Notes on the 2023 British Defence Review, Thus Far

Government documents regarding official policy, contrary to what they should be, are not written for the intelligent citizen taking an interest in the public affairs with which every citizen ought to be concerned, but the "expert." One reflection of this is a lack of context for virtually everything important, which, especially in combination with the pompous verbosity that is a trademark of such documents' prose, leaves many a reader who takes the trouble to plow through it with a bland, platitudinous text offering little if any real insight into the important issue at hand.

It seems to me that British defence reviews are getting worse rather than better in this respect, with 2023's review document exemplary--the more in as it is a "refresh" of the 2021 document, which itself represented a break with the past. Titled Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, it combined the review of defence with a much more comprehensive (and much longer) policy statement--and while generally being referred to as the defence review, relegated most of the more narrowly military stuff we actually expect from British defence reviews on the basis of what they previously looked like (like how the armed forces will be sized and structured, what will be done about equipment holdings and bases, etc., etc.) to a separate document, Defence in a Competitive Age.

So basically the thing we call a defence review, even as it swelled to greater proportions, did not actually contain much "defence review stuff" in it, while commentators generally refrain from calling the one with most of the defence review stuff in it something other than a defence review, the much more generic term "command paper," as Walter Sobchak would have it, the "preferred nomenclature." But with, as it happened, the critical stuff about Britain's government's plans to expand its nuclear arsenal mainly in the Integrated Review rather than the more defence review-type command paper.

Entirely logical, of course.

The pattern is being followed this year, with the Integrated Review out first (it appeared March 13), and the command paper to follow. However, when the 2021 Integrated Review came out the "command paper" came out the next day, so at least those interested in the issue had the details of the country's defence posture soon enough. This year, though, while the Integrated Review, which was itself subject to delay (coming out March 13, almost a week later than its initial March 7 due date ), will be followed by the "command paper" not by a single day but by a period of months--this expected out in June!

This very long delay seems the more consequential given the reports going back to February of squabbling among the government's senior policymakers over the armed forces' funding--a reflection, I suppose, of how between the country's post-Great Recession, post-Brexit, post-pandemic, post-Trussonomics economic situation, the reality of NATO's military confrontation with Russia as war rages in Ukraine, and the government's pretensions (prioritizing the Euro-Atlantic while somehow sticking with the "tilt to the Indo-Pacific"), the incoherence of the government's aspirations is impossible for even the senior functionaries to ignore. While it is clear that much remains to be decided, given the disparity between means and stated ends I see no squaring of this circle anytime soon, not with the crowd currently in office, nor for that matter any other allowed anywhere near 10 Downing Street--the more in as this month's Integrated Review appallingly opened with three paragraphs of the government congratulating itself at a moment when serious self-criticism was sorely needed.