When Britain’s Tory-led coalition government issued the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), the signal sent to Washington and the rest of the world was that London was in full-scale strategic retreat. The government’s priorities were domestic. Getting the country’s finances under control was first and foremost, with the result that sweeping cuts were made to defense programs, platforms, and personnel. Dealing with the aftermath of a global recession, difficult missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a vast “black hole” of unfunded defense acquisition programs from the Labour years, it’s perhaps no surprise that the 2010 SDSR took on the character that it did.
Jump forward five years, and it’s striking how a less-than-boffo British military performance in the 2011 campaign in Libya, beheadings of citizens in the Middle East, a Russian invasion of another sovereign European state, and Russian submarines and planes playing hide-and-seek around U.K. home waters and airspace can create a different strategic calculus. While not without its problems, the recently released 2015 SDSR is a more serious document.
As Prime Minister David Cameron notes in the foreword to the white paper, “threats” to the U.K. “are growing,” and Britain’s own well-being is tied to “stability and order in the world.” And when it comes to the threats posed to that order, Britain doesn’t have the luxury of choosing “between conventional defences against state-based threats and the need to counter threats that do not recognise national borders. Today we face both and we must respond to both.”
The question, of course, in such reviews is how those words match up with capabilities. On its face, this SDSR is not too bad.
There is a pledge to stay above 2 percent of GDP for defense spending—the agreed-upon floor for NATO countries that few allies actually meet. And the Tory government is also committed to upping the defense procurement budget by some $18 billion over the next decade.
With these resources, the plan is to maintain Britain’s sea-based nuclear deterrent, create two new army strike brigades, up the number of expeditionary forces from the currently planned 30,000 to 50,000, build and deploy two new aircraft carriers, speed up delivery of F-35Bs to put on the carriers, purchase nine P-8 maritime patrol craft, create two extra squadrons of multirole fighters, maintain a surface combatant fleet of 19 ships, and plus-up Special Forces and cyber capabilities. All in all, a far rosier outlook for the country’s military—especially considering that just a year ago further cuts to the military were seen as likely.
But before putting the “great” back into Great Britain’s defense capabilities, it’s worth noting that it required new “bookkeeping” rules to keep the U.K. above the 2 percent marker. Not that the new rules are unfair; indeed, they reflect common NATO accounting standards. But if the old system were still in place, Britain’s defense burden would be below 2 percent and certainly below what historically that burden has been.
That the budget isn’t being cut is certainly good news, but the reality is that the SDSR in real terms bumps up defense spending only marginally. There is also the issue that a fair amount of the “new” spending is tied to savings from efficiencies elsewhere, including a shift in moneys from other programs and a massive cut in the civilian defense workforce. The savings could happen, but one wouldn’t want to bet the house on it.
Diving deeper, one discovers, for example, that the two new army strike brigades are not a product of increased end-strength but taken out of the existing force structure and won’t be operational until 2025. As for the Royal Navy, the carriers will be going to sea with new F-35s but below a normal carrier complement. And while committed to maintaining a surface combatant fleet of 19 ships, the SDSR plan is to buy only 8 of the new antisubmarine frigates—instead of the original 13—while hoping to make up the gap with a new frigate that, it is said, will be cheaper and exportable but is only notional at this point. As for the air force, the two additional fighter squadrons will be composed not of new jets but of existing Typhoons extended operationally for an additional 10 years. To be sure, these are important capabilities but not of an order that knocks one’s socks off.
The fact remains that, since 1998, British land forces have shrunk by a quarter, and the number of principal surface combatants has dropped by half. There is no reason to believe that those reductions in force structure will be reversed anytime soon—if ever. As with virtually every European military budget, the British budget has been continually squeezed by other spending priorities. And while the Tory government has begun to bend that curve, even from 2009-10 to 2013-14, by London’s own accounting, welfare spending increased from 35 percent of the budget to 37 percent. In contrast, the share given to defense was less than 6 percent.
There is no question that the 2015 SDSR is an improvement over its predecessor in both the goals it sets and the means by which it plans to meet them. The underlying ambition to remain something of a “pocket superpower” is a welcome change from the “Little England” of recent years. But it’s an ambition that appears to lack urgency and is tempered by a grudging grant of needed resources. So for now, it’s only “two cheers” for this latest Strategic Defence and Security Review.
Gary Schmitt is director of the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
