‘Build the golf course first’ – an organisational and strategic management perspective on UK defence reviews

ABSTRACT

UK defence reviews have generated a flourishing academic debate for the past one-and-a-half decades. Still, the scholarship has hardly applied organisation and strategic management concepts regarding these reviews and therefore omits relevant insights to understand the outcomes arising from these important strategic documents. This article proposes the organisation and strategic management scholarship can contribute significantly to explaining the dynamics of strategy-making and implementation of the UK’s previous and forthcoming defence reviews. The avoidance of budgetary losses and maintenance of corporate autonomy by any formal organisation – including the UK Ministry of Defence – are particularly powerful concepts for explaining the dynamics of strategy-making and implementation. These concepts are critical for understanding how the UK defence budget is actually spent and how its defence reviews are developed and implemented.

KEYWORDS:

• organisational management
• strategic management
• strategy, UK defence reviews, UK Ministry of Defence

In the US military it is widely perceived that, among the services, the US Air Force has the nicest military bases with excellent accommodation and amenities. According to military folklore, when the US Army starts developing a new military base, it builds the capacities necessary for the core functions of the installation like the training facilities or the armoury first, and it spends on amenities what is left from the budget. Thus, the Army gets state-of-the-art military capabilities but sub-par accommodation for its personnel on the base. The US Air Force has a different approach: it builds the golf course first then the officer’s mess and other amenities. When they run out of budget, they ask for extra funds to finish the infrastructure, like the airfield, that is absolutely necessary for operating an airbase.¹ Hence, the US Air Force indirectly forces the political decision-makers’ hands by creating sunk costs to achieve its aims. Yet this behaviour is not a unique characteristic of the US Air Force. It is also happening in other armed forces, which corresponds with the insights of organisational theory and strategic management that suggests organisations primarily seek to maintain their corporate autonomy and want to avoid budgetary restrictions. By building the golf course first, the US Air Force achieves both.

Extending the “golf course” anecdote, this article brings the insights of organisational theory and strategic management (Allison and Zelikow 1999; Becker 2004; Hasselbladh and Ydén 2020; Lindblom 1959; Mintzberg 1994; Rosenau 1986; Upton 1994; Weick 1995; Wilson 1989; Zisk 1993) to the topic of UK defence reviews, which have generated a flourishing academic debate for the past one-and-a-half decades. The UK government experiences certain organisational processes affecting how its defence reviews are developed and implemented. However, although these reviews have generated numerous academic articles, the scholarship has hardly applied organisation and strategic management concepts to UK strategic reviews and therefore omits relevant insights for comprehensively understanding these important documents. This paper proposes to fill this gap by showing how the organisation and strategic management scholarship meaningfully contributes to how we understand UK’s defence reviews.

Two stable, high-level take-aways stand out from the organisation and strategic management literature. The first addresses the stability in the defence policymaking process, a view established by the very original “Groundhog Day” circular model developed by Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman (2010). The “Groundhog Day” model has set the agenda for much of the research conversation on UK strategic reviews. A key feature of the model is that policymakers are locked into the cycle of policy failure-inertia-formulation-misimplementation partly because the seeds of failure frequently are sown by the misimplementation of the previous strategic review. An important reason for this misimplementation is faulty assumptions policymakers make about the willingness of the UK MoD to accept the loss of budgetary resources, while the organisational management literature highlights that formal organisations are efficient in resisting budgetary cuts. This paper identifies three main methods the UK MoD utilises in this regard. First, when the UK MoD faces a potential budgetary cut or expects to receive less financial resources than it deems “necessary,” it frames the issue in a particular way based on existing ingrained organisational logic. Usually, the MoD argues that it will not be able to meet its international commitments or that national security will be in jeopardy without extra financial resources. Second, if the UK MoD does not receive the financial resources it hoped for, it seemingly accepts the strategic direction of the strategic review. However, in practice, the UK MoD does not change its plans significantly. It just extends the timeline of its programs and cuts on the margins while waiting for a more favourable political environment when its defence plans will be funded. Finally, the UK MoD maintains a conceptual inertia by keeping an outdated approach to strategy-making of “ends, ways and means.” This conceptual tool is efficient in generating economic arguments against budgetary cuts and maintaining the existing trajectory of the organisation but inadequate for generating real strategic options.

The second take-away from the organisational and strategic management perspective pertains to stability in substantive policy outcomes that is evident in a variety of works but comes to an apogee in the recent work of Matt Uttley, Wilkinson, and van Rij (2019) on the path-dependent nature of UK defence policy, in particular the long-run persistence of a balanced force posture. Here again, there is a crucial gap in the literature about why a balanced force approach is so strongly favoured by the MoD as an organisation. This is partly because of the yawning gap between the level of organisational flexibility assumed by policymakers and what is warranted based on what we actually know about the characteristics of formal organisations. In fact, organisational and strategic management theory contains little basis for predicting the speedy and enthusiastic uptake of significant and new strategic review recommendations; the situation is quite the opposite. The reason partially is that the intended transformations the MoD should make as a result of the strategic reviews often jeopardise its corporate autonomy. Thus, from an organisational point of view, muddling through is the preferred option over making hard choices. Namely, if the UK MoD keeps a wide portfolio of capabilities – even though with a smaller mass – it will enhance the flexibility of the organisation when it has to conduct operations.

Accordingly, organisational theory suggests the UK MoD will oppose both the efforts to shrink its resources and limit its autonomy. The avoidance of budgetary losses and maintenance of corporate autonomy by any formal organisation – including the UK Ministry of Defence – are particularly powerful concepts for explaining the dynamics of strategy-making and implementation. These ideas are therefore critical for explaining the constrained paths upon which UK defence policy ultimately travels, why policymakers have less room to change existing strategic directions than they sometimes appear to perceive, and how the UK defence budget is eventually spent.

