One year later: The U.K. strategic defence review

Sea Power, Dec 1999 by Kilvert-Jones, T D

An Engaged and Evolving Expeditionary Joint Force

British military and naval forces are now deployed around the world to a degree unprecedented in the postCold War era: from Brunei to Bosnia, from Cyprus to Saudi Arabia, from Belfast to Botswana, from Germany to Gibraltar-and in an additional 26 countries. This diversity of deployment is matched by the variety of their operational roles that, in support of national, NATO, and U.N. objectives, range from peacekeeping to limited war. This spectrum of tasks, carried out under widely different climatic, geographical, and operational circumstances, necessitates a flexible structure, a dynamic doctrine, strong leadership, and a correspondingly broad inventory of weapons and equipment capabilities.

The Strategic Defence Review

In 1998 the new Labor Party Government, under Prime Minister Tony Blair, introduced a comprehensive and very much needed Strategic Defence Review (SDR) that reassessed Britain's security interests and defense needs in the light of new and emerging strategic realities. The SDR has been widely acclaimed as the best attempt in recent history to restructure and rationalize the country's armed forces and establish more effective and relevant relationships among Britain's defense industrial base, the government, and the armed services.

The findings of the SDR were published in July 1998 as a government White Paper, Command 3999. A wide range of dramatic and effective programs and initiatives that focused thinking on the requirement to deploy highly trained and well-equipped forces around the world to prevent or contain crises was then instituted. To achieve the capabilities needed, U.K. government agencies, led by the Ministry of Defence (MOD), have identified the best methodology for force modernization. This process has touched every aspect of the military infrastructurefrom human-resource policies to defense-acquisition procedures.

The changes proposed by the SDR embrace the specific technical, doctrinal, and organizational developments needed to support a second-tier-power's approach to expeditionary operations and emerging security issues in an era of fundamental social, economic, technical, and cultural change. The SDR's impact on British joint and maritime forces is being felt in a number of ways.

The Crucible of Peace

Today's new and more complex national-security environment was a catalyst for change. The SDR also acknowledged that technology has once again had a revolutionary, if not decisive, effect on military capabilities, particularly the key enabling technologies of digitization and intelligence acquisition. Inevitable demands for improved efficiencies to generate savings in the ever-limited defense budget also have forced the pace for a fundamental review and reorganization of the acquisition infrastructure now known as the Defence Procurement Agency (DPA).

ln-truth, prior to SDR, too many of the United Kingdom's key defense acquisition programs had been over budget, behind schedule, and lacking the dynamic top-down leadership structure that could create the imaginative approaches that would bring the right equipment into service on time. In order to reverse that trend, programmanagement procedures were restructured under the auspices of the Smart Procurement Initiative (SPI). SPI will address these challenges by adopting a "whole life" (i.e., total life cycle) approach to acquisition-investing money early in the project's life, working more closely with industry, and, where appropriate, acquiring capabilities in stages. The SPI has delegated much greater authority in the acquisition process to the initial 33 newly appointed integrated-project-team leaders. This promises to produce a new and vital dynamic in the requirement analysis, design, and selection of MOD's future equipment inventory.

Iin the summer of 1999, John Howe, MOD's deputy chief of defence procurement, recognized the impact of these necessary changes and stated that Britain "must make the optimum tradeoffs between time, cost, and performance. In many cases, we will elect not to pay a premium for ultimate performance." In tight fiscal conditions, the best is certainly the enemy of the good. Other key SDR equipment-acquisition initiatives include a better integration of industry with the MOD to produce affordable, battle-winning military equipment.

As Howe commented, "It would be perverse of the ... MOD not to take greater advantage of the knowledge and strategic direction of companies in both the military and civil sectors of industry." This cooperative approach should enable the British to design, develop, and bring into service "new solutions to the front line faster and with less risk than before." Other benefits of this approach include cost effectiveness and greater joint force efficiency, because interoperability will be a critical requirement from the earliest design stage.

Significantly, within the European arena, Britain will be working more intimately with France, Germany, Italy,