Sir, Further to your report “Johnson to take aim at MoD over wasted cash” (Dec 16), the 2010 and 2015 strategic defence and security reviews (SDSRs) had far too many objectives. The consequence was that insufficient funding was “smeared” across too many defence capabilities. The failure in the planning process to adjust ambition against budget resulted in the pursuit of too many capabilities, few of which are now truly world-class. The promised 2020 SDSR should start from a much tighter set of strategic objectives; the result might be a less extensive but individually more effective array of defence capabilities, affordable from within the 2 per cent of our GDP committed to defence. Britain in isolation is no longer a global power: our defence objectives are…

Source: The Times December 17, 2019 00:00 UTC