09 Jun The UK’s New Defence Posture is Bold – but Washington will want Proof, not Promises
The UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) marks its most significant defence reset in over a decade. It lays out a shift from contingency planning to warfighting readiness, reframes defence as an industrial growth driver, and leans heavily into NATO. Drawing from lessons in Ukraine, Israel-Palestine, and the widening gap between the United States’ European and Indo-Pacific priorities, it is a strategy forged in a more dangerous world.
But for all its ambition, the review may leave watchers in Washington with an uneasy sense of déjà vu. Its posture is bold, but the plan lacks firm financial backing. The absence of binding fiscal commitments and the repackaging of old spending commitments as new media stories, combined with ongoing delivery concerns and a shrinking global scope, risks limiting Britain’s utility to Washington.
As UK and Europe watchers in the Washington pore through the detail and watch the political reactions closely over the coming weeks, their key questions will likely be: what of this is new and how much of this will actually happen?
What Washington will see First: Rhetoric Outpacing Resources
In the US, defence planners have long memories. They recall how the UK previously hit NATO’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence only after counting military pensions. Against that backdrop, an “ambition” to spend 3% of GDP on defence nearly a decade from now – without legislation or full-throated Treasury backing – carries less weight.
Meanwhile, the MoD’s own data shows it takes 6.5 years on average to deliver major defence programmes. Even a modest delay now risks capability gaps by 2030 – just as Russia is expected to reconstitute its conventional force.
More fundamentally, the SDR’s pivot toward Europe implies, and explicitly mentions, zero-sum trade-offs. A pound for the Baltics is a pound not spent in the Indo-Pacific. The UK’s regional prioritisation, while understandable, complicates US expectations of burden-sharing across theatres.
If Britain can’t sustain a forward posture in both regions, it risks becoming a valued but increasingly regional partner – one the US relies on in Europe but struggles to plan around globally.
Procurement Reform: Good Intentions, Questionable Credibility
The SDR’s most welcome signal – at least in theory – is its emphasis on emerging technologies. AI-enabled targeting systems, autonomous platforms, and integration across all branches are now central to UK doctrine. A new defence innovation body is promised, and the MoD aims to select and onboard new suppliers in under six months.
But Washington knows the UK system well, and doubts remain. The MoD’s procurement culture remains slow, bureaucratic, and reluctant to scale. Many promising innovations die in the valley of death between prototype and platform.
US and UK defence firms alike remain sceptical. The upcoming Defence Industrial Strategy, due on the 11th June, will need to show not just vision but mechanisms. The test will be whether agile contracting, private-sector partnerships, and industrial acceleration become routine or remain aspirational.
Meanwhile, European peers like Poland and Finland are racing ahead. And the EU, though often slow, is now offering ten times the innovation funding available through UK channels. If London cannot increase speed and scale, it risks losing ground in Washington’s mind – not just to rivals, but also to allies.
A Political Strategy that’s not yet Political
Finally, Washington will note that the government didn’t spend much time softening the ground with the electorate about the SDR’s relevance. While it references a “whole-of-society” approach, it was rolled out via media briefings over the weekend before its publication rather than through the proper Parliamentary channels. This leaves the government open to charges of bypassing democratic buy-in, just as it asks the public and business to rally behind a generational shift in security thinking and probably tax hikes. It also may have missed out on the earned wisdom and champions that many MPs with military backgrounds like Calvin Bailey MP and Fred Thomas MP may have brought and become.
Post-Cold War UK politics has also not favoured sustained defence investment, where hard choices were between health and social welfare spending, rather than between defence and everything else. Without a compelling narrative – one that builds cross-party and public consensus, while also bringing business along – the SDR risks being viewed as a technocratic exercise, not a national priority – or worse, a fig leaf for another tax grab by HM Treasury at the Autumn Statement, further hurting the UK’s economic growth prospects.
For the US, this matters. A fragile domestic consensus and a sputtering economy at home can make for a less reliable partner abroad.
A Test for Westminster – and for Washington
Strategically, the SDR aligns with many American interests. It reinforces NATO, boosts cyber and AI capacity, promises to reform procurement policy, and tries to pull UK defence policy into the 21st-century industrial frame. But alignment on paper is not assurance in practice.
Washington will be watching four things:
1. Whether the UK commits and legislates for 3% GDP spending or not, potentially in the Autumn Statement later this year.
2. Whether innovation moves beyond pilots and into procurement, and which US companies are chosen.
3. Whether Britain continues to show up in the Indo-Pacific – militarily, diplomatically, and/or economically.
4. Whether this is a durable cross-party shift or a temporary Starmer-era posture.
If those conditions are met, Britain will remain Washington’s first-call partner in Europe. If not, others – better funded, more focused, and faster to deliver – may fill the gap, ‘special relationship’ or not.
The views expressed in this article are the authour’s own and do not necessarily represent those of BFPG. This blog is part of a series by Michael Martins for BFPG on the future of UK-US relations. The first blog in the series can be read here.