Prior work related to this paper includes Thomson and Blagden (2018) and Grattan, Oregan, and Parry (2015). The fact that the existing UK strategic reviews literature has barely touched organisations and management does not mean that scholars (and practitioners) have not studied these issues in the more general context of British defence policy. Yet, on the one hand, with the exceptions of Thomson and Blagden (2018) and Grattan, Oregan, and Parry (2015), the papers concerning UK strategic reviews have almost never used organisation and strategic management concepts to understand the dynamics behind defence strategy-making. On the other hand, practitioners tend to see the development of defence policy as a political art that does not take into conscious consideration relevant organisations and management concepts. Both scholars and practitioners have typically applied “classical” thinking to strategy or developed new analytical tools. In addition, a significant amount of work has been done by applying organisation and management theories to understand doctrinal innovation that has been rarely utilised for understanding other aspects of defence policymaking (Posen 1984; Jensen 2016). Therefore, from the perspective of organisations and management scholarship, there remains an opportunity to create a more fulsome view of UK defence reviews, which is a key contribution of this paper.

The paper proceeds as follows. The next section will briefly summarise some of the insights about militaries as formal organisations and utilise concepts from the military doctrinal innovation literature to provide a conceptual foundation for the paper. This section highlights why it is difficult to generate meaningful change in militaries, which has an enormous effect on strategies. After that the paper briefly introduces UK strategic reviews and the related literature highlighting that, despite the available insights of organisational and strategic management, these literatures have not been used extensively to study UK strategies. The following sections focus on the two stable, high-level themes that emerged in the UK strategic review literature and study it from an organisational and strategic management point of view: first the stability of the defence policymaking process highlighted by the Groundhog Day model (Cornish and Dorman 2010) and; second, the stability in substantive policy outcomes, highlighted by the recent work of Matt Uttley, Wilkinson, and van Rij (2019). We illustrate these themes using five specific empirical examples: MoD framing of budgetary issues through the lense of international commitments; MoD strategy regarding funding gaps; Royal Navy aircraft carrier procurement; “ends, ways and means” approach to strategy making, and; European “Bonsai armies” balanced forces posture. In each case, we have chosen examples that are designed to colorfully illustrate the conceptual points of the paper but are also are accessible, i.e. use public data that is easily verified. The final section summarises the main takeaways of the article and demonstrates that organisational and strategic management theories provide critical and pragmatically useful analytical tools for studying UK defence reviews.

Military organisations from an organisational management point of view

Military organisations are often perceived as special kinds of formal organisations that also have unique military characteristics (Hasselbladh and Ydén 2020). Formal organisations are classically designed to produce sameness through hierarchical control, bureaucratic structures and processes, and the utilisation of a limited number of technologies to make task completion reliable. They evolve particular ways of doing business based on packages of standard operating procedures. Furthermore, they tend to build their own cognitive worlds; they apply already established categories, criteria and processes to make sense of experiences, in effect retrospectively (Weick 1995). At times they may deliberately misinterpret information in order to maintain consistency with their pre-existing cognitive worlds. Their reliability also has a price tag in that formal organisations are not designed to change easily. Hasselbladh and Ydén (2020, 479) stress that, “These structures and patterns present formidable obstacles to initiative for planned, comprehensive change.” Hence, considerable adjustment costs frequently stand in the way of adaptation.

It should be noted that military organisations are, in many ways, examples of extreme formal organisations. They try to handle huge uncertainties both on the battlefield and in the preparation for future wars. Accordingly, ‘military organisations are (…) under exceptional pressure to impose certainty on ambiguous, dangerous, swiftly changing, and highly consequential conditions of instrumental action‘ (Hasselbladh and Ydén 2020, 481). Again, while these characteristics provide stability, robustness, and resilience to military organisations that are highly important for achieving military success, they also mean that they are not inherently designed for adaptation. Hasselbladh and Ydén (2020, 490) that:

‘If the unique traits of military organisations follow from the two sets of structural conditions associated with

1. large-scale bureaucratic organising and

2. military organisations tailored for and preparing for large-scale lethal conflicts,

there is no reason to believe that they could change to something completely different. It is not likely that nation-states will use small-scale, informal organisations for military purposes. Neither is it likely that military conflicts will become premised on a logic different than lethal violence between antagonistic counterparts.’

(italics added)

Of course, this does not mean that defence organisations are not able and should not change at all (Farrell, Rynning, and Terriff 2013; Soeters 2022). Throughout the last century, militaries have been able to innovate and evolve, but organisational theory suggests two important insights in this regard: 1) successful innovations happen in militaries when it is in the interest of the organisation; 2) in defence organisations changes happen incrementally most of the time (Zisk 1993, 14). In accordance with these dynamics, whatever adaptation is achieved by military organisations is typically made in the teeth of organisational resistance from members of the military who would prefer things to stay the way they were. Even when innovations seem clearly beneficial, there is always the counter-argument that purported advantages may get eaten away by the operational uncertainties created by the improvement. While more adaptable organising types than the current formal military organisations are possible in theory (e.g. typically found in special forces) this adaptability comes at the cost of some combination of lower capability or higher training and preparation costs. Hence, while every military organisation is different based on its cultural and sociological context, in general they tend to change even slower than other formal organisations (Hasselbladh and Ydén 2020). Rapid, significant changes might also happen in military organisations, but they happen very rarely in exceptional circumstances such as when budgetary resources drastically change, a response is needed to an actual or potential dramatic performance failure, when the organisation expands, when strong civilian leadership pressures the defence organisation to change or when fierce internal competition between different organisational elements happens in the military (Nemeth and Dew 2020). Of course, these organisational pathologies are also at work across other UK government departments, collectively yielding the bureaucratic dynamics we associate with modern government (Wilson 1989).

