STRATEGIC DEFENCE REVIEW 2025

Those who were hoping that Labour’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) would set out the way out of the Russia/Ukraine war and the path to a secure and stable Europe will be bitterly disappointed. The SDR basically endorses current Labour policy, stems from that policy, settles for more committees and a focus on new technology, with nuclear weapons as a distraction. The House of Lords report into defence a couple of years ago, entitled ‘Ukraine: a wake-up call’, was more practical and directly addressed what was needed. One can see why Labour went to such lengths to prevent MPs from seeing the SDR document before John Healey, the Defence Secretary, presented it to the House of Commons.

Healey, in a Foreword, asserts the SDR advocates:

•’”NATO First”—stepping up on European security by leading in NATO, with strengthened nuclear, new tech, and updated conventional capabilities.

• Move to warfighting readiness— establishing a more lethal ‘integrated force’ equipped for the future, and strengthened homeland defence.

• Engine for growth—driving jobs and prosperity through a new partnership with industry, radical procurement reforms, and backing UK businesses.

• UK innovation driven by lessons from Ukraine—harnessing drones, data, and digital warfare to make our Armed Forces stronger and safer.

• Whole-of-society approach—widening participation in national resilience and renewing the Nation’s contract with those who serve.’

Healey commits the government to ‘accepting all 62 recommendations’ and boasted that the planned increase of 0.2 per cent in defence spending to 2.5 per cent in 2027 was ‘the largest sustained increase to defence spending since the end of the Cold War’. The problem is that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is becoming more bloody at a time when the USA is backing away and wants to concentrate on the Pacific and China.

Healey commits to ‘up to £1bn new funding invested in homeland air and missile defence and creating a new CyberEM Command’, but that is not the same as Israel’s Iron Dome defence, nor is £1 billion enough. There is a welcome commitment to set up ‘at least six’ new munitions factories and also the announcement of ‘up to 12’ new submarines as part of the AUKUS programme (involving both the USA and Australia). But the new submarines will not be built until well into the 2030s and will not help with the war against Russia.

In their own Foreword, the SDR’s authors, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen KT GCMG, General Sir Richard Barrons KCB CBE and Dr Fiona Hill CMG, disclose that their remit was to ‘determine the roles, capabilities and reforms required to meet the challenges, threats and opportunities of the twenty-first century’. This is very general and does not directly address the current defence situation in Europe, nor the looming threat posed by China. Further they were ‘were asked to conduct our Review within the budgetary context of a transition to 2.5% of GDP’, although they hailed as ‘significant’ the ‘ambition to spend 3% of GDP on defence in the 2030s if economic and fiscal conditions allow’. The government’s spending prioritisation is the determinant and not the threat posed by Russia, China and their North Korean and Iranian allies.

In the Introduction, the report highlights the ‘possible deployment of a “reassurance force” to Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire’ – which is not contested and instead is baked into the report. There is no mention of the expected £4-5 billion cost of this, nor of the wisdom of such expenditure in preference to other priorities. Nor does the SDR examine the wisdom of needlessly handing over sovereignty of BIOT to Mauritius along with many £billions.

The SDR advocates ‘NATO First’, but recognises the need to defend UK overseas territories as well as the situation in the Pacific (such as AUKUS). NATO First is not ‘NATO only’.

The SDR comments that ‘Doubling down on support to Ukraine in pursuit of a durable political settlement is critical’, but does not elaborate as to what that entails.

The SDR warns of the likelihood of ‘Air and missile attack (from long-range drones, cruise, and ballistic missiles) targeting military infrastructure and critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the UK’, in the event of ‘a state-on-state war as part of NATO in 2025’. That is complacent. As can be seen from the wars in Syria and Ukraine, Russia would not confine its attacks to CNI. They would attack anything including civilians and civilian infrastructure. They would aim to turn the UK’s cities into rubble.

The SDR refers to the ‘innumerable strengths’ of the UK’s military, but ignores that the army failed to control Basra after the Iraq invasion, failed to control Afghanistan, then failed to hold Helmand province in Afghanistan without substantial US support and was unable to remain in Afghanistan once the USA decided to leave. The army is not punching above its weight. It is repeatedly getting in over its head.

