Britain needs to rediscover a more resilient statecraft

For the first time in decades, there is a real sense of urgency about British security policy. In its haste to make up for unconscionably lost time, however, the country is in danger of losing sight of the lessons of 20th-century history, especially key aspects of the philosophy of whole-society resilience – ‘comprehensive security’ – associated with Nordic countries such as Finland and Sweden. The Defence Universities Alliance (DUA), inaugurated in July 2026, illustrates British shortcomings, revealing a lack of strategic vision and coherence.

The DUA is an initiative of the UK government to form closer ties between a group of, so far, 35 universities selected by the Ministry of Defence and the armed forces. Its aims are first, to support research in defence-relevant technologies; second, to coax students into defence-related careers; third, to foster defence collaboration between government, universities and industry.

When the scheme was formally launched, it was hailed by the minister responsible, Luke Pollard, as a boost for skills and research. This is no doubt welcome in and of itself. A new defence ecosystem is emerging, in which universities will play a key role.

The DUA appears to be part and parcel of the ‘specialisation’ agenda in the government’s (still somewhat embryonic) higher education and broader education policies. As so often when the government and its civil servants interact with the universities, the sector is invited to ‘deliver’ – in this case, ‘defence-related skills’ and defence-adjacent research outputs in cyber security, robotics, Artificial Intelligence and manufacturing. The current framework makes no effort to address larger questions of how universities might contribute to developing a broader national resilience strategy. If DUA is merely intended to be nothing more than a pipeline for producing engineers, AI graduates and any number of defence manufacturing projects, then the scheme will fall short of its full potential.

It ought to be obvious to anyone (with the possible exception of higher education managers) that universities are more than an assembly of lecture theatres, seminar rooms and laboratories, with halls of residence attached. Spread across the country and usually deeply anchored in their regional or local economies and public services, universities are among the few institutions, perhaps even the only ones, that can rally local councils, the National Health Service, the police, the third sector and private sector employers. It is a capacity that ought to be the backbone of national resilience at the local or regional level. For this to be effective, it would require an agreed framework with protocols of understanding setting out emergency relationships and roles, formal integration into local and national structures, but also safeguards to protect institutional independence. On all this, the DUA, and the wider public debate about Britain’s war-readiness planning, is silent.

Policies are not joined up, and there is no overall strategic coherence. Here, the precarious financial state of the higher education sector matters. Deliberately or in collective fits of absence of mind, successive governments have succeeded in hobbling UK universities by fiddling with the so-called ‘cap’, restricting overseas student numbers or persisting with an unsustainable funding regime. Equally, no objective observer would deny that senior management in many institutions leaves much to be desired.

The combined effect of all of this is a sector-wide loss of resilience and agility. Retrenchment remains the default setting. If institutions are forced to retrench yet further, or if some have to close altogether, more is lost than just a certain number of graduates, academics and other university employees. It means decreasing skills levels and research expertise, weakening the very institutions that could help to reinforce security in the broadest sense. To a considerable degree, then, defence research and investment might supplement institutional income at a time of financial uncertainty, though this in itself is problematic.

A tight fiscal context and international instability tend to make for an uncertain combination. As historians will point out, mobilisation under such circumstances will happen at great speed but also haphazardly, with little concern for the overall coherence of efforts. If institutions are drawn into defence activities through ad hoc funding schemes and de facto partnerships, such arrangements are likely to be seen by some as a form of creeping social militarisation. Some may well make that argument anyway, but in the absence of an overarching agreed, consultative framework the DUA may come to lack legitimacy. In turn, universities would stand to lose that resilience-building capacity which ought to be at the heart of the alliance.

For it to have a meaningful role in the UK’s overall defence and security efforts, it is necessary therefore to define or rather redefine the alliance’s purpose. If it is meant merely to produce more engineers for UK manufacturing, it will be nothing but a narrowly conceived pipeline project, no more successful than the STEM-prioritising efforts of successive governments. If the DUA is to enhance the UK’s war preparedness and national resilience, it must be about more than cyber security, robotics and assorted engineering projects. Again, as historians are able to tell defence planners, extrapolating from one contemporary conflict the nature, technological or tactical, of future conflicts usually leads into all sorts of dead-ends. The DUA must, therefore, also include the humanities, especially languages, history and philosophy as strategically necessary disciplines that foster the ability to think critically and to reason under, and to cope with, uncertainty.

These are not skills gaps that AI can close. Languages open the door to other cultures. With an appreciation of their history comes a deeper and richer understanding of those countries with whom the UK has to deal with as partners, competitors, even – perhaps especially – enemies. In not altogether dissimilar circumstances, during the years of strategic reorientation after Suez, the University Grants Committee appointed another commission to evaluate the status of foreign-language provision in the UK. Its report, published in 1961, became known as the Hayter Report, after its chairman, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, William Hayter. It concluded that UK universities should follow the US model in putting greater emphasis on contemporary languages and societies. The recommendations of the report led to large-scale financial support for the newly emerging field of area studies.

What appears to be the narrower horizon of the DUA scheme also underlines a broader problem of contemporary politics: the general decline in governmental performance (not a UK-specific problem, of course). There is a tendency to react to, and be overwhelmed by, events rather than shaping them. Organisational capabilities are often not properly understood; and, more often still, government departments and agencies prove incapable of adapting themselves to fast changing environments. A weak grasp of history – of one’s own policies as much as of foreign countries – is a symptom of that decreased capacity for in-depth analysis and joined-up policy-making.

In the early 19th century, the palpable decline of the Qing Empire encouraged Chinese scholars to look for practical kinds of scholarship to reverse the decline in government performance. Among them was Wei Yuan. In 1826 he published the Huangchao jingshi wenbian (Collected Essays on Statecraft Under the Reigning Dynasty), a study of political and economic issues, drawing on historical and geographical insights to replace or supplement the antiquated practices of the ossified imperial civil service.

It is time for the UK government to discover a 21st-century British version of jingshi (statecraft). Current national security planning should take its inspiration from both Wei Yuan and Hayter and embrace the vital contribution of the humanities to defence and resilience planning. Defining the DUA properly has obvious public policy implications, most notably for funding. Criteria need to be set out credibly and transparently so that a taxonomy of defence-relevant activities and roles can be developed. National security and resilience are too important to allow questions of what gets funded and what not to be covered in the opaqueness that characterises the UKRI’s funding strategy, and which so wastes much money and effort.

None of this is easy, but strategy never is. To paraphrase the great Liberal historian JR Seeley, the politics of strategy-making will not rise to the challenge unless they are liberated by history. And it must begin with the understanding that there must be no shibboleths, no half-baked solutions and no quack remedies.