Originally Posted by
Easy Street
In practice, the people who work on SDSRs spend the time between them keeping strategy under continual review, as it should always be. The 2015 SDSR was quickly overtaken by Brexit, Trump, and deteriorating relations with Russia. We don’t carry on as if nothing changes until the next review. I think you are really referring to the equipment plan, which is only one component of a SDSR.
Equipment plan reviews are an opportunity to ask the difficult questions like “is programme ‘x’ still going to deliver what we need in ‘y’ years’ time?”. Again these questions are asked more frequently during spending reviews, but the SDSR is the chance to take stock across the whole of Defence. As for SDSRs interfering with programme lifecycles, my simple response is “sunk cost fallacy”. If it’s no longer expected to be relevant or offer good value for future expenditure, bin it immediately irrespective of prior investment. (I recognise that politics often militates against this but civil servants are duty-bound to offer ministers the most economically-sound options). It’s a good thing we now question ourselves on this more often; you can blame the 12-year absence of comprehensive reviews after 1998 for the bloat and drift that compelled such over-correction in 2010.
That is exactly the issue, the people doing the review are in an ongoing process, which makes it very difficult to recognize that the world has changed fundamentally.
Reality today is that managing China is the key issue and that Russia is a potential ally and asset in that task, rather than a liability. That is not the existing paradigm, so the ongoing strategy reviews are not very useful, as they still run on mindsets dating back to Soviet days.