The SDR advocates more globalisation citing ‘economies of scale and mass, new paths to innovation and economic growth, interoperability with allies, and a stronger collective defence industrial base’. It ignores that being interdependent upon other countries renders the UK unable to act on its own initiative and gives those other countries a veto. Sharing development costs is one thing, but manufacturing needs to be more sovereign. Currently, the UK has problems with both the USA, which has its own agenda and approach to Russia, and with the EU that is still seeking advantage and money in return for any cooperation with the UK. The surrender of the UK’s fishing grounds and the ongoing invasion across the English Channel being but two examples. Brexit was a decision to restore the UK’s independence and the SDR is wrong to ignore that.

The SDR naivete regarding allies extends to Turkey, which it describes as being ‘imperative to UK security interests across Europe and on NATO’s flanks’. Turkey is an important power and NATO member, but it is a very unreliable one with an agenda of its own – as its entanglement with the Syrian civil war and ISIS proved.

The SDR recommends:

‘To complement the UK’s NATO First approach and enhance cooperation between NATO and the European Union (EU), the MOD should support implementation of the UK’s Security and Defence Partnership with the EU. The EU is a defence and security actor of increasing significance, whose unique regulatory and financial levers can complement NATO’s role as the primary guarantor of European security— as demonstrated by the European Commission’s recent proposals for the rearmament of EU member states.’

Once again, the SDR ignores the reality. The EU is using the UK’s desperation to get involved with its affairs to extract monies and benefits. The UK is in economic difficulties and cannot afford the deliberate damage being inflicted by the EU and this affects the monies available for defence. While it is welcome for the EU countries to use the EU structure to get organised, the UK should stick to NATO. We voted to leave the EU.

The SDR says that ‘securing a durable political settlement in Ukraine that safeguards its sovereignty, territorial integrity, and future security is essential to deter Russia from further aggression across the region’. To that end, the UK was ‘doubling down on its support to Ukraine’, with an annual £3 billion in military support ‘for as long as it takes’. The SDR makes no comment on this commitment, nor the amount, nor its open-endedness. What safeguards sovereignty is not signing bits of paper with an enemy who has a long track record of breaking every treaty entered into. What ultimately safeguards sovereignty is military capability.

After three years of war, Ukraine is struggling to halt a slow Russian advance in its south-east, and Russia is massing more forces for an expected summer offensive. The nightly air attacks, by drones and missiles, on cities across Ukraine are causing deaths and destruction. If the aid to Ukraine at its current level is not enough to win, or at least conclude, the war – then does the West and the UK simply go on dishing out the same level of support indefinitely? The SDR does not say anything about this dilemma.

The SDR fully endorses the BIOT sell out and the payments involved. The SDR also praises the UK’s defence relationship in the Far East, including with Pakistan and India.

The SDR asserts: ‘The UK’s defence relationship with France is fundamental to its security. The 1995 Chequers Declaration stated that there is no situation in which a threat to a vital interest of one is not a threat to both. This remains true in 2025.’

The SDR highlights that the UK is ‘the only European country to assign its nuclear capability to the defence of NATO’. Also that ‘the UK and France have long recognised that a threat to the vital interests of one would constitute a threat to the vital interests of the other’, and so the UK ‘should seek a closer relationship with its European nuclear ally’.

Giving away BIOT is an act of treason. Neither India nor Pakistan are allies of the UK in any meaningful way. They are keen to export immigrants to the UK and refuse to take back those here illegally or have committed criminal offences. They are merrily buying oil from Russia and are sympathetic to Putin. Pakistan hid Osama bin Laden until the USA found and killed him. India was not even pro-West during the Cold War.

Both India and Turkey have been buying black market Russian oil, and have even been refining and mixing that black market oil with other oil and selling the mixture on to others. They are happily profiteering from the war. These are not the actions of allies.

France, with EU support, is happily a jumping off point for the illegal immigrant invasion of the UK, have demanded access to UK fishing grounds, and has been consistently difficult about Brexit – as has the rest of the EU. All of this is costing the UK serious money and thereby reduces the amount available to spend on defence.

The SDR’s globalist fantasies are at odds with reality and do great harm to the UK in setting out a false scenario. It is globalisation and the opposite of Brexit. It subordinates at every opportunity UK interests to globalist institutions and countries that do not have UK interests at heart. Further, it is a perverse excuse not to invest in UK security.

Instead of undermining the UK’s sovereignty to further a globalist agenda and offering monies to the EU, the UK should send munitions and weapons direct to Ukraine and inform the EU accordingly.

Looking at the three military services in turn, the SDR describes the role of the Royal Navy thus:

• ‘Role 1: Defend, protect, and enhance the resilience of the UK, its Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies: delivering the Continuous At Sea Deterrent (CASD), the bedrock of the UK’s defence. The Royal Navy should also assume responsibility for leading and coordinating industry and wider Government in protecting critical undersea infrastructure and maritime traffic.