Zisk (1993, 14) significant changes are more likely to be successful and “likely to be accepted by the military institution when it is consistent with that institution’s bureaucratic interests.” This means that, first, defence institutions will resist attempted changes that would decrease their budgets and jeopardise their corporate autonomy. This is not a unique feature of military organisations, as most formal organisations would respond the same way to protect its resources and autonomy. Second, military organisations will react to threats that come from the international environment and might endanger state security and also from the domestic policy community that might harm the military organisation’s bureaucratic interests. If threats arise from both the international and domestic environments, the military organisation will first focus on containing the domestic one. The members of the defence institution will most likely identify the domestic bureaucratic threat as a danger to national security and will show corporate cohesion to avoid risky and not tried innovations in an international crisis (Zisk 1993, 14–16).

As Posen (2016, 167) “war may be an extension of politics, but politicians are a source of uncertainty” for military organisations too. Although militaries prepare for war and intend to mitigate uncertainties on the battlefield and during military operations, most of the time they are working in a peacetime environment that is full of uncertainties as well. Politicians and civilian leaders might choose new priorities and new adversaries to military organisations, new technologies emerge that can alter the calculus for preparation for war, the public’s attitude to combat and tolerance to casualties might change (Posen 2016, 167–168). Although militaries try to simulate and train for new situations, it is very difficult to do this with appropriate accuracy and in the context of organisational interests that are not supportive of change or innovation.

UK strategic and defence reviews

Several strategic and defence reviews have been conducted since the end of World War Two, but until 2010 they were done in an ad hoc way and only when the UK government felt that it was absolutely necessary to adjust the strategic directions of the British armed forces. Since 2010, strategic reviews have become regular exercises that are intended to be delivered at least every five years with intervening “refreshes,” e.g. the Integrated Review Refresh 2023 (HM Government 2023). Indeed, when all the defence review papers are considered, 2010–2023 has arguably been in a period of a continuous defence review process. While during the Cold War these reviews focused exclusively on defence, after the fall of the Berlin Wall the scope of these documents has expanded progressively as the concept of security has been broadened. Thus, the 2021 review evolved into the “Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy” which covers all aspects of international and national security policy underpinning the interdepartmental government approach of security (HM Government 2021). However, paradoxically, the 2021 Integrated Review also became much more defence focused and less broad than originally envisaged. Not only because the Related Defence Command paper was published (UK Ministry of Defence 2021) but because, after decades of real term decreases in the UK military spending, the Johnson government committed an extra £16.5 billion to the defence budget for capability development between 2021 and 2024. At the same time, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office lost the same amount of money (£16 billion over four years) from its foreign aid budget, which means that military force plays an increasing role in foreign and security policy of the current British government (Warrell and Parker 2020).

Thanks to the broadening focus of these reviews, new government practices and bodies have been established in the last decade or so. Among others, the National Security Council (NSC) led by the Prime Minister was created with the aim to coordinate the efforts of different departments in Whitehall to produce strategic documents and a new risk assessment methodology has been applied to identify the risks that the UK government has to prepare for in the reviews (Devanny 2015). Although several innovations and significant progress have been made in developing better and more integrated documents, we will see in this paper the impact of these documents is often limited regarding the UK MoD, which is the focus of this article. Of course, this ultimately raises questions about how seriously defence reviews should be taken, in particular whether they should rightly be treated as an underlying source of defence strategy, or whether it is more appropriate to consider them to be a secondary phenomena and a largely cosmetic one at that (Rumelt 2011).

The literature on UK defence and security reviews has mostly focused on the development and (mainly political) dynamics behind the creation of these strategic documents, as these periodic reviews set strategic goals for the MoD and provide the basis for the MoD’s long-term equipment plans. Thanks to the great deal of research that the last reviews – especially the Strategic Defence and Security Reviews (SDSR) 2010 and 2015 – have generated, scholarship about British defence policy has studied SDSRs from a diverse set of approaches such defence budgetary issues (Cornish and Dorman 2009; Cornish and Dorman 2011; Dorman, Uttley, and Wilkinson 2016; Hartley 2010), political processes (Phillips 2012), internal dynamics in defence (Dorman 2010), historical perspectives (Hampshire 2016), international events, or a mix of these factors (Dover and Phythian 2012; Cornish and Dorman 2015; Chalmers 2016). Scholars analysed the strategic direction and strategic goals of the United Kingdom, e.g. finding Britain’s desired role in the world (Blagden 2019). They have done this by providing policy analysis (Chalmers 2011; Porter 2010) or by introducing different frameworks that highlighted the strategic choices Britain could make using role theory (Gaskarth 2014), ends- and means-centric approaches (Layton 2015), the concept of “human security” (Ritchie 2011), the strategic dimension concept (Blackburn 2015) and proposing a “risk sharing approach” (Paul and Dorman 2013).

We suggest that, although several fascinating approaches have been applied to analyse British defence and security reviews, there remains an analytical dividend to widening the conceptual lens with organisational and strategic management theories regarding defence institutions. One of the rare examples of scholarly work that has studied strategic reviews with the help of organisational theories was written by Robert Grattan, Nicholas O’Regan and Glenn Parry who examined the 1998 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) and concluded that the process of the 1998 SDR “adopted a formal bureaucratic style that was consonant with the hierarchical ‘machine’ organisation of the MoD” (2015, 316). They also pointed out that, although this process was more transparent and more policy-led than in the case of previous strategic reviews, in the end the constraints created by the Treasury determined the outcome of the review. This finding also aligns with the insights of strategic management theories that suggest that “strategic aspirations are always bounded by resource limitations” (Grattan, Oregan, and Parry 2015, 316). Thomson and Blagden (2018) studied the post-2010 reviews focusing on the informal institutions around the National Security Council and the development of the 2010 and 2015 SDSRs. Their innovative paper highlights that not only formal institutions, where rules and norms established and enforced through official channels, but also informal ones, where unwritten but socially shared rules exist outside formal frameworks, play significant roles in British security and defence policy making. They convincingly demonstrate that informal institutions “improve the design and implementation of security policy in the United Kingdom” but also point out their limitations by arguing that, because of the inertia of formal institutions of the strategic review process, the British government “often fail(s) to conduct visionary, long-term strategic planning based on wholesale, back-to-basics reappraisals of underlying assumptions” (Thomson and Blagden 2018, 586–588).

