General Sir Roly Walker, the Chief of the General Staff, said earlier this month that a ‘frank conversation’ with the British public about the need to prepare for a future war was vitally important. He is not wrong. The world is increasingly perilous – Russia’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine continues and its campaign of ‘hybrid’ attacks is expanding in scope and intensity. America’s conflict in Iran is exposing both the changing character of war and Washington’s own defence limitations. The United States is also pursuing Nato 3.0, which will see it scale back its own forces and shift the conventional burden onto its European allies. The People’s Republic of China has designs on Taiwan and may act, militarily, to retake what it sees simply as a rogue province.

That ‘grave conversation’ needs to be about more than just the threats the United Kingdom faces and its need for increased defence spending. It must be about the United Kingdom’s power and purpose in this changing world and how defence can best advance British interests at home by ensuring its security abroad. Successive defence reviews have sought to achieve this but have fallen short, serving more as accretions of policy ambitions rather than making substantive choices. They have regressed to debates about equipment in lieu of defining the British way of war or answering the question of ‘What are His Majesty’s Armed Forces for?’

Defence must be understood not as a........

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