Page 48 - Five Forces of Americanisation Richard Hooke 04072025 final post SDR1

The UK Defence Industry in the 21 Century
st
The Five Forces of Americanisation

progressive ends while accepting the world as it is.” Whilst some suggest that Lammy’s two objectives
are mutually exclusive, history might suggest otherwise.

“By the time the UN was set up at San Francisco in the summer of 1945 … The confidence which,
for the first two years after the war, the Americans placed in Britain’s continued strength was
remarkable. They seriously believed that Britain was capable, without American help, for the
security of Western Europe from which American troops would be withdrawn”
(“The Search for Peace” Douglas Hurd, Little, Brown & Co., 1997)

President Harry S. Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill on the steps of the "Little White House,"
the residence of President Truman during the Potsdam Conference.
From the album, "The President's Trip to Potsdam, album number 1." July 16, 1945
(US National Archives)

Notes

1. The “Levene Reforms”
“In the decade that followed the end of the Cold War, defence pursued a number of cost-saving initiatives
that created defence-wide bodies to replace some duplicated facilities in each of the services …. In the
emerging era of expeditionary operations, defence also sought to coordinate the warfighting activities of
the three services more closely, to pool their expertise and maximise their punch, while at the same time
eliminating duplication and waste.
“The most recent reorganisation of the high-level management of defence, however, somewhat reversed
that trend. The changes introduced as a result of the post-2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review
(SDSR) Defence Reform Programme, more commonly referred to within defence as the ‘Levene Reforms’,
were intended to ‘[build] on the strengths of the individual Services and the Civil Service … within a single
Defence framework that ensures the whole is more than the sum of its parts’. Almost 10 years on, the jury
is arguably still out as to whether that intention was achieved.”
48
07/07/2025 Richard Hooke 2025