The lessons of previous reorganisations and attempts to change the practices of the MoD on a systematic level through strategic reviews have shown that the MoD has had a limited capacity to change itself significantly. Among others, academic scholarship has pointed out that the development of strategic reviews have been following the same cycle of policy failure, policy inertia, policy formulation and policy misimplementation again and again (Cornish and Dorman 2010), while the major themes, assumptions and proposed force postures of the strategic reviews have barely changed since the end of the Cold War and, if they changed, they were altered incrementally (Uttley, Wilkinson, and van Rij 2019). However, these phenomena are not surprising for those who studied the organisational aspects of defence institutions. Defence institutions are highly formalised, bureaucratic organisations that have to be able to operate effectively in a tremendously uncertain environment, one in which the uncertainties are, by the very nature of conflict, irreducible (Porter 2016). They often intend to make the uncertainties controllable as much as possible by utilising standard operating procedures (SOP). These characteristics make any defence institution resistant to changes and the UK MoD is not an exception in this regard.

Accordingly, our paper focuses on how the systematic applications of organisational and strategic management theories can enrich our understanding about the dynamics regarding strategy-making in general and British strategic reviews in particular. Specifically, our paper is primarily interested in how certain characteristics of defence organisations – as formal organisations – affect the development and implementation of UK defence reviews. In this regard, we concentrate on the UK MoD that includes a constellation of organisations (e.g. Head Office, services, commands and headquarters, enabling organisations) that are institutionally interlinked (UK Ministry of Defence 2020) and oversees approximately 260,000 personnel including regular and reserve forces and civil servants (UK Ministry of Defence 2022b, 2022a). As Allison and Zelikow (1999, 167) point out, the “overriding fact about large organzations is that their size prevents any single central authority from making all important decisions or directing all important activities.” Rather, each organisational unit delivers its activities based on pre-established routines to fulfil their formal mandates usually focusing on objectives sequentially, following standard operating procedures under central coordination and control (ibid 166–175). This approach helps to understand how certain choices deviate from ideal rationality by demonstrating how organisational routines limit the formation of options. It also highlights how routines influence implementation after decisions have been made (Welch 1992, 117). Thus, this paper is not interested in the dynamics between individuals in key positions and how they act based on parochial priorities, although this paper acknowledges that the literature on bureaucratic politics could also provide relevant insights regarding the development and implementation of UK defence reviews (Allison and Zelikow 1999; Halperin and Clapp 2006; Jones 2012; Marsh 2014; Rosati 1981; Welch 1992).

Stability in defence policymaking processes: avoiding the loss of defence budgetary resources

The UK defence policymaking process and its organising concept are surprisingly stable regarding developing strategic reviews, a phenomenon described effectively by the “Groundhog Day” model developed by Paul Cornish and Andrew Dorman (2010). Cornish and Dorman studied several previous strategic reviews and found a specific recurring pattern surrounding the production of UK strategic reviews. In the first phase, which they call “policy failure,” the government denies that a new strategic review is needed or any major problem exists with current policy, even though the goals set by the previous review have not been met, are not sustainable, and a variety of disasters or mere let-downs have occurred. The second phase is “policy inertia” when, although the government reluctantly acknowledges that a new strategic review must be started, it takes some time to launch the process. During this hiatus, different lobby groups campaign to influence decision-makers, set agendas, and dominate the narrative of the future review. The third phase is “policy formulation.” This is the phase when the review finally begins but the development of policies is typically based on overoptimistic assumptions regarding the future defence budgets and savings stemming from reorganisations and other efforts to make the MoD more efficient. Inevitably, it is the Treasury that ultimately has a large say in the policy choices made. “Policy misimplementation” is the last phase, which means that the implementation of the review – which is already based on false assumptions – usually goes to a wrong direction. This is because of, for example, over commitments in operations (Cornish and Dorman 2010, 407) or because some groups within the MoD try to change the decisions of the review to ones they find more to their favour (Dorman 2010, 378). According to the “Groundhog Day” model after phase four the pattern circles back again to phase one. In summary, the “Groundhog Day” model portrays a rather dark and worrying view of British defence policymaking with its revolving door of policymakers somewhat helplessly caught-up in a repeating process they ultimately have little control over.

As previewed earlier in this paper, the “Groundhog Day” model has set the agenda for much of the scholarly conversation on UK strategic reviews over the past decade, with much research supporting the model implicitly or explicitly. A key feature of the model is it proposes defence policymakers perform a four-stage cycle of policy failure-inertia-formulation-misimplementation, with each subsequent cycle driven by the misimplementation of the previous strategic review. Here, we elaborate that one key reason for misimplementation is policymakers’ faulty assumptions about the fundamental character of defense organisations, including misperceptions about how organisations such as the MoD react to external review processes. For the MoD, the term “strategic review” is often perceived as just another name for defence budget cuts, which attack its resource base and limit its autonomy. To resist the effects of potential budget cuts the UK MoD applies three main methods. First, it attempts to shape defence policy by framing issues in a particular way based on existing ingrained organisational logic. Second, if this attempt fails, the MoD seemingly accepts the strategic direction that was set in a strategic review, but in reality it starts to apply indirect approaches to achieve its aims. Finally, the UK MoD maintains a conceptual inertia by keeping an outdated approach to strategy-making that not only helps to avoid major changes, but it is also an efficient tool to generate economic arguments against budgetary cuts.

