The Strategic Defence Review Must Put Training at its Heart

Cold War military bases frequently displayed the quote ‘Our Job in Peace is to Prepare for War’, reminding people that the peacetime role of the armed forces was to be ready for war. Hardly a new idea, variations on the theme appear in Sun Tzu, Clausewitz and in Vegetius’ famous dictum ‘si vis pacem, para bellum’. The connection between training and war is well established.

At RUSI’s Land Warfare Conference 2024, the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS) argued for more productive armed forces, and endorsed the new Chief of the General Staff’s ambition to increase the lethality of the Army. The Strategic Defence Review must consider these issues, alongside the size of the Defence budget needed to deliver the stated ambitions. And while many of the headlines will be focused on the physical elements of capability – the people, equipment and stockpiles – capability is more. In Ukraine, Russia’s numerical superiority in people and equipment has not delivered the quick victory it hoped for. 

The Ministry of Defence describes capability as a function of many factors, encapsulated in the acronym TEPIDOIL. There is a reason that Training comes ahead of Equipment, People, Information, Doctrine, Organisation, Infrastructure and Logistics: it is the glue that binds the other elements and gives the force its utility. 

Training (and education) not only coheres the elements of capability, but also connects the three components of fighting power. It ensures that the physical component can be used to the full, enhances the conceptual component, and underpins the moral component by building and sustaining trust and people’s willingness to fight for each other. Collective training forges strong and integrated units, Services and alliances. Just as capability is more than equipment, so too is interoperability – the ability to exchange data and cue each other’s sensors and shooters still requires people to cooperate, and human interoperability is founded on trust, which requires shared experience. Training, therefore, needs to be an integral element of the Defence Review and not the Cinderella function to be ignored in favour of its more glamorous sisters such as air and missile defences, artillery, cyber and digital backbones. Nor can training be confined to a human resources analysis independent of operational requirements, which the Strategic Defence Review’s terms of reference might suggest is how it is seen.

Despite renewed focus on training – the Royal Navy’s collaborative synthetic training that connects Portsmouth to the US Navy in Norfolk or San Diego, the Army’s Collective Training Transformation Programme and the RAF’s aggressor training, together with a more dynamic exercise programme in recent years, including through NATO and the Joint Expeditionary Force – there are concerns that the current approach to training in the UK is outdated. While many of the issues impacting individual training are well known, collective training does not adequately prepare the forces for state-based conflicts, despite it being almost a decade since the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR) which described a resurgence in state-based threats. 

This commentary highlights a potential tension in the desire for enhanced productivity and preparing the armed forces for war, before considering four issues that impact on collective training’s ability to meet threats: capacity; the scale at which training takes place; the content, including questions about risk; and funding. So, while there is much that is positive about collective training and exercising, there are challenges that the Strategic Defence Review team should address.

A Productivity Gap?

Having productive armed forces is important, but the yardstick against which productivity is measured is crucial. Productivity generally concerns how much input is required to produce a given output; how the output is defined is therefore crucial. If the measure is how much use is made of the armed forces in delivering routine peacetime activity that shows an immediate return against the Defence budget – greater equipment availability from the same fleet with fewer people, or military aid to the civil authorities – these tasks will be prioritised, even if the forces have less time to train to win the wars they may be called on to fight. If the job (output) of the armed forces in peace is to prepare for war, this is a different measure of productivity, one that is hard to gauge in advance, but which may require training for war to be prioritised above the forces’ routine use. However, it would be unrealistic to think that the defence budget should only fund the armed forces as a break-glass emergency capability; they must add value short of war. 

The choice is not binary: credible, lethal armed forces can deter many adversaries, where they have the right type and volume of equipment that can be used to the full through realistic and demanding training. Where that training is conducted can have deterrent and reassurance effects, so whether the British Army Training Unit in Suffield, Canada (BATUS) is the right location for a European threat is worth consideration. BATUS offers permissive land and air space for large-scale training – including for the use of drones – that is hard to find in Europe, but is a long way from the potential fight, so there is a judgement between training value and deterrent effect. However, if technology can help coordinate live and virtual forces dispersed across multiple European training areas, Defence could step between the horns of that dilemma. And, if the definition of productivity as routine use is adopted, deterring adversaries and reassuring allies through practised interoperability in the likely theatre of operations makes an immediate contribution to outputs which should be just as legitimate as sending small training teams around the world, or providing military aid to the civil authorities. 

