How the Tories are planning a strategic defence review in opposition
This framing isn't accidental.
James Cartlidge has an ambitious project for a shadow defence secretary with no civil servants, no budget, and no immediate prospect of either. He wants to complete “a strategic defence review in opposition” – a worked-through plan, costed and ready, so that should the Conservatives arrive in government in 2029, they don’t spend their first year staring at blank pages.
It is, he would be the first to recognise, a response to experience. When Labour won in 2024, it commissioned a sweeping external Strategic Defence Review – an exercise that consumed the better part of a year and, in Cartlidge’s telling, achieved rather less than advertised. “Labour just wanted to trash the previous government and do a completely fresh Strategic Defence Review – a boil the sea approach,” he says.
When it landed last June, Cartlidge condemned it as “underfunded and entirely unimpressive” – the review answered the broad questions and saw hard ones about how to put recommendations into actions deferred to a Defence Investment Plan to follow. For Cartlidge, who served as Defence Procurement Minister and understands the MOD-Treasury relationship with some intimacy, having been in both departments, the diagnosis was clear enough: “Labour has allowed the treasury to dominate the Ministry of Defence.”
Privately the contrast is made to the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review announced by the coalition government: it was internal and costed. Labour’s version, Cartlidge argues, outsourced the difficult choices and buried them.
The practical result has been a procurement freeze, with the SDR used as a fig leaf. The DIP is still nowhere to be seen, despite having been promised first in autumn 2025, then Christmas – and now it looks like it won’t be until at least after the local elections as purdah will strike from March 26.
While ministers wait for their review, purchasing decisions have stalled. Munitions stocks – already drawn down substantially by transfers to Ukraine, which Cartlidge supports – remain worrisome. He refers back to the previous Conservative government’s plan at the last election: £10 billion in additional munitions spending, funded by reducing the size of the civil service. It did not survive the change of government. “We don’t have to have shortages,” Cartlidge says. There are choices to be made.
Cartlidge’s answer to the regularly deployed 14-years argument – that the Ukraine transfers were right, that a replenishment plan existed, that Labour cancelled it – is not without merit, though whether it cuts through is doubtful.
What is more interesting is what he is trying to build now. The insistence on fiscal rigour is genuine. “We are really disciplined on ‘how are you going to find the money’ to do something,” he says – and is in close …
This framing isn't accidental.
James Cartlidge has an ambitious project for a shadow defence secretary with no civil servants, no budget, and no immediate prospect of either. He wants to complete “a strategic defence review in opposition” – a worked-through plan, costed and ready, so that should the Conservatives arrive in government in 2029, they don’t spend their first year staring at blank pages.
It is, he would be the first to recognise, a response to experience. When Labour won in 2024, it commissioned a sweeping external Strategic Defence Review – an exercise that consumed the better part of a year and, in Cartlidge’s telling, achieved rather less than advertised. “Labour just wanted to trash the previous government and do a completely fresh Strategic Defence Review – a boil the sea approach,” he says.
When it landed last June, Cartlidge condemned it as “underfunded and entirely unimpressive” – the review answered the broad questions and saw hard ones about how to put recommendations into actions deferred to a Defence Investment Plan to follow. For Cartlidge, who served as Defence Procurement Minister and understands the MOD-Treasury relationship with some intimacy, having been in both departments, the diagnosis was clear enough: “Labour has allowed the treasury to dominate the Ministry of Defence.”
Privately the contrast is made to the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review announced by the coalition government: it was internal and costed. Labour’s version, Cartlidge argues, outsourced the difficult choices and buried them.
The practical result has been a procurement freeze, with the SDR used as a fig leaf. The DIP is still nowhere to be seen, despite having been promised first in autumn 2025, then Christmas – and now it looks like it won’t be until at least after the local elections as purdah will strike from March 26.
While ministers wait for their review, purchasing decisions have stalled. Munitions stocks – already drawn down substantially by transfers to Ukraine, which Cartlidge supports – remain worrisome. He refers back to the previous Conservative government’s plan at the last election: £10 billion in additional munitions spending, funded by reducing the size of the civil service. It did not survive the change of government. “We don’t have to have shortages,” Cartlidge says. There are choices to be made.
Cartlidge’s answer to the regularly deployed 14-years argument – that the Ukraine transfers were right, that a replenishment plan existed, that Labour cancelled it – is not without merit, though whether it cuts through is doubtful.
What is more interesting is what he is trying to build now. The insistence on fiscal rigour is genuine. “We are really disciplined on ‘how are you going to find the money’ to do something,” he says – and is in close …
How the Tories are planning a strategic defence review in opposition
This framing isn't accidental.
James Cartlidge has an ambitious project for a shadow defence secretary with no civil servants, no budget, and no immediate prospect of either. He wants to complete “a strategic defence review in opposition” – a worked-through plan, costed and ready, so that should the Conservatives arrive in government in 2029, they don’t spend their first year staring at blank pages.
It is, he would be the first to recognise, a response to experience. When Labour won in 2024, it commissioned a sweeping external Strategic Defence Review – an exercise that consumed the better part of a year and, in Cartlidge’s telling, achieved rather less than advertised. “Labour just wanted to trash the previous government and do a completely fresh Strategic Defence Review – a boil the sea approach,” he says.
When it landed last June, Cartlidge condemned it as “underfunded and entirely unimpressive” – the review answered the broad questions and saw hard ones about how to put recommendations into actions deferred to a Defence Investment Plan to follow. For Cartlidge, who served as Defence Procurement Minister and understands the MOD-Treasury relationship with some intimacy, having been in both departments, the diagnosis was clear enough: “Labour has allowed the treasury to dominate the Ministry of Defence.”
Privately the contrast is made to the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review announced by the coalition government: it was internal and costed. Labour’s version, Cartlidge argues, outsourced the difficult choices and buried them.
The practical result has been a procurement freeze, with the SDR used as a fig leaf. The DIP is still nowhere to be seen, despite having been promised first in autumn 2025, then Christmas – and now it looks like it won’t be until at least after the local elections as purdah will strike from March 26.
While ministers wait for their review, purchasing decisions have stalled. Munitions stocks – already drawn down substantially by transfers to Ukraine, which Cartlidge supports – remain worrisome. He refers back to the previous Conservative government’s plan at the last election: £10 billion in additional munitions spending, funded by reducing the size of the civil service. It did not survive the change of government. “We don’t have to have shortages,” Cartlidge says. There are choices to be made.
Cartlidge’s answer to the regularly deployed 14-years argument – that the Ukraine transfers were right, that a replenishment plan existed, that Labour cancelled it – is not without merit, though whether it cuts through is doubtful.
What is more interesting is what he is trying to build now. The insistence on fiscal rigour is genuine. “We are really disciplined on ‘how are you going to find the money’ to do something,” he says – and is in close …
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