Rewriting the Integrated Review in the new era
Next month's Budget will have a major impact on the UK's defence and strategic posture, but what do the policy needs demand and what will it all cost?
On Wednesday, Politico Europe’s able defence and foreign affairs correspondent Cristina Gallardo, who has a crisp and forensic style which may stem from her background and training as a science reporter, broke a story that the government’s anticipated “refresh” of its fundamental defence and security document, 2021’s Global Britain in a Competitive Age: the Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, could be delayed until the end of March; the original plan had been to update the policy paper before the chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, delivers his first Budget to the House of Commons on Wednesday 15 March.
It might seem rather early to be revisiting a document which was only issued two years ago, and which was the culmination of a review announced in December 2019’s Queen’s Speech, lasting nearly 18 months. After all, the government of the day emphasised its weight, detail and comprehensiveness when it appeared in 2021, described as a paper “which is the product of over a year of work across government and of consultation with a wide range of external organisations and thinkers, [and] sets out a vision for Global Britain”. Boris Johnson, prime minister at the time, trailed it as the biggest review since the end of the Cold War, not just of defence but of overall international security policy, attempting boldly to connect the individual dots of military capability, diplomatic activity, strategic and economic policy and international development. Typically for Johnson, the hyperbole was readily at hand, but the ambition for the review process was as sincere as it was obvious.
For the cognoscenti, the serious intent of the review was signalled by the choice of Professor John Bew of King’s College London to lead the process. Bew had been brought into the Number 10 Policy Unit by Johnson to provide a dash of diversity of discipline and act as the prime minister’s adviser on foreign policy. He is a specialist in strategic and international policy, a biographer of Clement Attlee and Lord Castlereagh as well as author of a book dealing directly with the way in which foreign policy is conducted, Realpolitik: A History. His connections to US academics and thinkers made him attractive to Johnson’s inner circle; he held the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center (at the Library of Congress) from 2013 to 2014, the youngest ever occupant of the post, and knew the landscape of Beltway thinking. Nor were domestic politics a closed book. He headed the Britain in the World project for the right-wing think tank Policy Exchange, which was launched in March 2016 by the defence secretary Michael Fallon, and in 2018 he was appointed specialist adviser to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee for its extended programme of inquiries into “Global Britain”.
It is also worth noting, of course, that Professor the Honourable John Bew is the son of Lord Bew, the eminent historian of Ireland who is now chair of the House of Lords Appointment Committee and before that was chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Although the young Dr Paul Bew made his name in 1980 with a short but iconoclastic biography of the great Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell, he has also acted an historical adviser to the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday from 1998 to 2001 and was awarded his peerage partly because of his relationship with former Ulster Unionist leader Lord Trimble during the Northern Ireland Peace Process.
Why do we find ourselves revisiting the Integrated Review two years later, then? It had, after all, been a thorough and wide-ranging statement of a new policy framework with clearly defined elements:
the status of the United Kingdom as a “beacon of democratic sovereignty”, able to act with authority and influence in the world “sustaining an international order in which open societies and economies continue to flourish and the benefits of prosperity are shared through free trade and global growth”;
amplifying the UK’s influence through “stronger alliances and wider partnerships”, with the relationship with the US at the heart of everything, but also acting as the leading European member of NATO and engaging with the EU “based on mutual respect for sovereignty and the UK’s freedom to do things differently, economically and politically”;
increasing the UK’s presence in the Indo-Pacific to become “the European partner with the broadest, most integrated presence in support of mutually-beneficial trade, shared security and values”, in some ways mirroring the similar tilt of the United States over recent years;
developing and executing policy in a more connected and cross-government way, “characterised by agility, speed of action and digital integration – with a greater emphasis on engaging, training and assisting others.”
Attempting to bring together the various instruments of international policy was not new. New Labour’s Strategic Defence Review of 1998 was, according to the then-defence secretary, George Robertson, “firmly grounded in foreign policy” and was based on “a process of wide consultation”. He summed up the purpose of the review with the phrase “We want to give a lead, we want to be a force for good”. That sentence would not be out of place in the Integrated Review. Even Duncan Sandys’s famous or notorious 1957 white paper, while some of its phraseology now sounds rigidly ideological and obsessively focused on the expansionary threat of communism, talked about:
The need to fulfil our obligations as a member of the Commonwealth and of various regional defensive alliances. It must therefore enable us both to make our fair contribution to the Allied deterrent to global war and to discharge our responsibilities in many parts of the world.