Technology, through simulation, also enhances productivity by reducing the use of physical equipment, increasing its life (for example, fewer live flying or sea hours allowing more of a fleet to be operational) and reducing the need for fuel, spare parts and maintenance. However, those who fuel or service the equipment (or people) also need to be trained for wartime conditions, and industry may depend on repeat orders of parts to keep production lines and supply chains open; simulation is therefore not the complete answer.

Capacity Constrained 

The capacity of the individual and collective training systems is heavily constrained, both in the number of training places and the estate. The military flying training system’s problems are well-known, but capacity elsewhere has been ‘optimised’ for the force size and requirements described in the 2015 SDSR, as adjusted by the Army cuts in the 2021 Defence Command Paper. 

With training capacity already matched to small armed forces with a commensurately limited throughput, the situation will be worse if the Strategic Defence Review concludes – as it should – that numbers must increase. This will be a particular issue for the Reserves in the event of mobilisation. One deduction may be to give the volunteer reserve a role in training for mobilisation, creating a nucleus of trainers who can prepare the second and subsequent echelons, expanding capacity quickly when required. The way Reserves were involved in training the Ukrainian armed forces under Operation Interflex offers a potential template.

Another capacity constraint is the ability to release people or units for training. Justin Bronk observes that in several NATO air forces (including the RAF), pilots and engineers are overstretched by concurrent requirements for maintaining basic flying currency, major exercises and operational deployments. Consequently, many non-US NATO air forces cannot conduct the large-scale complex training sorties necessary to regenerate the skills needed for high-intensity missions. Similarly, the Royal Navy’s small fleet is regularly bounced between deployment and rigorous training packages, leaving little time for rest or maintenance, which contributes to retention and serviceability challenges across the fleet. Armed forces busy doing today’s tasks cannot be preparing properly for tomorrow’s. 

Size Matters

A significant weakness in UK collective training is its scale. At the Land Warfare Conference, Major General Mark Pullan described NATO’s aspiration for Corps-level training, which significantly exceeds the UK’s current training effort that often takes place below brigade level. Similarly, in the maritime and air domains, collective training and exercises often focus on small formations, not the larger ones that would be needed in war. 

Technology could expand the ability to generate scale by combining live and virtual assets: the synthetic training system Gladiator – used by the RAF and the Australian, Canadian and US Air Forces – and the Advanced Tactical Augmented Reality Systems are good examples. Expanding the ability to connect all domains to such systems would also help training and exercise scheduling, enabling virtual participation with or from other Services or partners. This could overcome the limitation of platform numbers – for example, as the British Army expands its ground-based air defence capabilities, not having to wait for the RAF to provide a fast jet or drone might allow for more responsive, assured and predictable training. And something in the vein of a simulation Red Flag-like exercise (Sim Flag) could contribute to interoperability and mass without the high cost and lengthy planning involved in physical exercises. However, technology is not a complete replacement for live training – simulating the aggregate friction inherent in large-scale operations is still difficult.

Train Hard, Fight Easy

The content of training must change to reflect the threats and experience of recent wars, and this is currently not responsive enough. Speakers on the multi-domain integration panel at the Land Warfare Conference highlighted how the design of many exercises and collective training remains rather traditional across the maritime, land and air domains. The modern battlefield’s ubiquitous intelligence gathering, swarming drones, unconventional weapons (chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear) and fast-adapting electromagnetic environment that undermines the ability to integrate forces are absent from too many exercises, and rarely present in combination. Moreover, with a primary focus on the learning benefit to combat forces, the logistics elements are often underplayed, whether supply, medical or engineering – including wet-gap crossings – meaning the vital enablers are not tested as they would be in conflict. Exercises also assume that the force is already at war, rather than testing the transition to war, which would stress different parts of the armed forces and society. Similarly, exercises often pay little, if any, attention to post-attack recovery. Greater integration of industry and partners across government is needed in exercises and collective training events to build the understanding, processes and trust that will be needed in war. And while there are examples of this, notably the Joint Expeditionary Force, it is not as common as it should be. 