• Role 2: Deter and defend in the Euro-Atlantic: contributing to NATO Regional Plans through the provision of: CASD; fifth-generation carrier strike capability; anti-submarine warfare, with a focus on securing the North Atlantic through its Atlantic Bastion plan (Box 12); littoral strike; and Type 45 destroyers providing Integrated Air and Missile Defence (Chapter 7.4).

• Role 3: Shape the global security environment: using Defence levers where the Navy can deliver the greatest effect, including capability partnerships, exports, and training and education, enhanced by the Navy’s permanent presence and periodic deployments beyond the Euro-Atlantic.’

For reasons unexplained, the SDR recommends: ‘Plans for the hybrid carrier airwings should also include long-range precision missiles capable of being fired from the carrier deck.’ Why? The priority for the two aircraft carriers is to ensure that they have a full complement of aircraft. Currently, they do not. Other surface vessels should have the ability to fire missiles. Some countries even have ‘missile cruisers’. However the SDR recommends: ‘Moving to a ‘hybrid’ carrier airwing, comprising crewed combat aircraft, autonomous collaborative platforms in the air, single-use drones, and, eventually, long-range missiles capable of being fired from the carrier deck.’ It makes no comment on the shortage of fighters for the carriers, or of the low number of surface vessels, or of the general lack of active ships across the Royal Navy – most of which are in dock.

The SDR recommends ‘using commercial vessels and burden-sharing capabilities with allies to augment assets such as the Fleet Solid Support ships’. The SDR makes no assessment of the size of the UK’s merchant fleet (once the largest in the world, but now…) and again tries to enmesh the UK with foreign powers, which, if carried out, would end its independent capability. It is an excuse not to increase naval capability.

The SDR urges the army to ‘be bolder’ and should aim to ‘deliver a ten-fold increase in lethality by harnessing precision firepower, surveillance technology, autonomy, digital connectivity, and data’. The details of this wish list are not explained other than in general terms.

The SDR describes the army’s Role 2 as:

‘Deter and defend in the Euro-Atlantic: providing one of two Strategic Reserve Corps to NATO, in line with NATO’s Regional Plans, ready to deploy rapidly from the UK to anywhere in the Euro-Atlantic area. The Army must also sustain its contribution to NATO’s forward presence in Estonia and Poland.’

The SDR recommends:

‘The Army must modernise the two divisions and the Corps HQ that it provides to NATO as one of the Alliance’s two Strategic Reserves Corps (SRC). The SRC should be led by the Corps HQ (Allied Rapid Reaction Corps) and enabled by, and command, Corps-level capability. The first division should comprise a fully deployable Headquarters, three manoeuvre brigades with armoured and mechanised capabilities, support brigade, and associated enablers. Planning should include the integration of the Royal Marines Commando Force into the SRC when appropriate.’

It continues:

‘The Army must evolve its mix of Regulars and Reserves, with a minimum of 100,000 soldiers, of which 73,000 are Regular. A small uplift in Regular personnel should be considered when funding allows … while the Army should benefit from the proposed 20% increase in Active Reserve numbers.’

The SDR calls only for a modernisation of the army’s capability, which is already underway, and ‘a small uplift’ of the regular army ‘when funding allows’ and endorses a proposed 20% increase in ‘Active Reserve numbers’. One assumes therefore, that the army can currently provide its SRC to NATO.

Russia and Ukraine are on the eastern edge of Europe, while the UK is an offshore island on the West coast. The continental powers (ie excluding the UK, Canada and the USA), including Ukraine, have around two million ground troops against Russia’s one million or so. An increase in the size of the UK army will make little difference to the ground war. The point previously argued on this blog (see here and here) is that the UK should not get drawn into wasting money on the army or deploying its current ill-equipped army into Ukraine willy-nilly. The SDR does not caution regarding this and simply endorses Labour policy, including the deployment of a ‘reassurance force’ of 5,000 troops to Ukraine (at a cost of £4-5 billion per year) in the event of a ceasefire. With respect, that is a strategic blunder.

The SDR correctly recognises: ‘Air power is vital to the protection of the UK … Over the next two decades, the UK and its allies will have to compete harder for control of the air, fighting in a way not seen for over 30 years due to the rapid development of adversarial capability specifically designed to counter Western strengths.’ The SDR continues: ‘ Although the quality of RAF capability is unquestionable, its lean size reflects the requirements of a post-Cold War era … With the return of state-on-state conflict in Europe, the RAF must improve its productivity, agility, and adaptability to build greater readiness and resilience’.

