{"id":30184,"date":"2015-02-13T08:01:12","date_gmt":"2015-02-13T13:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=30184"},"modified":"2015-02-13T08:01:12","modified_gmt":"2015-02-13T13:01:12","slug":"britains-next-defence-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/02\/13\/britains-next-defence-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Britain’s next defence review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Think Defence<\/em><\/a> looks at the 2015 iteration of the British defence review process:<\/p>\n

There is a pre defence review ritual that everyone with an interest indulges in. It starts with a few gentle discussions on Great Britain\u2019s \u2018place in the world\u2019, the scale of our global ambition and obligations as a G8 regional power with a seat with our name on at the UN.<\/p>\n

After a suitable period has elapsed the discussion then veers into areas of risk and threat but even during this phase the mood is still good natured.<\/p>\n

Phase 3 gets heated because it is the first stage at which money is usually involved and therefore consideration of how the diminishing cake is sliced up between the services.<\/p>\n

It is during this phase that negotiations and backroom deals kick in and the inevitable \u2018test the water\u2019 leaking to sympathetic journalists.<\/p>\n

The final phase happens when it is all over and then as the implications of actual decisions made become clearer the bitterness sets in which can last for decades (see moving Australia and CVA01 for a good example).<\/p>\n

If you start with the money and define a fixed budget you still get into the same argument and all that happens then is people tend to shape the first phases so that, oh look, my answer was right all along.<\/p>\n

Start with risks and threats and the answers will always have to be tempered by the time it comes back around to budgets. Each review is rapidly made redundant by \u2018events dear boy\u2019 and the cycle starts again.<\/p>\n

There are no easy answers and to think so is rather foolish, if there was an easy method, everyone would be doing it.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

The \u2018punching above our weight\u2019 theme needs to be ruthlessly struck from the vocabulary because not only does it lead to illogical equipment decisions and hollowed out forces it fundamentally results in the talk loud small stick foreign policy that we seem unable to wean ourselves off.<\/p>\n

You can only get away with this for so long until others start to realise you are bluffing and I believe this is where we are now, even our allies are starting to realise that our big talk isn\u2019t backed up, despite having the worlds most advanced x or y, they are of little practical value if you only have a handful. Fur coat and no knickers could be an apt description of much of the UK\u2019s defence capabilities, as painful as it may be for us all to recognise, and so I think there is a fundamental need to reassess \u2018our place\u2019.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Think Defence looks at the 2015 iteration of the British defence review process: There is a pre defence review ritual that everyone with an interest indulges in. It starts with a few gentle discussions on Great Britain\u2019s \u2018place in the world\u2019, the scale of our global ambition and obligations as a G8 regional power with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,5],"tags":[145,31,697,30],"class_list":["post-30184","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-military","tag-airforce","tag-army","tag-budget","tag-navy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7QQ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30184","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30184"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30184\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30185,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30184\/revisions\/30185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}