Risk is another constraint on the conduct of training. Understandably, the safety risk in training is managed closely, but whether or not the balance is right is being challenged. The Defence Safety Authority (DSA) – which ‘aims to reduce and ideally prevent loss of life, avoidable harm and damage to the environment’ – discharges its responsibilities seriously, but this can lead to a preference for risk that is ‘as low as reasonably practicable’. Whether the DSA and the wider legislative framework that impacts on the armed forces’ training for war are calibrated correctly should form part of the thinking during, or be tasked as subsequent work by, the Strategic Defence Review team. 

Attitudes to operational risk also need review. Those playing the adversary need relevant capabilities, whether as organic functions – such as the US Air Force aggressor squadrons – or contracted capabilities such as Draken who support the RAF. This requires not only financial but also intellectual investment to understand how an adversary might fight you – not just how they have fought against others – and how to defeat them. This in turn requires a willingness, even an enthusiasm, to fail. But with few opportunities for collective training, unit commanders are disincentivised to be radical for fear that their only exercise report in command will indicate they did not pass. 

Technology can expand access to training, allow for experimentation, and confine the risk of death or injury to avatars in the virtual world. Moreover, the simulated/augmented reality environment may be the only place certain capabilities such as cyber attack, urban operations in cities and F35s can be tested without providing an adversary with intelligence on the extent of one’s capabilities, or for practical reasons. And while the temptation may be to invest in the front-end virtual/augmented reality systems, Defence needs the foundations to allow single Service systems to integrate, nationally and with key allies. Ideally, standards for technical architectures, acquisition and data would operate at the NATO level, but UK Strategic Command’s Integration Design Authority has an important role to play, and it needs to be enabled to do this.

Secure Funding 

Training is expensive, and funding represents a critical challenge. The money comes from in-year running costs – the resource departmental expenditure limit (RDEL) – (which is often overcommitted, frequently resulting in cuts to activity, including training. Moreover, while RDEL savings will impact on the regular component, they pose greater risks to the operational effectiveness of the Reserves. 

The predictability of funding over many years is hugely important for effective exercise planning, especially given the need to exercise at greater scale and with allies and partners whose own planning needs to be considered. A financial settlement that moves to the promised 2.5% of GDP, but that ties that growth to capital expenditure or specific RDEL elements, such as pension contributions – as happened under the last government’s 2019 spending review – or the new government’s pay award, which requires some of the 6% pay rise to be found by reprioritisation and savings, could leave training funding vulnerable. An option might be to protect the exercise budget by ringfencing the funding settlement, providing predictability for planners, both UK and allied. While this constrains budget flexibility, which is generally undesirable, it may be essential in protecting the capacity to train meaningfully. And while large-scale exercises are costly in both money and time, in Peter Drucker’s memorable words, ‘if you think training is expensive, try ignorance’.

The question of training is fundamentally one of the Defence mindset, and the Strategic Defence Review needs to help Defence reset how it thinks and acts – an approach to preparing for war that avoids risk, prioritises routine activity over large-scale preparation for conflict and sees training as a cost to be reduced is not one that will deliver lethal, battle-winning forces that could prevent war by deterring those who would do us harm. With many of the constraints impacting on training and exercises, investing in technology in a more systematic and coordinated way could compensate for the limitations the forces are operating under, and raise their readiness to fight. 

Rapidly increasing lethality is most likely to be achieved through more effective use of what is currently available; the equipment and people are important, but training is as important for coalescing the components of capability and making them more than the sum of their individual parts. The Strategic Defence Review, therefore, must ensure that when decisions are made about the capabilities the forces need, the requirement for access to realistic, demanding and predictably funded training is secured. If the job of armed forces in peacetime is to prepare for war, this will also deliver CDS’s demand for enhanced productivity, perhaps more so than their use in delivering peacetime services to the nation. 

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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