Published on the 2^nd June 2025, the British Government’s Strategic Defence Review 2025 is not a defence policy document. It is a state-sponsored hallucination. Its 144 pages form a testament to the delusions of a governing class that has neither the will to defend the realm nor the vocabulary to describe what such defence might entail. Instead, it offers an indigestible slab of platitudes and strategic fantasy—held together by a level of financial obfuscation that should bring the attention of the Serious Fraud Office.

Britain has no enemies but its own ruling class. It has no strategic interest beyond the control of its own sea approaches. All that is required for real defence is a navy to command the Channel and the North Sea, an air force to secure the skies, and an armed citizenry trained in basic self-reliance. This is not utopian: it is what Switzerland does with a fraction of our budget. But such a policy would render obsolete the bloated apparat of public-private parasites who now feed off “defence” as a procurement racket and a vehicle for ideology.

Instead, we are given nonsense such as this:

Degradation… is creating new geographical realities and competition for resources; are driving migration, instability, and more frequent humanitarian disasters; and demand military adaptation for operations in more extreme weather conditions. Of particular importance to Defence is the likelihood that the Arctic and High North will be ‘ice-free’ each summer by 2040… creating a new site for competition within the UK’s wider neighbourhood. (p. 26)

This is not strategy. It is green propaganda in uniform. The Army is to be restructured because the ice might melt in Greenland. What does it mean to say that “degradation” is creating “new geographical realities”? Nothing. It is managerial gibberish that no sane officer would utter and no honest taxpayer fund.

Then there is this horror:

A concerted effort to unlock private capital and expertise… Defence must develop better relationships with, and understanding of, the financial services sector. New funding models should be explored… to make defence innovators a more attractive proposition for private capital… and increase the ability to pool capital with allies. (p. 53)

This is not national defence. It is PFI plus aircraft carriers. It is the City of London in combat boots, with all the competence of a politics graduate and all the patriotism of an offshore accountant. What we are seeing is not the protection of a nation but the further monetisation of its ruin. The language is revealing: “defence innovators” are to be made “a more attractive proposition.” Who decides what is attractive? Who qualifies as an innovator? The answer is simple—anyone with the right connections at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

This is the end-state of managerial barbarism: war as investment opportunity. Gone are the days when defence meant arms, men, and national will. In their place we are offered a risk-managed portfolio of equity-backed software startups and pseudo-academic partnerships, with profits safely domiciled in Jersey. The entire mechanism is designed to funnel public money into the hands of the well-connected—to shovel tax revenue into the troughs of friends, cousins, university flatmates, and PR flacks masquerading as “strategic advisers.”

Expect not a single functioning rifle to emerge from this. Expect only webinars, slide decks, and glossy brochures explaining how “cross-sector synergies” and “innovative financing models” will secure Britain’s interests—presumably after the enemy has agreed to pause hostilities for a stakeholder consultation.

The same grift continues under the heading of science. Page 55 tells us:

A new Defence Research and Evaluation (DRE) organisation… should act as a gateway to academia and research institutions across the UK and allied countries… to make it worthwhile for universities to invest in long-term capacity- and capability-building.

Again, not defence. This is the old quango trick: rebrand the bureaucracy, double its funding, call it innovation. There will be a new name, a new “mission,” a new board stuffed with Oxbridge cronies. The money will not go to weapons development or field tests. It will not be spent on battlefield logistics. It will go to “capacity-building”—a phrase which in modern usage means subsidising academic departments run by functionally illiterate ideologues who cannot build a sentence, let alone a guided missile.

Research funding will flow into seminars on the gender dynamics of drone warfare and the carbon footprint of amphibious landings. Contracts will be awarded to “intersectional technologists” with no grasp of mathematics but impeccable networking skills. A defence grant in 2025 will be indistinguishable from a DEI consultancy gig in 2022, except with more acronyms and a slightly better lunch buffet.

And this is no accident. It is policy. It is the deliberate diversion of defence funds away from national security and into the soft, cloying hands of the professional-managerial class—the people who do not build, do not fight, and do not believe in the country they are paid to serve.

The rot continues even in recruitment. Page 65 celebrates:

Better publicise the ‘specialist’ roles available in the Reserves (such as lawyers, engineers, and cyber specialists) and ensure their capability, skills, and advice are made available to the whole workforce.”

That is: offer jobs to the people who would otherwise be unemployable. The “specialists” in question will not be experts. They will be quota-hires. Expect entire battalions of second-rate graduates in gender studies and critical race theory to be appointed as “cyber specialists,” recruited not for merit but for identity. They will be paid handsomely to sit on Zoom calls and circulate reports on “inclusive cybersecurity strategy,” while the technical core of the Armed Forces continues to rot peacefully away.

This is the real message of the Review: that the armed forces are to become an employment scheme for the ruling class’s offspring and its client classes. It is not the defence of Britain—it is a jobs guarantee for a caste of public-sector mediocrities and private-sector parasites. It is war without weapons, planning without strategy, and money without audit.

And all of it—every absurd proposal, every contradictory priority—is written in a language so dead that you must see it was written by a human being. A chatbot, even a poorly programmed one, would at least try for clarity. The prose in this document is not merely unreadable. It is anti-readable. It fights comprehension at every turn. This is what happens when state policy is ghost-written by management consultants for an audience of other management consultants.

There is no clear structure, no honest appraisal of capability, no moral vision. It is a document without an author, intended for a country that is no longer a nation. It does not name enemies, because its authors dare not admit that Britain’s real strategic position is now dictated by its own weakness and decadence.

There is no recognition in the Review that the British Army cannot meet its recruitment targets, that its navy barely functions, or that its population has been disarmed and demoralised. There is no call to create a citizen militia, or even to invest in actual weapons that work. Instead, there are endless pages of “resilience,” “integration,” “digital enablers,” and “forward presence”—euphemisms for our continued subservience to the demands of NATO, Washington, and Davos.

The armed forces are to become little more than an HR-compliant delivery system for foreign policy adventurism and internal psychological conditioning. They will be green, inclusive, and utterly incapable of fighting anyone but their own citizens.

This is what decline looks like. This is how it sounds. Not with sabres and speeches, but with ESG compliance metrics and bullet points about resilience. Our ancestors left us dockyards, regiments, and a legacy of victory. The current regime has left us PowerPoint slides and a suicide pact with the City.

Britain needs no “global projection,” no “capital pooling,” no “pan-defence resilience.” It needs a navy. It needs an air force. It needs rifles in the hands of men who know what this country once was, and are angry that everything this country once was has now been pissed away.

Instead, not surprisingly, we have the Strategic Defence Review 2025