First, the MoD tries to convince other actors that further budget cuts or lack of extra funds might harm international commitments and national security of the UK. Accordingly, the MoD frames this issue in a particular way. As Xymena Kurowska highlights (Kurowska 2009, 525–26), “conventionally defined, framing is understood as a process of selective control over the perception of the meanings attributed to certain phenomena with the aim to permit certain interpretations and rule out others.” This way actors minimise and emphasise certain meanings based on their routines, interests and worldviews (Farrell 1998). These framings may become a part of the deeply engrained habits that instinctively structure the way a professional community thinks about policies (Porter 2018). For instance, experts expected that after the 2015 SDSR the UK defence budget would no longer reach 2% of the GDP, which is a NATO requirement (Dorman, Uttley, and Wilkinson 2016, 46–47). However, the MoD successfully framed this issue as a problem that would harm British international commitments, as it would mean that the UK would not meet its NATO obligations which might have significant impacts on British-American relations and the role of the UK in NATO. This argument won support from domestic and international actors and the UK defence budget did not fall below 2% of the GDP. Similarly, before the Integrated Review Refresh in early 2023, the MoD argued that without extra budget the military would not have enough funds to replenish weapons stocks it gave to Ukraine and would not be able to meet its NATO commitments (Haynes 2023). Again, the MoD was successful in framing this issue and received an £11 billion increase in defence spending in the next 5 years (Rathbone 2023). Of course, not every framing attempt becomes successful. Among others, this happened in 2018 after prime minister Theresa May faced the growing funding gap in the defence budget. The MoD framed the problem that without extra funding the UK would lose its position as a tier one military power. However, Theresa May responded by questioning if Britain had to stay a tier one military power and proved unwilling to provide extra defence funds (Bond 2018).

Second, when armed forces suffer budgetary losses or cannot get the financial resources they want, or when political leaders favour change, militaries tend to change but with caveats. When the MoD buys-in to the change, we can expect the implementation of major change, but when the military does not favour change, we will see minor change “that the military organisation promotes as major change” (Gallo 2018, 81). As the policy formulation phase of the “Groundhog Day” model points out (Cornish and Dorman 2010), new defence plans are usually based on overoptimistic assumptions regarding future defence budgets, the costs of different capability programs and the possibilities for efficiency savings. This dynamic is in line with organisational theory, as it is a way to resist budgetary reductions. Although it might seem that the MoD cuts its budgets significantly and implements significant changes after a strategic review, in reality, it just stretches its modernisation plans and reduces its activity level. Accordingly, in the short term, there is a budget reduction by cutting minor parts of programs but only a slightly smaller level of capabilities are envisaged in the long-term plans. This way the MoD creates a perception that it implemented major changes when actually it did minor changes. This helps the MoD keep their programmes alive in the hope that more resources will be available in the future. It is the main reason why a significant funding gap always emerges in the MoD’s equipment plans (Baylis 1986).

This usually pays off in the long term. In 2019, Boris Johnson, then the British prime minister, promised to “undertake the deepest review of Britain’s security, defence and foreign policy since the end of the Cold War” (Forces.net 2021), yet the major themes and the force structure of the British armed forces did not change significantly in the Integrated Review of 2021.² However, the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) received an extra £16 billion between 2021 and 2024, and it will acquire new weapon systems, but most of the extra financial resources will be spent on filling the £13 billion funding gap in the MoD’s equipment plan (Sabbagh and Butler 2020). Thus, while previous governments were reluctant to fill the funding gap of the MoD that was generated by the organisational dynamics and routines of the MoD, the MoD did not change or transform its strategic plans significantly. Instead, it waited for a government that was willing to finance programs that did not change significantly for the past one-and-a-half decades.

Of course, the MoD is not monolithic and the different services are also competing for resources. For instance, arguably the biggest winner of the Integrated Review of 2021 was the Royal Navy, as it won the necessary ships to protect its highly expensive aircraft carriers and would also be able to fulfil its other responsibilities. Previously, many analysts argued that building the carriers was a sub-optimal decision as they were overly expensive, they might be already obsolete for 21^st century warfare and building them sucked out the money from other Royal Navy programs that would be more crucial to fulfilling the core mission of the organisation (Sheridan 2020). However, the carriers for the Royal Navy have proven themselves to be somewhat analogous to the “golf course” on a US Air Force base. The organisation could have functioned and fulfilled its core functions without them by spending its resources on the most necessary capabilities instead of the carriers/golf courses. But, by building the carriers first, the government ultimately had to provide extra funds for the procurement of those assets required to achieve the core security tasks anyway, to include the Naval assets required to protect the carriers (Allison 2017; Beale 2013). Accordingly, as organisation and management theories would suggest, the procurement of the carriers/golf courses helped the organisation avoid the budgetary restrictions originally imposed on it. This way the Royal Navy successfully increased its assets and has increased its claims on the UK defence budget for the foreseeable future.

