The Integrated Review in Context

The Integrated Review in Context - Read the collection here

Strategic reviews don’t come along every day. There was, for example, a twelve-year gap between the 1998 Strategic Defence Review and the 2010 National Security Strategy and aligned Strategic Defence and Security Review. At the other extreme, conducting too many full-spectrum strategic reviews in too short a period of time would be counter-productive – tying officials up in knots, as no sooner than one review was finished, another cycle would start again.

Still, twelve years was too long. In the interim, the United Kingdom’s twin focus was global counter-terrorism and the defining military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. While the SDR itself was refreshed within four years, following 9/11, with a ‘New’ Chapter – it was anything but full spectrum. There was a growing sense throughout the 2000s that the UK needed a more thorough-going strategic review and, importantly, that such a review should transcend the traditional siloes of departmental activity and be backed by significant investment.

National Security in the 2010s

Ahead of the 2010 general election, there was a relative cross-party consensus that reforms were needed to the structures, processes and advisory roles supporting the Prime Minister and Cabinet on national security issues. Following that election, the coalition government drew on the Conservative Party’s plans from opposition to implement a series of reforms. The new Prime Minister, David Cameron, asked the top official in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Peter (now Lord) Ricketts, to lead this national security reform process. Ricketts became the UK’s first National Security Adviser (NSA), and he led the creation of a National Security Council (NSC) and supporting Secretariat in the Cabinet Office.

The NSA post and NSC structure are familiar and long-standing features of the US government - far from coincidental in the development of the UK reforms, and a clear benefit of Ricketts’s new role, as the indisputable UK equivalent for the US NSA and other foreign counterparts to coordinate with on major issues of foreign policy and international security. Another prominent feature of the US national security landscape is the publication of regular strategic reviews. This was also emulated by the 2010 reforms in the UK, which created an expectation of a five-year cycle of National Security Strategies and Strategic Defence and Security Reviews. In addition, a variety of sectoral strategies were developed within this wider framework, such as the five-yearly cycle of National Cyber Security Strategies.

Cameron’s reforms demonstrated that different prime ministers can change the machinery, rhythm and direction set from the centre of government. This point has been further proved in the five years since Cameron’s resignation. First, Theresa May appointed Mark Sedwill, who had been her permanent secretary at the Home Office, to be NSA, breaking a cycle of three NSAs with more conventional diplomatic career experience. Then, in the exceptional circumstances of the illness and untimely death of Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, May effectively decided to do without a full-time NSA, surprisingly – and unwisely – allowing Sedwill to combine both substantial roles simultaneously.

This potted history highlights the fact that efforts to reform the structures and processes of national security, to improve the quality and integration of national security strategy and its implementation long pre-date the Integrated Review, whatever Johnson’s bombastic proclamation about his Review being the ‘biggest’ since the end of the Cold War. Precursor reviews may not have had ‘integrated’ in their titles, but the consistent aim of the last two decades has been to achieve more integration between the different policy areas and departments involved in national security affairs, and indeed to achieve greater ‘fusion’ between the government and other actors which have an important role to play in national security.

The first point of context for the Integrated Review is, therefore, that it does not represent a historical break with past practice. There is a long pre-history of successive governments trying to achieve better coordination and integration in their national security strategies and implementation. Whether due to politics and presentation, or also reflecting a deeper truth about the difficulty of achieving lasting progress, most governments lament the status quo they inherit and feel that government could be more integrated and better coordinated than they find it.

The Johnson Strategy

You might think that this is a particularly difficult trick to pull off if the party of government has been incumbent for over a decade. Like much else in Boris Johnson’s political strategy, it is striking how much of the Integrated Review can be interpreted as a swipe at his Conservative predecessors, May and Cameron. Whether institutionally subordinating international development to foreign policy in the new Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, led by Dominic Raab, or indefinitely cutting the aid budget, in the Integrated Review and other decisions Johnson has repudiated key features of his predecessors’ approach to government. The extent of intra-party conflict this has provoked is evident in the concerted backbench rebellion over the aid cut, including May and former Cabinet Minister Andrew Mitchell as protagonists, as well as the concise excoriation of the cut released by former Prime Minister John Major.

