The Royal Navy continues to become irrelevant with a bone in its teeth.
The 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) for the Royal Navy has been published and it is just as bad as you think it will be. Another buzzword salad buffet with zero calories and promises that will not be kept. Another simpleton’s wish list, with an unlikely promise about 3% GDP Defence Funding (2035?). Just another compilation of if’s and maybe’s which are entirely useless for planning in any future planning or fight. There is not a single viable or deliverable element in the document.
The mind-numbing repetition of “we continue to do defence on the cheap”. Long term 2.5% is an improvement on the 2% level that has been failing for over a decade. 3% will mean an extra £15 bill being spent on defense in a fiscal wasteland in the UK. In 2024, Germany outspent the UK overall – £65.4 billion compared to £56 billion. So, the UK neither has the largest actual defense budget, nor the largest percentage spend on defense in Europe. The second of those titles goes to Ukraine, and then to Poland. NATO wants members to spend 3.5% on defense. The SDR wants the UK to spend 3%. 3% means an extra £20b a year, 3.5% would mean an extra £30b. Given the state of UK finances, either will be a challenge.
Overall this review seems quite pointless except to buy time for a UK government that has no real idea how to improve UK defense and pay for it in alignment with changing NATO ambitions.
Firing deep fire missiles from aircraft carriers?
12 new nuclear subs hen they can’t maintain their current fleet 3/4 that size?
Nuclear armed F35?
I suspect the SDR was written by someone with zero defense knowledge or expertise, reycling terms and phrases they have only recently heard in briefings and getting them fundamentally wrong. You will note the SDR says nothing specific about anything, it feels like this document was crafted by a team of wikipedia experts and desktop defense intellectuals, that would explain a lot of the nebulous references and unclear terminology: they simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Yet another ultracrepidarian acid trip posing as policy.
The review was shaped by two core questions. The first considered what must be done to modernise UK defence to ensure it is fit for purpose in the strategic environment up to the 2040s. The second examined what could be delivered within a fixed financial framework. The recommendations were bench-marked against a funding profile of 2.5% of GDP from Financial Year 2027/28, rising to 3% no later than 2034. No additional questions were posed, and those writing the document were strictly confined within these parameters.
The document claims to be a “landmark”, having involved 1,700 individuals, 8,000 individual submissions and 150 senior experts. In many ways, the document is sound in terms of direction, but it is fundamentally aspirational-only, lacking detail about force design (except in a few instances), leaving the entire defence enterprise none the wiser about which programmes will be carried forward. While the Integrated Review (2021 & 23) talked about the need to change from ‘industrial age’ capabilities to ‘digital age’ the latest review does not mention cuts or de-scoping at all. Meanwhile, John Healey claimed the MoD will be making £6Bn of ‘efficiencies’ within the life of this Parliament.
More hot garbage wasting tens of millions of dollars on this kind of boilerplate that achieves nothing, consistently.
Implications of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review for the Royal Navy
