At 5pm on Thursday 29 October 2026, Dr Andrew Curtis will present a critical analysis of UK defence policy from the end of the Cold War to the present. This lecture will be hosted in-person at Lancaster University and live-streamed via Crowdcast. This event is co-hosted with the Centre for War and Diplomacy.

This lecture will present a critical analysis of UK defence policy from the end of the Cold War to the present, arguing that it has been defined by the systematic avoidance of strategic choice. The collapse of the Soviet Union removed the predominant threat that had dictated the structure of UK defence policy for four decades. However, instead of replacing that threat with a clear hierarchy of priorities, successive British governments have sought to preserve the language and posture of global military power while progressively reducing the material, industrial, and political foundations required to sustain it.

Post–Cold War defence policy has been marked by a continual disparity between declared ambitions and actual capabilities. Defence reviews served more as political tools to balance fiscal constraints and domestic expectations than as drivers of genuine strategy, frequently postponing critical decisions regarding force structures, capacity, and risk. Operational adaptability and professionalism regularly masked deeper structural erosion, particularly during the prolonged interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather than strategic shocks, the return of state-driven threats and the war in Ukraine are seen as moments of reckoning, exposing longstanding weaknesses embedded through years of austerity, reliance on coalition warfare, and assumptions about warning time and escalation control.

Situated within critical security and strategic studies, the lecture will integrate military operations, defence management, and political decision-making into a single longitudinal analysis of the previous 35-years, offering actionable insights to reconcile the UK’s strategic ambition with available resources in an era of renewed geopolitical competition.

Andrew Curtis is a defence and security academic, specialising in strategy, the higher management of defence, and military logistics.

His research interests stem from his 35-year career as a Royal Air Force logistics officer, from which he retired in 2019 in the rank of Air Commodore. His final appointment was programme director of the Defence Support Transformation Programme, the flagship transformation initiative of the MoD’s Modernising Defence Programme. During his career, he gained considerable operational experience through a variety of appointments, including: commander support in the NATO Headquarters at Kandahar Airfield in 2011-12; chief of staff of the Joint Task Force Headquarters that conducted the UK’s 2011 Non-Combatant Evacuation Operation in Libya; and commander of the UK humanitarian contribution following the Haiti earthquake of 2010.

Andrew is an Associate Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute and a Cityforum Editorial Board Member. He is a regular contributor to defence commentary and debate, and author of two books: Understanding UK Military Capability (2022) and We need to talk about Defence (2024). He was appointed as an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2007 and has a PhD in Defence Studies from King’s College London.

Lancaster Lecture: From deterrence to intervention and back again: the strategic drift of UK defence policy since the Cold War