Initial thoughts on the defence review

One of the most important pieces of work the government will be carrying out in the next few months will be the strategic defence and security review. It is an area where it can be difficult for governments to apply creative or radical thinking- after all, the country’s security is at stake, not an area anyone is willing to take risks on. But in fact it could be argued that the least risky option is to carry out a fundamental re-assessment of some of the assumptions that underpin defence thinking (Paul Rogers has a good assessment here).

This defence review needs to ask what security issues and risks our security policies need to counter. This is a difficult thing to do- procurement processes take years, and it is impossible to guess what threats we might be facing in 10 years time. However there is also no point in continuing to prepare for yesterday’s battles. The review needs to ask questions about whether we really will want or need to fight wars like Iraq and Afghanistan in the future. Maybe the important threats to national security will come from transnational crime like piracy? Maybe we should be more interested in the potential threats from climate change? Or the potential conflict generated by perceived inequality?

It seems clear to me that the defence review needs to be willing to question and challenge every aspect of our current defence and security policies. This also means looking at spending a part of the budget on peace initiatives, and research into conflict resolution and prevention, not just on weapons systems to enable us to intervene militarily when a conflict breaks out.

One of the big questions for the defence review is trident. It is clear that this has to be part of the review- not only because any review needs to look at the subject as a whole, but also because the cost of renewing trident would impact significantly on the options available for anything else. In the international context, President Obama has been talking about a nuclear-free future. The UK really needs to take this seriously, and move to support it, not carry on oblivious by renewing trident without even incorporating it in the defence review. One of the ironies about the debate on nuclear weapon proliferation is that under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT), not only do non-nuclear states agree not to acquire nuclear weapons, but nuclear states agree to engage in a process of disarmament. We can’t expect other states to cooperate with the NPT if we are not willing to act on our commitments also.

Whatever happens, the review needs to build in flexibility to cope with challenges in the future that we’ve yet to think of, as well as the ability to cope with the risks we can be sure of. In my view this means not only looking at military capability but also looking at how we can play our part in an international community that cooperates to prevent conflict from escalating to physical violence in the first place.