Equipping Britain’s Armed Forces: Continuity and Change in Defence Procurement and Industrial Policy

Abstract

The 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR)¹ contains the most recent and comprehensive statement of Britain’s defence equipment priorities and plans for the period to 2015. Marking the culmination of Britain’s shift from its Cold War posture, the SDR and associated policy documents explain how UK forces are to be equipped with a flexible expeditionary warfare capability and outline supporting defence-industrial policies. This chapter evaluates the new equipment programme and the defence-industrial issues it generates. The first section analyses the major defence platforms that make up the SDR vision and the military capabilities they are intended to provide. Though the SDR and supporting initiatives are presented as policy ‘solutions’ to long-term future British defence acquisition, the Blair administration continues to confront challenges that previous governments have had to address which arise from the inherent complexity of managing major equipment programmes and the difficult choices in formulating appropriate defence-industrial policies. The second section outlines these challenges and the third section reviews the ‘solutions’ that the current administration has chosen to adopt. The concluding section considers the difficult decisions that subsequent administrations will have to make if the SDR vision is to be achieved in full.