Nevertheless, when the Integrated Review was published in 2021, there was a cautious optimism that the process as well as the outcome was genuinely revolutionary, and that there had been at least an attempt to base it on the principles of strategic priorities and goals rather than available resources. Alexander Downer, the former Australian foreign minister at that time acting as a United Nations envoy to Cyprus, stressed the comprehensive nature of the document in July 2021.
Where the Integrated Review has succeeded is not just in developing a medium-term plan for the UK’s international engagement but in doing so has incorporated most of the strands of that international engagement.
Gesine Weber, now a doctoral candidate in defence studies at King’s College London but in 2021 a programme coordinator for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, noted:
The Integrated Review finally puts flesh on the bones of the concept of Global Britain, and clearly outlines the UK’s aspirations to secure its place as a major player in international security.
Examining the Integrated Review a year after its publication, in 2022, the director of the British Foreign Policy Group, Sophia Gaston, praised it for its broad embrace of national interests on the international stage.
The Integrated Review was a substantial intellectual exercise underpinned by a radical and creative spirit, which required a comprehensive form of cross-governmental cooperation and consensus-building. It was intended to drive the construction of the enduring architecture of the UK’s geopolitical ambitions as a generational project, and to enable the delivery of these objectives in the national interest.
Shortly after the review was published, in April 2021, I spoke to legendary defence analyst Professor Michael Clarke, former head of RUSI and now working at the Strategy and Security Institute at the University of Exeter, for the Pivot Point Group podcast. The full episode is worth listening to—I would say that, wouldn’t I?—but Clarke’s view of the Integrated Review can be summed up by saying he praised its ambition and attempt to connect disparate strands of policy and mechanisms of delivery, but that, like any defence or international relations statement from the government, its success or failure would depend on how thoroughly it was implemented. In essence, he believed the review was saying most of the right things, but the real question was whether, in the light of it, the government would do those things, or act in a short-term, penny-pinching, financially driven way.
Now we are two years on. It has been a repeated refrain that defence and foreign policy reviews date quickly and can leave governments with outdated policy blueprints. When the SDSR was published in 2010, it noted sharply that there had not been a comprehensive review since 1998; while the SDR of 1998 looked back to the immediate post-Cold War assessment of Options for Change, delivered by Tom King as defence secretary in July 1990 (before even the first Gulf War had taken place). (There had also been the 1994 Front Line First study, but it had been widely suggested that it had been essentially an exercise in reducing costs, rather than a clear-eyed assessment of needs and a translation of those into resources required.)
The major event to have changed the strategic context since 2021 is, of course, the Russian invasion of Ukraine which began on 24 February 2022. This was, admittedly, in part an extension of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict which had begun in 2014 with the annexation of the Crimea by Russia, but the commitment of major forces to a “special military operation” last year has been a change in the scope of the conflict by President Vladimir Putin so substantial that it is not misleading to regard it as a discrete set of activities. Since last February, the war in Ukraine has much more closely resembled a traditional state-on-state encounter between sovereign states over disputed territory than a semi-proxy clash over circumscribed territorial disputes. So it is time to revisit our strategic posture taking into consideration a major new piece of context.
The other significant change of circumstances since March 2021 is the economic one. With the catastrophically received Growth Plan 2022 which then-chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng presented to Parliament in September last year as the major policy unveiling of the short-lived Truss administration, the UK’s economic prospects have, at least in short term, contracted substantially, and so the new defence and security settlement will be heavily influenced by available resources. This is why the reported negotiations between the Ministry of Defence and HM Treasury over public expenditure, which I considered at some length last week, are so important, and why the outcome will have an unusually significant impact on the way our security policy is carried out over the next few years.
Returning to Gallardo’s piece, she reports that the proposals for change submitted by the service chiefs have been rejected by Downing Street, where John Bew is still in the lead on the Integrated Review, because they offer insufficient change. At the same time, the leadership of the armed forces is wary of advancing proposals which are too radical, fearing that they might not attract the expenditure necessary to make them a reality. It is, fundamentally, an age-old Whitehall game of chicken: no part of the armed forces wants to offer more sacrifices than are necessary, only to see them carried out, but equally there is a fear of finding that ambitious plans, while they may be strategically and operationally sound, will fall by the wayside because, for all the goodwill, they are simply unaffordable.
Listening to the mood music, there is a sense that Rishi Sunak is much less open to the bold, dramatic sweeps of the arm than his predecessor Boris Johnson, for whom they were meat and drink. This is understandable: it is not just a matter of character, though the current prime minister seems by nature much warier and risk-averse than Johnson, but Sunak is having to deal with an economic situation which would seem to require substantial retrenchment. Although support for the commitment to assist Ukraine remains strong, and seems to be a genuinely popular item of foreign policy, the current premier believes that it must be accommodated within a less ambitious overall framework, and that the UK simply cannot afford major spending commitments with profound knock-on effects for our economic profile at a time when there is a politically poisonous cost-of-living crisis, no end is in sight in the conflict in Ukraine, and public services overall, from the National Health Service to higher education, are facing harsh spending reductions and have reacted with damaging industrial unrest.