In its recommendations for the RAF, the SDR advocates that the RAF continues to update its aircraft as technology allows, improves its surveillance, ‘drive greater productivity to enhance its resilience’, deregulate, and ‘Hawk T187 87 The aircraft flown by the Red Arrows aerobatic display team. and Hawk T2 should be replaced with a cost-effective fast jet trainer’. The RAF currently is unable to train its own pilots due to lack of Hawk aircraft and is relying upon foreign countries for assistance. This is how bad things have got.

The SDR acknowledges that the F-35 fighters include 15% of UK value for each aircraft which had ‘strong industrial benefits for the UK’. The SDR makes no recommendation to increase the number of fighters in the RAF. This is an astonishing and telling omission.

This blog has already argued that the UK’s weak economic situation means that we cannot spend sufficient funds on all three military services. Resources are finite. We need to prioritise. The army is the least important. We need a much stronger RAF to establish air superiority over Europe and to defend the UK. We should therefore prioritise the RAF and restore it to having the same number of fighters it had during the Cold War: 900 or so. We further need a comprehensive equivalent Iron Dome air defence system similar to Israel. Given the advantage we have regarding the F-35 fighters, with British technology and the 15% value to the UK, then the UK has a unique advantage and should exploit this for our own and Ukraine’s benefit. It would be a big help if, like other countries, we could produce the fighters in the UK and hence acquire the skills necessary to maintain them.

There are rumours that Canada is reviewing its commitment to buy the F-35s and is considering buying the Swedish Griffin fighter instead, and Sweden has offered Canada the option to produce the aircraft in Canada. It is reported that the Griffin fighter is now using a Rolls-Royce engine.

The USA has proven itself an unreliable ally, especially regarding its treatment of Ukraine. The SDR ignores this and does not consider the consequences of the USA cutting off intelligence and satellite information as they did with Ukraine. If the UK has any doubt about the reliability of the F-35 because of this, then we too should consider the Swedish option, if the Eurofighter is either unsuitable or unavailable.

China expects to be militarily ready to conquer Taiwan in 2027. A military clash between the USA and China is likely to involve naval conflict. China already has the larger navy and is building more ships rapidly. The USA, which currently has a larger navy when measured by tonnage rather than the number of ships, is likely to concentrate its naval forces in the Pacific. There is consequently a need to be able to backfill the USA naval presence in the Atlantic, Mediterranean and the Gulf, from where Europe gets much of its oil and gas.

The SDR states that the Royal Navy’s role is to ‘defend in the Euro-Atlantic’. This restriction neatly ducks the issue of how the oil and gas tankers can reach Europe when undefended.

We need a larger Royal Navy to ensure free movement on the seas, including the Mediterranean and the Gulf, that is strong enough to take on the Houthis (Iranian allies) who have recently been forced to stop attacking shipping as a result of US naval bombardment, pirates, who roam that part of the world, and any Chinese warship or submarine that might wish to sink Western shipping. There may need to be a convoy system. The Royal Navy needs more investment for more warships, with more firepower, asap.

This increase in Defence spending should be funded by reducing the foreign aid budget by £15 billion, and that funding should be ring-fenced for capital spending. This will necessitate an end to the illegal immigrant invasion, given that monies from the foreign aid budget have been used to accommodate the illegals. Any spending on extra personnel should be funded by reducing the size of the civil service, which, under the Tories, increased from 384,000 in 2016 to 513,205 by June 2024.

The Labour government are treating the SDR as a delaying tactic and as an endorsement tool, rather like the OBR is to the Treasury. This is not good enough. The SDR has failed to properly highlight the strategic priorities, nor helped in any decision making process.

There is further the issue of whether or not a ceasefire, at least, can be achieved in Ukraine. A sustained ceasefire gives the Europeans time to concentrate on building up their military capability. Fewer munitions will need to be sent to Ukraine. If the war continues uninterrupted, then supplies to Ukraine need priority.

Particularly in the event of a ceasefire, then there is the danger of Putin recommencing his invasion should China invade Taiwan. Europe will need to be ready for that eventuality. Should the war continue, then NATO needs to consider bringing matters to a head now before China attacks Taiwan. NATO needs to consider how they can decisively defeat Putin now and so permanently end the war.

It is reported that the NATO countries will be pressed to increasing their defence spending to 3% at least. The reallocation of £15 billion to defence will fulfil that for the UK anyway.