The Disintegrating Review: where next for the UK?
The MoD’s NMH programme will replace the Griffin HAR2, Bell 212, AS365 and the Puma HC2 (pictured). (Photo: Trevor Nash)
The UK is not short of strategic documents outlining ambitious plans for its armed forces, but the ever-changing threat landscape poses a different set of questions.
The ‘Options for Change’ defence white paper of 1990 was designed to restructure the UK armed forces following the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. This restructuring provided an opportunity for the UK and other Western governments to reap a peace dividend by turning ‘swords into ploughshares’ with defence spending cuts.
That real-term decline in defence spending has continued to this day in tandem with military capability.
Although the UK government has briefed that defence spending has gone up over the last five years, this increase has been swallowed by adding elements from the security and intelligence agencies and lumping them
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