Most strategic defence reviews – this is the ninth since the end of the Cold War in 1990 – have two major “strategic” flaws.
The first is that the world changes so fast that they are outdated almost before they are presented to the nation. Not much, to be fair, can be done about that. The second, a more puzzling and abiding failure, is that they rarely give much attention to the essential question predicating any such exercise – what, exactly, are Britain’s armed forces (and the Secret Intelligence Service) going to be asked to do in the coming years?
