Conservative Party faces problems - is its leader one of them?
The real problem facing Britain's shrinking military
Sign up for the Off Air with Laura K newsletter to get Laura Kuenssberg's expert insight and insider stories every week, emailed directly to you.
BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. And we showcase thought-provoking content from across BBC Sounds and iPlayer too. You can send us your feedback on the InDepth section by clicking on the button below.