The Upcoming British Defence Review

The British government was supposed to have a defense review out on March 7--one the more eagerly anticipated because of the fact that, as its appearing a mere two years after the last rather dramatic review indicates (in the post-Cold War era, recalling the 1994 Defence Costs Study after the monetary-fiscal crisis of the early '90s, the "New Chapter" to the 1998 Strategic Defence Review after the September 11 attacks), it was expected to address a painful shock, or rather several of them. The protraction of the pandemic, Britain's especially weak economic condition afterward, the worsening of matters by "Trussonomics"--and of course, the war in Ukraine, amid a generally deteriorating international scene--make it easy to picture changes coming.

The review, of course, does not seem to have appeared as of the time of this writing (March 9). On March 7, the day it was supposed to actually be out, we were told that it "will be published in the coming days" (around the time of the Spring Budget 2023, which is scheduled for March 15)--against a backdrop of speculation that dispute within the government over policy and its resourcing was likely to compel such a delay--the Ministry of Defence apparently objecting to being asked to do more without a greater infusion of cash.

We will have to wait until then to see how the government will try to square the circle of its ends and means--or rather, pretend to do so. Since the nineteenth century Britain has been consistently, severely, overstretched militarily--the long-range big-picture history one retrenchment after another. Especially since 1945 the retrenchments have come thick and fast--in part because the cuts to commitments always significantly lagged the cuts to forces, which in turn lagged the cuts to the armed forces' budget, the reduction of which was never in line with the reduction in what Britain could afford. The result was that the situation quickly compelled a new round of adjustments--generally, cuts--of all of the above, each inadequate in the same way as before, Britain requiring its armed forces to do more than was reasonable, while being penurious with the forces it did have, and even that penurious spending more than the British fiscal state or the British economy on which it stood could bear (even, one might add, as British budget-cutters inflicted increasing pain on their populations with ever-greater stringency in services and social programs, down through the death rate-elevating 2010-2019 round of austerity), in a vicious circle that just went on and on.

There is not much left to cut these days, with British forces, which have shrunk almost every year since the Korean War, now under 150,000 strong, with an army that cannot boast a single proper heavy division (as against the three armored divisions it had in Germany during the Cold War), and a fleet stretched to the limit merely providing escort to its handful of carriers and nuclear ballistic missile submarines.

How could this be when Britain has been, and remains, one of the world's biggest spenders? The story is a complex one, but a key part has been British governments' hanging on to certain superpower-type trappings--a nuclear deterrent, a global base network (extending from Alberta to Kenya, from Cyprus to Oman, from the Falklands to Singapore), a relatively robust defense-industrial base that has the country building its own tanks and warships and fancying itself building sixth-generation super-fighters. Surprisingly recent decades have seen the government bring back things it had admitted that it could not afford back in the 1960s--not least the aforementioned big carriers (the seeds of which lie in the 1998 review), and an "east of Suez" orientation (emergent with the "Global Britain" rhetoric and alarums about China, the essential thrust of the "tilt toward the Indo-Pacific" of the 2021 review). Meanwhile, ever-extending the gap, Larry Elliott's quips about a Britain with a "fantasy island" economy sinking toward Third World status looks less and less like hyperbole all the time. (Crunching the numbers recently it seemed to me that the first industrialized nation is approaching the condition of a developing nation, certainly if the manufacturing-intensiveness of the economy is the standard.)

The more critical, quite fairly, speak of post-imperial "grandeur" prevailing over the government's realistically living "within its means," all as the same government wrecks the economic foundation providing those means for decade after decade. Still, severe as the situation has become, I do not think retrenchment or rationalization are to be expected from the coming review--just as I have no confidence that the current British government, nor one headed by its Parliamentary opposition, is likely to shift the country's economic course to any appreciable degree. Rather I expect that the new policy will be grandiosely described, materially overambitious, inadequately resourced, and (the more so for combination with that dismal economic situation) necessitate overhaul in another very short period of time--likely, before 2028. Because in our time the pattern of Establishment decision-making, in all things and everywhere, is "If it's broke, don't fix it."