Read on Twitter
#SDSR20 observation(s?).. Every SDSR has a pre-Review “phoney war” phase, in which headlines swirl about this or that capability. “Second carrier to be cut” one week, “frigate numbers to fall” the next. It is part of the politics. “Murmur the vulnerability of Sacred Cow X”,...1/?
...”and maybe they’ll offer up Y for cuts instead, or at least cut some fat from Z” (although “fat” usually means letting some infrastructure become ever-more dilapidated, or ever-more actually-quite-important jobs become gapped). One wildcard this time around is Cummings,...2/?
...wandering around government, pointing at things he doesn’t really understand, and saying “I imagine that’s [insert “inefficient”, “outdated”, “replaceable with a new computer that I read a ‘Wired’ article about” as appropriate]”. And it’s going to take a bloody powerful/...3/?
...secure-in-post/about-ready-for-the-pension-anyway official who *does* understand it to stand up to him. DC hinting at (maybe achieving? I haven’t followed this closely..) a new CDS before the SDSR is part of that: a top-level salvo, telling the senior-most official of... 4/?
...of Britain’s most-revered institution - or nearly-most, after the NHS - that even his many gold stars and royal honours aren’t going to get in the way of DC’s back-of-an-envelope RMA 3.0 (which RMA are we up to now?). Incidentally, it’s also a mark of the relative... 5/?
...immaturity and fragility of the UK National Security Strategy / Strategic Defence and Security Review system that it is quite so vulnerable to the contestation over the Review’s scope that we’re now seeing. The US drumbeat of NSS / QDR is more deeply consolidated; even... 6/?
...Trump’s associated loons have/would’ve (I think..) found it harder to retask for their own purposes than ours may yet prove to be (this can be construed as a good or bad thing, depending on your respective weighting of democratic control of the national security state vs...7/?
...institutional checks on executive authority). Anyway, Cameron’s vision of a regularised drumbeat of quinquennial NSS/SDSRs - one of his few, modest contributions to UK public life - has faced political and economic shocks from the start, leading to inter-Review SDSRs-that..8/?
...we-dare-not-name-as-such, like the 2017-18 NSCR/MDP, and still intermingled with an impulse toward the “old” understanding of the Defence White Paper as an ad hoc, contingent, ‘unstructured’ policy process to serve the political purposes of the government of the day. 9/?
... I will stop with random ramblings for now, though may have some more later (especially after this afternoon’s chat with @ChildsNJ @IISS_org, who has one of the shrewdest eyes out there for this stuff). But for anyone who wants to read more, I have... 10/?
...this (with @catarinathomson) in @BritJPIR on the political value/purpose of the NSS/SDSR process: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1369148118784722... 11/?
...this in @IntelNatSecJnl on the strengths/weaknesses of National Security Risk Assessment that feeds the NSS/SDSR process: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02684527.2018.1449366?journalCode=fint20... 12/?
...this in @RUSI_org Journal from two whole SDSRs ago(!) on why the return of multipolarity and associated need for interstate defence/deterrence should return as the focus of UK defence policy: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03071840903532932... 13/?
...this in @FPA_Jrnl on how the UK is still motivated to remain a major power on both role-perfomative and realpolitikal understandings, but that the tensions between the two are ever-present and often painful: https://academic.oup.com/fpa/article/15/4/470/5212276... 14/?
...this in International Politics (second half of the article) on what some of the shocks of Brexit might mean for the UK’s strategic position: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fs41311-017-0015-2... 15/?
...and this in @defence_studies on how the UK is once again thinking about major-power competition (but in an imprecise way) and what such competition might mean for UK security: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14702436.2019.1643243?journalCode=fdef20 (building on a predecessor in @IAJournal_CH: https://academic.oup.com/ia/article-abstract/91/2/333/2199819?redirectedFrom=fulltext)... 16/?
...Ok, going to get off Tw*tter now to do some real work, but *may* return if I get any more SDSR-themed niggles. Have a good day, and thanks to anyone who made it down this far! 17/[STOPPING FOR NOW]
...and I should know, since I assess hundreds of those a year! 
