Will Starmer's defence review actually solve any problems?

Independent

2 days ago

After months of behind the scenes wrangling, the government's long-awaited strategic defence review (SDR) is finally set to be published on Monday.
The flagship review, which was promised by Sir Keir Starmer immediately after assuming office, is intended to address the 'true state of the armed forces' – and the money available to spend on it.
Whenever ministers have faced questions over Britain's ailing military in the past few months, they have pointed to the SDR as a fix-all remedy.
But when the review is published on Monday – and inevitably pored over by defence experts, journalists and MPs – there will no longer be anywhere for the government to hide.
The key question hanging over the review is whether or not it will be ambitious enough to address the problem at hand – Britain's armed forces have been chronically underfunded for years. Troop numbers are down and ageing equipment is in a bad state.
Meanwhile, it is being published in an increasingly fraught landscape for global defence. Pressure on Britain and the rest of Europe to ramp up their defence spending has been rapidly increasing since the election of Donald Trump, who has repeatedly threatened to pull out of Nato if Europe does not pull its weight.
While the Nato defence spending target is 2 per cent of GDP – a benchmark that a number of European nations fall short of – Trump has gone so far as to suggest that US allies should be spending 5 per cent, amid mounting global threats from Russia, China and Iran.
Britain has already set out plans to reach 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 and on Friday, defence secretary John Healey went even further, committing to spending 3 per cent by 2034.
Although it sends a strong signal of ambition ahead of Monday's review, the near decade it will take us to get there shouldn't be overlooked. In the meantime, Britain will be lagging behind Baltic states like Estonia, Poland and Finland.
While it is an encouraging start, the resounding response is that the UK must move faster if it wants to remedy the hollowing out of the armed forces that has occurred after years of chronic underfunding.
In April 2024, the army fell below its recruitment target for the first time since it was set, with personnel numbers at the lowest level since the Napoleonic wars, at around 73,000 troops – down from 110,000 in 2010.
A commitment to increase troop numbers is likely to feature in the SDR, but the problem won't be fixed overnight. There is a major cultural issue with recruitment and retention in the armed forces: MoD figures from June 2024 revealed that more than 15,000 personnel quit in the 12 months previous, while just over 11,000 signed up.
The government's suggestion of putting peacekeeping troops in Ukraine is only adding to this pressure, with former head of the British Army Richard Dannatt last year warning that the UK simply doesn't have the numbers or the equipment to make this plan viable.
Spelling out the scale of the problem at a Royal United Services Institute conference in December, defence minister Al Carns – a former special forces soldier – admitted that the whole army could be dissipated within a year if it was dragged into a conflict similar in scale to the Ukraine war.
After years of chronic underfunding, Monday's report will be a difficult read. It's unsurprising, therefore, that the process of drafting it has not been plain sailing.
When Lord Robertson – one of the people tasked with leading the review – slapped a version on Healey's desk in December, one source said he was told to go away and 'give it another go'.
By February the review is understood to have already been on its fifth draft, and nobody seemed happy with it. Every time it landed back on MoD desks, it was met with horror at the scale of the holes in Britain's armed forces.
It was hoped the review would be able to highlight issues and propose viable solutions. But the further along it got, the more it made for depressing reading, sparking growing concern from figures inside the MoD that it could actually cause more problems for the government than it solved.
Just days out from the review's publication, defence sources said the final details were still being ironed out.
To make matters worse for Healey, Starmer's dash to get his beleaguered Chagos deal over the line meant the treaty was signed just two weeks before the review's publication - raising questions over how much of the defence budget would be swallowed up by the agreement.
According to conservative estimates from the government, the deal will cost £101m annually, split between the Foreign Office and the MoD. But just two weeks out from the review's pubication, there was still some toeing and froing over which department would foot the bill. How the cost would be shared, ministers couldn't say.
A few big ticket commitments have also been briefed out to the media ahead of Monday's publication. Britain is looking purchase fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons, a move that would be the biggest expansion of the nuclear deterrent since the Cold War. While £1.5bn will be spent on building six new munitions factories.
These pledges - like the 2034 deadline for hitting 3 per cent on defence spending - send the right signal: an acknowledgement that Britain is facing the most treacherous period since the Cold War.
But this will need to be echoed across the report as a whole, rather than displayed in just a few headline pledges. And the nine-year time lag before we hit the 3 per cent target doesn't convey the sense of urgency that many had hoped the review itself would.
The main purpose of the SDR is to provide solutions to the problem of Britain's ailing military. Certainly, it is meant to answer more questions than it poses. But with the global landscape becoming increasingly treacherous, and with the government dragging its heels on defence spending, there is a high chance Monday's publication will only bring more questions over how the UK defends itself in an increasingly unstable world.