...The current state of Britain’s defence stands in marked contrast to the situation just a decade ago. In July 1998 George Robertson, Labour’s first Secretary of State for Defence in 18 years, presented the government’s Strategic Defence Review (
SDR) to parliament for approval. The SDR represented 14 months of work and enjoyed widespread support within the MoD and parliament, among the various London-based think-tanks and policy research institutes, and within the defence industry and academia. The strategy was praised for bringing foreign and defence policy together in a clear, coherent and affordable fashion. For several years the SDR was regarded as a model for defence planning, so much so that current Conservative defence policy looks set unimaginatively to replicate the SDR process.
Why is it that the government’s past performance in this field, so widely regarded as admirable in principle, has nevertheless proved so difficult to sustain in practice? To put the question another way, why is it that strategy and reality have apparently parted company so dramatically? To answer these questions it must first be understood that UK defence policy—at best a complex and uncertain process, as the next section explains—has always been a compromise of sorts between three policy imperatives: declaratory policy; military strategy; and the defence budget. These imperatives, each of which we discuss in turn below, have been the three main ingredients in the UK defence policy debate particularly the last.....
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