This could almost be a stereotype of the differences in personality between Johnson and Sunak. Although the decision to offer major assistance to President Volodymr Zelenskyy’s government in Kyiv was by no means the personal crusade by Boris Johnson as which he is happy for it to be portrayed, it has been a clear and sustained direction of the UK’s external policy. We are the second-biggest donor to Ukraine, admittedly far behind the United States but still in a clear supporting role, and we have tried to move opinion and decision-making in our direction: when the defence secretary, Ben Wallace, announced last month that the UK would donate a squadron of Challenger 2 main battle tanks to the Ukrainian armed forces, the significance was not so much the additional capability which those 14 vehicles will contribute, though they will be the most advanced and sophisticated systems available to the Ukrainian Ground Forces; more important in the long-term is our taking the first step, which it is hoped will lead to other European countries transferring German-built Leopard 2 MBTs, something which has until now been resisted by the German government. Further, some commentators believe it could be an important step towards the US donating more substantial numbers of its own M1 Abrams MBTs, of which President Biden has so far only committed to donating 31.
(For what it’s worth, I’m sceptical of the value of giving M1s to the Ukrainian Ground Forces; while it is still at least a match for anything on the battlefield, it is distinguished from the Leopard 2 by the fact that it uses not a diesel engine, like the Leopard and the Challenger, but a multi-fuel gas turbine. This powerplant gives the M1 impressive acceleration and a high degree of mobility, but it is less fuel efficient than diesel engines, potentially putting greater strain on Ukraine’s supply chains. It is in theory a multi-fuel unit but has only generally been run on specific jet fuel which will need to be made available in a sustainable way for Ukraine to be able to operate the vehicles. There is also a basic but important tactical point, that the exhaust gases from the turbine are hotter than those from a diesel engine, so, although this drawback has been exaggerated, it can make it difficult for supporting infantry to stay close to the tank. From my own observations, it would be preferable to have large numbers of the readily available Leopard 2, in service with 21 countries around the world, rather than an admixture of Leopard, Abrams and Challenger.)
These delays to the Integrated Review “refresh”, however, are still measured in weeks rather than months. The initial plan was to announce changes in concert with 15 March’s Budget, then publish a white paper from the Ministry of Defence to set out how the changes will be implemented by July, before Parliament’s summer recess. If the revisions to the review are not revealed until the end of March, that could put pressure on the ability to draft, finalise and publish a white paper in the required timescale. Moreover, both civilian and military leadership at the MoD are aware that we are now in the fourth year of the 2019 Parliament, and a general election will have to be held by 24 January 2025. A unbiased and cautious betting man would not be placing money on a comfortable Conservative victory, and the arrival of a new government would inevitably lead to considerable upheaval across the policy spectrum, but in defence and foreign affairs in particular. Anything but the immediate short term, therefore, is very tentative.
This matters especially because timescales at the Ministry of Defence can be very long, particularly in terms of procurement. Even if we disregard the disaster of the Ajax infantry fighting vehicle, specifications for which were being drawn up in the second half of the 2000s but “it is not possible to determine a realistic timescale for the introduction of Ajax vehicles into operational service”, according to defence procurement minister Jeremy Quin in 2021, timeframes for equipment acquisition rarely stay in single figures of years and almost always run behind schedule (and over budget). It is true that the MoD’s system of Urgent Operational Requirements, whereby equipment to fill specific capability gaps can be obtained with funding directly from the Treasury, has generally delivered much shorter timeframes, but this is unsuitable for mainstream procurement. Any kind of revised strategy which will require new equipment may simply not be possible before potential major changes to policy by a new government.
It was misfortune that one of the more sensible, thorough and intellectually sound reviews of recent decades hit the brick wall of reality so quickly with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but anyone who seeks to make long-term strategic arrangements should be mindful of the aphorism of Mike Tyson that “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”. In Main Building on Whitehall, from the secretary of state for defence down, the leadership of our armed forces should, perhaps, redraft their submissions to the Integrated Review team with a very careful consideration of what, precisely, represents the punch in the mouth, how hard it will be, and how they will avoid simply hitting the canvas in its aftermath. Maybe the apposite quotation is not so much Iron Mike but the fictional Robert “Rocky” Balboa:
It’s not about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.