Third, the MoD maintains an outdated strategy-making concept by applying the concept of “ends, ways and means” for developing strategies. This concept is highly ingrained in the cognitive world and routines of the MoD even though its weaknesses is widely known, but it is an efficient tool to generate economic arguments against budgetary cuts. Implicitly or explicitly, most British practitioners and scholars think about strategy in general and developing strategic reviews in particular in the framework of Lykke’s (1989) concept of “Ends + Ways + Means = Strategy.” For instance, SDSR 2010 clearly states that it “sets out the ways and means to deliver the ends set out in the National Security Strategy” (HM Government 2010, 9). The consensus that the best way (or the only way) of creating strategy is the application of the concept of “ends, ways and means” seems to be so strong that it acts as a barrier to scholars and practitioners looking for alternative approaches. This is despite the fact that scholars have criticised this approach both specifically in the British context and also more broadly (Edmunds 2014, 531). For instance, Meiser (2016, 82) convincingly that “the ends + ways + means formula interacts with a simplistic notion of means to create a situation where strategy is reduced to a perfunctory exercise in allocating resources.” This reduces strategy to a process of mere optimisation of given resources (as in economics) rather than making it an exercise geared towards getting more out of the situation than the initial scenario would suggest possible, i.e. by developing options and alternatives for more effective ways of competing (Freedman 2013). In the long term, this approach also helps avoid losses of defence budgetary resources as it provides a simple and logical framework that is difficult to argue with for those who do not know strategic management concepts. As the ‘“ends, ways and means” formula focuses on optimisation and resource allocation, the debate about strategic choices can rarely escape the already existing options and thus cannot take into account real alternatives. Not surprisingly, critics argue that this approach is not a recipe for critical and creative thinking (Meiser 2016). It may also be the case that Treasury driven processes are even more likely to become means-ends oriented and therefore more likely to drive out meaningful thinking about ways of reformulating strategy. However, this fits the MoD’s organisational interest to avoid budgetary constraints.

The “ends, ways and means” concept has become so habituated into the cognitive words and routines of the MoD that its utility is rarely questioned and shows extremely strong resistance to replace it, which resonates with Patrick Porter’s research on the US foreign policy establishment (Porter 2018). However, the concept of “ends, ways and means” is more than thirty years old now and is based on the principles of the strategic planning scholarship of the 1960s, when the main goal was the improvement of the competitiveness of every business unit in an organisation. This is problematic because, compared to modern strategic management concepts, it is clearly outdated. A small revolution happened in the understanding of strategy-making in the 1990s, and among others, Mintzberg (1994, 107) that strategic planning – like the “ends, ways and means” concept – is only “strategic programming, the articulation and elaboration of strategies, or visions, that already exist.” As the next section will discuss, UK strategic reviews have showed significant similarity and stability in their major tenets since the end of the Cold War. The way of thinking in the framework of “ends, ways and means” does not help to change this, as it mostly focuses on formal planning. As Mintzberg (1994, 109) “formal planning, by its very analytical nature, has been and always will be dependent on the preservation and rearrangement of established categories … But real strategic change requires not merely rearranging the established categories, but inventing new ones.” The strategic management literature offers several tools for this which are not necessarily taken into consideration during strategy development in the UK. This phenomenon corresponds well with organisational theory’s insights that suggest that formal organisations are not inherently designed for adaptation even when more up-to-date knowledge becomes available, especially when a tool proves to be useful to avoid or mitigate budgetary losses.

Stability in substantive policy outcomes – Maintaining corporate autonomy through balanced force structure

As previously stated, as with other formal organisations, military organisations are designed fundamentally to produce sameness; therefore, they are not prone to change their practices easily. They especially resist attempted changes that would decrease their budgetary resources or threaten their corporate autonomy. When changes do happen in formal organisations in general, and military organisations in particular, they tend to happen incrementally. Dramatic changes might occur too when, for instance, the budgetary resources of an organisation drastically change (in the case of budgetary feast or prolonged budgetary famine) or it has to respond to dramatic performance failures (Allison and Zelikow 1999, 171–172). However, these events are the exceptions rather than the rule and the changes are still based on existing procedures and practices, which limits them significantly. The organisation theory literature suggests that formal organisations rarely adopt radical innovations and instead opt for “muddling through” when they have to react to environmental pressures. Studying US government organisations, Charles Lindblom highlighted (Lindblom 1959, 79–88) already in the 1950s that organisations rarely look for every alternative when they face a problem and tend to choose similar solutions they applied previously. Rosenau (1986) also points out that organisations have their own habits and routines which shape how they react to changes. This does not mean that they will not respond to changes coming from their environment and keep their routines rigidly. But organisations will follow their own pattern of response and although “their policies might change, they are driven by standard operating procedures” (Zisk 1993, 17). Subsequent literature has elaborated the underlying bureaucratic processes that tend to constrain and channel the activities of formal organisations along narrow paths (Becker 2004). Accordingly, when organisations learn and change the “parameters of organisational behaviour mostly persist.” In cases when they have to deal with nonstandard problems, organisations search for new routines but this happens “within the world view of the organisation’s culture’ and they tend to evolve from existing procedures (Allison and Zelikow 1999, 171). These mechanisms not only help organisations produce sameness but helps them to avoid external interference into their decisions and, as a result, maintain their corporate autonomy.

If there is one outstanding feature of UK defence policy it is the amazing long-term stability of the UK’s defence posture despite the regular drumbeat of turmoil created every time a strategic review is initiated. Comparative analysis of the UK strategic and defence reviews of the last thirty years shows that only incremental changes have happened in the strategic directions of the UK MoD and its major concepts and ideas have barely changed (Uttley, Wilkinson, and van Rij 2019, 810–814). This resonates well with the insights of organisational theory that predicts that, if organisations change, they mostly do it incrementally. Among others, the core concept of British defence policy has not changed, and a “balanced force” policy has been the dominant theme in every British strategic review since the Cold War. Uttley and colleagues describe this policy of maintaining a full spectrum of military capabilities as foundational and fundamental to the UK’s approach to defence. Nonetheless, Uttley et al. argue that this organisational inertia creates path dependencies that may determine the strategic direction of the MoD for long periods, even though the future may unfold very differently than it was originally imagined to (Uttley, Wilkinson, and van Rij 2019, 810–814). They point out that a balanced force strategy may not be a deliberate strategy by the MoD. Instead, the authors (2019, 803) assert that “the MoD has rarely strayed from its basic direction of travel precisely because it cannot … ” and contend that the root of British policy stability is to be found in culture: the UK’s identity and self-image. The result is: “considerable continuity in the ends, ways and means of post-Cold War British defence policy – a continuity which is attributable to the persistence of dominant ideas about Britain’s place in the world and the incremental development of its force posture” (Uttley, Wilkinson, and van Rij 2019, 814).