Politically, then, Johnson’s government is defining itself as much against past Conservative practice than against anything currently proposed by the Labour opposition. Johnson has also been erratic in his approach to the senior advisory roles at the heart of government. On Sedwill’s retirement last year, Johnson first tried to appoint his Brexit adviser, David Frost, to the role of national security adviser as a member of the House of Lords –as neither a minister nor a career official. This unusual decision has since been sensibly reversed, with Frost assuming a more conventional, ministerial role focused on Europe, and the former permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, Stephen Lovegrove, assuming the NSA role. (Lovegrove’s five years running the MoD is directly-relevant experience, but it is fair to say that, as compared with his predecessors, he does not bring the same depth of national security experience to the role.) The dance over Frost’s appointment revealed a continuing discussion about how political the NSA could and should be – the outcome revealing once again how difficult it is to reform the civil service/political interface in these key areas of national security.

And from early 2020, the coronavirus pandemic emergency has called into question whether the structures, processes and policies pursued under the national security approach have adequately prepared the UK to address a threat that was identified as a top (Tier One) priority by the 2010 Strategy. Was the problem strategy or its implementation? Announcing his Integrated Review in the months prior to the pandemic, Johnson had claimed there was already a need to conduct a much bigger, more far-reaching and comprehensive review than any undertaken by the UK government since the end of the Cold War.

Johnson’s hyperbolic historical framing of his Review – the ‘biggest’ for thirty years – explicitly lends itself to a contextual appraisal. Judged by the metric of Johnson’s rhetoric, does the Integrated Review live up to this billing? To what extent does it really differ in substance from the Reviews conducted by Johnson’s predecessors, from John Major to Theresa May? And, in light of the post-Brexit ambitions of Johnson’s government to develop and deliver a ‘Global Britain’ agenda, how should we assess the fitness for purpose of the Integrated Review as a blueprint for approaching the defence, diplomatic, development and security issues that face the UK as matters of priority, whether regionally or thematically?

These were the questions that led us, at the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s College London, to commission a series of essays from distinguished former practitioners and leading scholars, most of whom are affiliated with the School of Security Studies at King’s and its work on national security matters, to provide insights and reflections on the Review.

Conclusion

The 20 essays in this volume cover a wide range of topics and themes associated with the Review, from the controversial issues of development policy and the aid budget, to the Review’s ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ and apparent treatment of China policy, and perennial issues of Euro-Atlantic security and the threat from Russia. The contributors do not always agree on their interpretations of the Review and its significance. Given the Review’s great breadth and its many unanswered questions – punted to subsequent sub-strategies and decisions – such disagreement is hardly surprising. And whilst several months have now passed since the Review’s publication, this can still only be a very provisional early assessment – a series of snapshots taken early in the life-cycle of the Review. The assessments, insights and provisional forecasts offered by our contributors can be returned to over the next five-to-ten years, used as indicators of how expert opinion regarding the Review has shifted – as it will – over its implementation cycle. To give just one example, we are waiting for the forthcoming conclusions of Stephen Lovegrove’s review of the national security mechanisms at the centre of government, which will perhaps help us to understand better what Johnson’s government means when it talks about an ‘integrated’ approach to national security.

Whilst the Review adopts an upbeat tone, particularly about seizing opportunities, the uncertainty and insecurity of the last five years creates a very different mood of reception for the Review’s title, Global Britain in a Competitive Age. The May and Johnson governments have struggled to define the phrase ‘Global Britain’ and breathe life into it, against the backdrop of five years of insular, inward-looking debate about what Brexit can and should be. This protracted, still on-going process has had a significant impact on relations between the United Kingdom’s constituent parts. It has also inevitably affected the UK’s relations with its closest neighbours in Europe and, to that extent, reduced the UK’s utility as a US partner in some ways.

Johnson’s government cannot realise its ‘Global Britain’ ambitions without first addressing its domestic challenges and those relating to its present and future relations with Europe. At the same time, as foreshadowed in the Review’s reference to a ‘competitive age,’ the UK’s domestic, social and political challenges will surely continue to be a target for hostile states intent on undermining the UK’s capacity to act. The strength and unity of purpose required to pursue an active global role will not emerge readily from a divisive domestic agenda. In short, context matters. The Johnson government must recognise the interdependencies and system effects of the totality of its policies. Policy coherence, as much as rigorous implementation, is a pre-condition for the success of the Integrated Review.

Dr Joe Devanny is Lecturer in National Security Studies in the Department of War Studies, part of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. He is deputy director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s. He is an associate of the Institute for Government, a member of the King’s Cyber Security Research Group, and an affiliate of the King’s Brazil Institute.

Professor John Gearson is Professor of National Security Studies in the Department of War Studies, part of the School of Security Studies at King’s College London. He is director of the Centre for Defence Studies at King’s and co-director of the Freeman Air and Space Institute. He has served in various senior positions at King’s and is a former specialist adviser to the House of Commons Defence Committee.