Study title

25 face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted with high-level members of the UK’s foreign, defence, and security policy communities over 2015-17. Their identities are protected as part of the conditions under which they could speak candidly (and due to University and MoD ethics requirements). Key personnel from different government security agencies/departments were selected based on their knowledge of and experience with the design of security policy in the UK.This project seeks to explain how security policy is developed in the UK, and suggest how relationships between different security and defence agencies can be improved. Security policies protect the borders of a nation-state and the security of its citizens and include military, economic, environmental and cybersecurity policies. These policies are designed and implemented by different agencies including military organizations, the intelligence community, and government departments such as the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence. We live in a fast-paced world where security threats may unexpectedly emerge from state actors such as the Syrian government, or non-state actors such as terrorist organizations. In this rapidly changing security environment it is paramount that national security policies be designed with enough flexibility so as to increase the likelihood of success. Important constraints can hinder this need for flexibility. One such constraint is that members of the security and defence community might fear losing support, appearing as incompetent, or harming the reputation of their agency if they fail to implement a security policy they had previously committed to implementing. This can make them wary of significantly modifying a security policy, even in the face of important environmental changes such as budget cuts or the emergence of new information regarding the predicted effectiveness of its implementation. Such fear of domestic backlash likely played a role in...