Ultimately, the institutional view propounded by Uttley et al. is, like the “Groundhog Day” process model, a dark view of UK defence policymaking because it suggests policy stability exists for no functional reason. Instead, the policy of the balanced force is merely a relic of routines grounded in past history and an effort to conform with international norms. Under these circumstances, if the country’s substantive strategy turns out to be a good one, it is mostly a matter of luck.

As Cornish and Dorman put it (Paul and Dorman 2012, 220) the approach of the balanced forces is a “national strategy is based on hedging or, in other words, on deliberate indecision.” Naturally, this begs the question of why indecision may be favoured, and by whom. Based on organisational theory, the answer lies in the short-term inflexibility of (typically highly) specialised defence organisations. Since organisational flexibility is not a reliable approach for adjusting to emerging defence scenarios, the main internal option for hedging risks is to maintain the broadest portfolio of military capabilities that the defence budget will stretch to. In other words, maintaining a diversified portfolio of defence capabilities is an evolved strategic posture that gets around the inherent inflexibility of defence organisations faced with an uncertain future. Balanced forces are like balanced investment portfolios: they protect investors because of diversification, not just for the uncertainties they anticipate but also for the surprises they do not, or perhaps cannot, anticipate. Therefore, a balanced force is “an insurance policy against future uncertainty” including those Black Swan uncertainties that cannot be forecast (Mills, Brooke-Holland, and Walker 2018, 18). This flexibility helps military organisations to maintain their autonomy from threats coming from the international environment by being able to act with more freedom and less constraints imposed by adversaries (Blagden 2009; Porter 2016).

Flexibility is “the ability to change or react with little penalty in time, cost or performance” (Upton 1994, 77). Organisational adaptation and portfolio diversification are two paths to flexibility. The generic inflexibility of defence organisations makes adaptation a risky option (Hasselbladh and Ydén 2020). The RAF’s 2006 strategic plan (UK Ministry of Defence 2006, 3) highlights that: “[t]he greatest risk to the security of the United Kingdom is perhaps that the strategic environment will change faster than the UK can adapt.” Hence, maintaining a diverse portfolio of alternative military capabilities has been the preferred path to operational flexibility for most militaries that can afford it – and some that cannot. According to Liddell Hart: “For, the principle of alternatives is simply the power of variability, which, in turn, means a state of adaptability … ” (Finkel 2011, 73). Simpkin simply states that, “This balance is in fact the safeguard against the commander or the planner being wrong” (Finkel 2011, 75). Finkel (2011, 75) argues that the degree of balance in forces is therefore inversely related to risk of being surprised. Therefore, a balanced force reduces the incentives for surprise attacks.

The symmetry of this situation across adversaries leads to a preference for balanced forces by all. No country can afford to specialise their capabilities without running significant risks of being out-flanked by adversaries with more diverse capabilities. Hence, a balanced forces posture is the preferred solution of both civilian policymakers and defence services. Countries all over the world prefer a balanced forces strategy because their potential adversaries have adopted it, a co-constructed mutualism that, until the Ukraine war began, was for over 70 years a major strategic success in keeping the peace in Europe, at least. As a case in point, even smaller nations with small defence budgets typically prefer to maintain as high a degree of balance as possible, at the expense of economies of scale in fewer, more focused military capabilities. This has led analysts to bemoan Europe’s evolution towards “Bonsai armies” (Mauro and Jehin 2019, 4). However, for each individual country, this trade-off is preferred, given the organisational rigidities which they must cope with, even though it may be unimaginable that they would fight a significant conflict without pooling military assets with allies. Furthermore, one could certainly argue that the lack of organisational flexibility has had beneficial consequences; from the perspective of keeping the peace, at least in Europe, rigidity has been a “feature” rather than a “bug” in defence organisations, a characteristic that may for a time have been locally sub-optimal but globally advantageous.

The organisations literature provides a toolkit of concepts for predicting this strategic posture in a straightforward fashion. As it was mentioned earlier, military organisations strongly prefer to enhance their autonomy. A balanced force strategy is conducive to fulfilling this goal because it is designed to decouple long-term defence strategy from countering emergent threats. Britain invests in a spectrum of defence capabilities and then lets MoD operators decide how best to respond to the threats and tasks that emerge by utilising an appropriate mix of capabilities that are available at the time. This gives the MoD a significant degree of operational autonomy over issues they care about greatly in order to accomplish their goals, e.g. deciding how capabilities may be matched to the threat at hand. Because of the MoD’s preference for autonomy, it makes sense for it to strongly favour a balanced forces strategy and therefore resist defence policy and budget changes that limit the MoD’s room for maneuver.

Consider for a moment the “inside view” of UK MoD operators on the mismatch between the military uncertainties they face and the rather rigid nature of the organisations they command. Realist scholar Barry Posen argued that militaries prefer to take an attacking stance, i.e. an offensive doctrine. However, they also have to be prepared at all times to manage their risk of being attacked, in particular the risk of surprise attacks that threaten, in effect, to temporarily suspend the competition between adversaries. And they know that the initial battles of any war are almost entirely fought with whatever equipment is to hand: “Decisions made long before the war will determine some operational possibilities during the war” (Posen 1984, 31). From the perspective of UK MoD, the combination of these adversarial dynamics with short-to-medium-term fixed organisational capabilities strongly favours a balanced force posture for two reasons. First, having multiple military capabilities available is of high value for an offensive doctrine. The attacker gains an advantage if they have more diverse capabilities than their adversary, “so that if some are incapacitated by countermeasures, the commander can still devise a solution with the remaining resources” (Finkel 2011, 82). Because an attacker cannot rely on quickly adapting their forces, a high degree of diversification is a very useful asset to an offensive doctrine; indeed, it logically follows from a preference for the offense. Second, because measures taken by one adversary to enhance its security may reduce the security of others, countermeasures are to be expected. Adversaries attempt to be equally well prepared. An adversary benefits when they can devise an imbalance in forces that creates an absolute advantage to them. To counter this risk, the defender may also employ a balanced force strategy that denies the adversary opportunities to outflank their capabilities.

