Defence reviews and foreign policy resets seem to turn up almost as often as the Sussexes’ lifestyle brand relaunches these days. Labour’s strategic defence review this week comes less than two years after the Conservatives’ hardly less detailed defence white paper in July 2023, which in turn was a “refresh” of Boris Johnson’s ambitious integrated review of defence and foreign policy of March 2021. By this measure, it must be doubtful if, come the 2030s, analysts will look back on Keir Starmer and John Healey’s review and say it broke the mould.

The Labour government was entitled to try to put its own stamp on defence policy, of course, and its review team of George Robertson, Richard Barrons and Fiona Hill did a good, reasonably independent job. Yet this 2020s pattern of repeated strategic adaptation and refocus feels like the new normal now. It is also true that grand strategy does not often survive prolonged contact with the real world. In wartime, as the US general, later president, Dwight Eisenhower once put it, plans are useless but planning is essential.

Today, though, war is no longer an academic possibility. So defence policy must adapt afresh, and at pace. Labour’s defence review does not always do this convincingly. Most of the imperatives and innovations of the day revolve around resisting the threat from Russia and adapting to the new weaponry of the drone and cyber age. At times, though, this is hard to reconcile with the review’s dogged assumption........

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