The UK Strategic Defence Review: A risky rearmament plan

Lewis Brooks and Charlie Linney examine the UK’s recent Strategic Defence Review and argue that the SDR risks undermining global peace and security through its militarised narrative, narrow scope, and short-term thinking.

The UK’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was launched last week, into an environment where established understandings of geopolitics and the UK's place in the world are in flux. It advocates putting the UK armed forces on a war footing and articulates a swathe of reforms towards this goal. Yet, the SDR presents itself more as a rearmament plan than a comprehensive understanding of the challenges facing the UK or of how to address the broader implications of its own actions on global peace and security.

Given the SDR’s authors were independent, scrutiny must be of the Government's decision to adopt the recommendations wholesale alongside its wider policy approach, as much as of the SDR itself. The UK’s upcoming National Security Strategy, due imminently, will need to address the bigger picture or risk a UK stance that inadvertently promotes instability over peace.

The narrative problem

“If you want to deter conflict, then the best way to do that is prepare for war” was the theme of the UK Prime Minister’s comments as he launched the SDR last Monday. This narrative captures the tone of the SDR itself, repeated in speeches and media engagements, which signals a shift in UK defence posture – returning the army to a war fighting position and calling for a ‘whole-of-society approach’ to defence and deterrence. 

Some of this narrative seeks to justify the considerable changes within the armed forces that the SDR entails – yet it goes far beyond that. The SDR aims to increase military capacity and prepare society for this endeavour, but without clearly articulating how such action would actually keep people safer. The danger is that this narrative over-simplifies a much more complex security environment and risks further conflict in the future.

The horizon problem

While the threats from other states are significant, the SDR takes a narrow and short-term view of the security environment. It acknowledges that ‘Ukraine is just one flashpoint amid growing instability...in the international landscape’ and, yet, in the ensuing list of ‘most immediately relevant’ challenges, two out of three issues identified still relate to the war in Ukraine.

The SDR cites daily attacks against the UK – from espionage to cyber-attacks and information manipulations – as well as the prospect of state-to-state war, and pivots the UK to defend its territory and the Euro Atlantic. Yet, many other security challenges, clearly identified in the Ministry of Defence's (MOD) own 2024 Global Security Trends forecast, are barely examined or addressed. These include long-term dynamics such as inequality and pressures on governance, conflict and instability beyond Europe, and environmental destruction and the climate crisis. There is little analysis of the gendered impacts of conflict and insecurity on women and men, girls and boys and other marginalised groups. While some mention is made of the treatment of armed forces personnel, the word ‘women’ only features twice in the entire 144-page document – in the footnotes.

These omissions are particularly stark given that the MOD – and other government departments – have spent years developing tools to address these challenges. The SDR makes no mention of drawing on the Armed Forces’ existing expertise in areas such as human security, which is a ‘moral, legal and strategic imperative' according to the MOD’s own Joint Service Publication on the subject. Nor does the SDR mention Women, Peace and Security, cultural property protection, civilian protection, or conflict sensitivity – let alone how to adapt capabilities in these areas for the current geopolitical and technological environment. As the UK Government implements the SDR, it is essential that it maintains, deploys and updates this expertise alongside its military objectives – not doing so risks undermining long-term peace and security.

As a result, the SDR gives the impression of orientating the military to take a single approach to a single (though significant) problem.

The consequences problem

The SDR does not adequately address the consequences and trade-offs that come with a focus on rearmament and militarism. This raises a fundamental question: does a UK military build-up with billions invested in attack submarines, warheads and cyber capabilities further incentivise rivals to rearm in response? The SDR also makes a clear push to build and integrate autonomy and AI to enable ‘military systems making decisions at machine-speed’, but does not seem to acknowledge the risks associated with such technologies or the role that the UK can (and certainly should) play in promoting international safeguards to prevent escalation or miscalculations. It misses an opportunity to develop an overall strategy with clear steps to promote disarmament and de-escalation and avoid misunderstandings that could result in military action – a recommendation the SDR makes with regards to China but not other states.

The SDR seems to place arms exports, as well as defence relationships with a view to increasing exports, at the heart of its approach – promising stronger ties with the arms industry and promoting the ‘defence as an engine of growth’ catchphrase. It recommends centralising arms innovation, procurement and export under the MOD, citing efficiency and clarity for industry, and directly framing arms exports as an economic opportunity. This approach appears to wilfully ignore the risks that current, let alone increased, arms exports may exacerbate conflict and fuel further humanitarian catastrophes akin to genocide against the Palestinians or Saudi Arabia’s brutal air campaign in Yemen. The overall impression given by the SDR is that the MOD will be more effective at facilitating arms exports, thereby supporting the broader production goals. We fully agree that the arms export control system should be efficient, however shifting responsibility for arms exports to the MOD risks confusing efficiency with expediency and repeating the mistakes of the past. For example, in 1996, the Scott Report revealed severe deficiencies in the MOD’s handling of arms export policy, where perceived short-term economic and foreign policy gains were pursued at the expense of restraint, accountability and the robust application of international law.

The SDR also fails to consider the massive carbon emissions stemming from military build-up and the risks of environmental damage, treating climate change as something happening to the UK rather than a cataclysmic phenomenon that it could play a significant role in combatting. Instead of surface-level adaptations to the military’s operations, Arctic presence and its bases, the UK must seriously consider its contributions to the problem and commit to proactively mitigating further damage – both on its own and multilaterally. It is irresponsible to propose such huge shifts in defence without conducting a comprehensive analysis and taking significant steps to mitigate the potential consequences. Strengthening, not loosening, arms export controls, reducing environmental destruction and climate crises, and promoting responsible use of military AI must be part of the UK’s approach to international security.

A downward spiral

The UK is far from solely responsible for the increasing military build-up across the world. The SDR clearly (though rather briefly) articulates some of the threats facing the country. Yet, to absolve the UK of responsibility for global militarisation and to paint this trend as an inevitability over which the UK has no agency – as the SDR and the rhetoric around it risks doing – is dangerous.

Viewing rearmament through a flawed economic lens is also more likely to fuel conflict and instability than prevent it. The SDR’s push for more autonomous capabilities and defence exports is one of embracing efficiency at the cost of responsibility. To do so would open the UK up to further complicity in human catastrophe, reputational damage, and the same inability to build international security as its rivals. Without a sense of the strategic consequences and risks of its approach, the UK may contribute to, or even accelerate, a global race to the bottom – as the norms that keep us safe are jettisoned and the tools that drive human suffering proliferate.

Looking to other government strategies...

When considered alongside the decision made earlier this year to slash the aid budget to increase spending on defence, the narrow lens of the SDR simply compounds the sense that the UK is making a strategic mistake – a criticism levelled by former military figures.

Looking forward, much now hangs on the National Security Strategy that is due to be published later this month. The National Security Strategy and the UK government more broadly should take a much more holistic approach in assessing the security environment, addressing the risks and consequences of rearmament and playing a stronger role in making the world safer and more stable.