In summary, the UK’s defence posture is better understood when organisational theory is taken into account than without it. Without the organisational rigidity assumption it is difficult to predict what sort of inflexibly flexible approach the UK MoD will organise for. The rationale for a balanced forces strategy depends on particular assumptions about the character of military organisations, i.e. that they are far from being adaptable enough to response in a flexible way to the activities of competitors.

Concluding remarks

This paper has utilised insights from organisational and strategic management research to elaborate key gaps in our scholarly understandings of UK defence reviews. Efforts to avoid budgetary losses and maintain corporate autonomy by any formal organisation – and thus the UK MoD – are particularly powerful concepts for explaining key patterns in UK defence reviews. The UK MoD uses three main methods for avoiding budgetary losses. First, it tries to frame strategic decisions in a way that helps to keep or increase its financial resources. Second, if it is not successful, it accepts the necessary changes on the surface, but in practice it promotes minor changes as major changes to avoid significant losses in its capabilities. Instead of changing its goals fundamentally, it stretches its modernisation plans and reduces its activity level while it waits for a government that is willing to fund its plans. It also can “build the golf course first” by investing in capital programs that are not absolutely necessary for fulfilling its core functions but, once they are there, the government has also to fund other capabilities to make sure that the organisation can deliver its most basic tasks. Finally, the MoD uses an outdated model for strategy-making that simplifies strategy into an easily understandable formula, which helps generate budget-driven arguments that prevent budgetary losses but does not support creative thinking about real alternatives.

We have also pointed out that the surprisingly stable nature of UK strategic reviews in their substantive policy outcomes can be explained through the lens that the MoD intends to maintaining its corporate autonomy through a balanced force structure. Keeping a balanced force structure might create a perception that the MoD does not want to change or make hard choices. However, from organisational point of view, it is a logical choice as the MoD intends to maintain its corporate autonomy by maintaining a wide portfolio of military capabilities that creates operational flexibility. This approach works in a similar way to balanced investment portfolios which protect investors from uncertainties and unforeseeable events by avoiding specialising in one type of investment. This approach provides military organisations with flexibility and enables them to maintain their autonomy against challenges emanating from the international environment by allowing them to act freely without being constrained by enemies, those both foreseeable and unforeseeable.

A legitimate question is what kind of substantive policy options can withstand the unforgiving nature of the UK MoD as formal organisation that is focused on avoiding budgetary losses and maintaining its corporate autonomy. This strategy-making context creates conditions that are inimical to the survival of particular kinds of strategies. It has been suggested that this policy process favours conservatism because it creates conditions that are unsuited to significant departures from the status quo but are well-suited to incremental muddling through (Paul and Dorman 2012). Thus, the process itself preordains the substantive outcomes and thereby has entrenched the UK in a particular policy path with very significant inertia. On the one hand, it might be considered pragmatic to continue with a policy that is proven to have worked, to have stood the test of time. On the other hand, detractors may claim that past performance is no guarantee of future effectiveness and was, in fact, no guarantee of it in the past, either. However, organisational and strategic management literature suggests that this will not change in the long-term unless significant organisational changes happen in the UK MoD.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bence Nemeth

Bence Nemeth is a Senior Lecturer at the Defence Studies Department of King’s College London. He primarily teaches British and international military officers at the Defence Academy of the UK. Currently, he serves as the Academic Programme Director of the Advanced Command Staff Course (ACSC), which is the flagship postgraduate course of the Joint Services Command and Staff College centred on the military operational level of warfare. Dr Nemeth is regularly invited to give guest lectures on defence management and planning at European military staff colleges, including the Baltic Defence College, the Czech University of Defence, the Irish Command and Staff School and the Netherlands Defence Academy. Prior to moving to King’s, Dr Nemeth had been working in various defence planning positions at the Hungarian Ministry of Defence for eight years, and also taught at the Hungarian National Defence University.

Nicholas Dew

Nick Dew is a Professor of Strategic Management at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. His teaching and research focuses on entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation in defense and homeland security. He has a PhD and MBA from the University of Virginia and experience working in the international energy industry. He is the author of over 50 research papers and an award-winning entrepreneurship textbook. His teaching and research has been funded by various U.S. Department of Defense agencies and recognised in multiple teaching and research awards. He currently serves as the Academic Associate responsible for the Naval Postgraduate School’s innovative one-year Professional MBA program and the LEAD leadership program with the U.S. Naval Academy. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not represent the official position of the US Department of Defense.

Notes

1. As is common with folklore, the origin of this anecdote is lost in time; its provenance cannot be proven. However, one colleague, a retired USAF officer, told us his father – also a USAF officer – joked about this story, which indicates this anecdote has had a long career. Another colleague, a retired US Army officer, told us he heard this joke regularly at the Defense Acquisition University. He added (dryly) that while teaching at West Point, he lived on base next to a USAF officer who was getting paid a “substandard housing” allowance for living in the same quarters.

2. Although the size of the UK Armed Forces has shrunk significantly since the Cold War, its force structure and the common themes in the strategic reviews have not changed significantly. This is not a UK-specific phenomenon; it is common in many European armed forces. For instance, the force structure of the Bundeswehr still resembles its Cold War era structure but it contains many hollow forces where the organisational elements exist but most of the personnel are missing.