What is The Strategic Defence and Security review and what is it based on?

Since the budget last week, there is currently quite a lot of change happening in the UK.  The announcements made last wednesday show how the current Labour government is setting out its plans and its vision for the long term? This has led to many people and businesses wondering, how are we going to get to the long term? What are the steps we’re going to take in the short term to get to the long term? And this is probably the hardest point in any journey - where do I start?

Before that though, we figured it might be useful to consider how we’ve been talking and thinking about the future. How do we make baselines for our future progress, what assumptions are we making today - through things like the Strategic Defence and Security review (SDSR). 

What is the SDSR?

The principle behind the SDSR is that its a review that is scheduled to happen every five years or so. Sometimes such reviews are a basic accounting of what is new and what has changed (kind of a refresh of the last review) - other times, they are bigger and deeper than others.  So, today (Nov 2024) following a significant change in government the current review is likely to be quite deep and long lasting.  

What is the scope of an SDSR?

Strategically speaking an SDSR is complex beast.  Such a review covers not only any potential events or challenges around the world, but it also has a very long timeline.  For example, In September 2024, the public consultation phase of the latest SDSR asked the general public to share what they saw as the challenges faced by the UK out to 2050.

On the surface, such a question seems almost absurd. 

But in reality, there are people who do need to try to answer this, especially in government. 

To provide security and stability for its people a government needs to support and maintain ongoing programmes of growth. For defence and security this goes a bit further - as the systems that provide defence (generally referred to as defence capabilities) are themselves commissioned, developed and run and then decommissioned over very long periods - often 10-50 years in length! From industrial reforms, to the maintenance of nuclear power stations and building aircraft carriers, there are many people plan and think about the long term.

How does an SDSR handle questions about the future?

How does the SDSR gain a better understanding of the future challenges the UK might face over the next 25 (or so) years. 

At present it seems to do this on a few different fronts.  It does so, by asking the public to answer a series of questions (such as the question asked in the public consultation phase of the SDSR). It also uses established futures/foresight products like those produced through the UK’s Global Strategic Trends programme - the latest version of which is available here. 

Nominally, this output provides views on what the future trends could look like while (where possible) providing reach back to the evidence linked to such trends occurring.  Global strategic trends itself, does this by providing an extensive, academic style publication that lists research and efforts for what could happen.  So this is a fairly comprehensive baseline - provided in two publications one comprehensive (around 460 pages) and one a bite size summary of around 50 pages.

What source of information then does the SDSR use to think about the future?

So as it stands, the current SDSR takes its baseline and assumptions from the following two sources

1) Public consultation

2) Official documents outlining the ‘strategic context’ - in this case Global Stratagic Trends edition 7.

In parallel with these sources, there is likely to be third, that is somewhat harder to define but can be summarized as

3) Internal expressions of beliefs around threats and priorities from government departments (internal consultation)

And this is what is currently happening, and in some ways this is where the ‘art’ of policy making picks up from the ‘science’ of analysis - the source information has been collected from 1 and 2 and now, as the SDSR is actually written, this is where the further discussion and refinement of 3) is being played out. That is a topic of discussion in itself, but before we go there, I’d like to spend a bit more time looking at the outputs from 1 and 2, so we can do some of the fun stuff…in this ChatGPT enabled world - how do we actually answer the question of ‘What challenges will the UK face out to 2050?’