Britain is far from prepared for the era of AI warfare

How safe will this country be under Labour? The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) is supposed to provide the answers. It hasn’t been published yet, but may already be out of date. It’s expected to make the case for defence spending to rise from 2.3 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent – but that won’t be enough for Donald Trump, who has asked allies to devote 5 per cent of their national wealth to the military. And it’s not only what we spend but how we spend it that the government are struggling to get right.

The upcoming SDR will be the fourth review in a decade. On past showing, it will very probably fail to focus on the right questions, let alone give the right answers, on how to rebuild Britain’s military. Too often, defence reviews fixate on strategic questions, which they frequently get badly wrong, and avoid defence questions, which are far more important to get right. Reviews by David Cameron, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak each sought subtly to integrate security, defence, foreign, trade and other policy considerations – which detracted from complicated planning.

We need a review which starts by looking at and understanding what’s been happening in contemporary conflicts, particularly Ukraine. Many wars come to be defined by novel technology. The first world war was the war of the machine gun, the tank (in its later stages) and of tinned food – which enabled soldiers to hunker down in trenches for months. The second world war was the first to be fought as much in the air as on the ground. More recently, the first Gulf War introduced precision bombing with the aid of satellite images.

The conflict in Ukraine may at first appear to be a traditional grubby war of attrition.