Strategic Direction and Military Capability

This chapter provides the context for the analysis chapters that follow. It opens with an examination of what strategic direction has been given by politicians to defence decision makers since the end of the Second World War. It then moves on to discuss defence policy, outlining what is contains, how it is decided upon and how is it promulgated. This, in turn, leads to a consideration of defence reviews, which seeks to identity exactly what a defence review entails and why they have occurred when they have during the research period. The second half of the chapter focuses on military capability. It begins with an explanation of the genesis of military capability as part of the Smart Procurement Initiative (SPI), which was introduced following the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR). It concludes by identifying how Defence’s approach to military capability has changed as a result of the post-2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) Defence Reform Programme (DRP).