The Tory leadership campaign has reignited the auction of promises to boost defense spending. Many of the contenders have made pledges since the start of the war in Ukraine, usually up to a reassuringly round figure as a percentage of GDP. Most also promise tax cuts. Beyond questions of fiscal logic, what is more worrying for people interested in defense is that ill-conceived spending increases could be a sugar rush that supports the status quo while delaying the transformation that UK defense urgently needs. needs.
Therefore, it may be prudent to explore the issue of increasing defense spending. Three questions can be usefully addressed: why spend more and then the related questions of what and how will the money be spent?
The “why” seems obvious, given that a ground war is raging in Eastern Europe. But since it began concentrating on the Donbass in April, Russia has captured territory equivalent only to Greater London. Moscow is now struggling to replace the huge losses it has suffered with these minimal gains. Even if she manages to make further gains, her army is already severely battered, bleeding and weakened.
Given the impact of sanctions, why should it be valid to assume that the Russian military can recover to its pre-Ukraine capacity, let alone to a size and capability that would allow it to threaten NATO? We must ensure that Russia is defeated in Ukraine, rather than planning to spend fortunes in the future on defenses that may never be needed.
What has been clearly revealed, however, is that the West has allowed its stockpiles of munitions and the industrial capacity to stockpile them to atrophy to dangerous levels. Instead, it has invested in fancy combat platforms – ships, planes, tanks – to put on display, of which there are very few. But having a top-of-the-line rifle and not having the money for bullets doesn’t scare your opponent.
What Ukraine has also demonstrated, once again, is that ingenuity and the will to win trumps Gucci gear. Ukraine has innovated with commercial drones and geospatial intelligence linked to reservists with laptops via Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites, which can then use their cleverly dispersed artillery to target Russian forces. It is value for money; or, stated as a principle of war, economy of effort.
Ukraine does well with economy of effort. Its peacetime defense budget is approximately £4 billion. The UK is £44 billion. The brutal truth is that the DoD and the services have a poor record of conducting effective or efficient procurement, so any requests for more money must come with plans to address structural and cultural deficiencies in the development of imagined forces and efficient procurement .
Our NATO allies are showing us that there are other ways beyond our convenient military-industrial complex to effectively build a national defense. Finland has a defense budget of £7 billion and only 21,000 regular military personnel. But it has a trained and equipped immediate reserve that can send 285,000 troops into the field, including the largest artillery force in Europe outside of Russia. Given a little longer, there are about 900,000 available. There are military plans for defeating a Russian invasion that have been assessed, resourced and practiced. This is not a model to slavishly copy – the UK has different strategic responsibilities – but it does demonstrate that there are other ways of creating an effective national defense force.
No one has yet fully grasped the lessons of Ukraine. But we can already discern many things that must shape our armed forces and their posture. Nuclear weapons have shown their central role in setting strategic conditions – we are not making enough of our nuclear contribution to NATO. China is a much bigger strategic competitor, by several leagues, than Russia. The emerging ideas of war in the information age were demonstrated in Ukraine: you can be detected and struck faster and at a greater distance than ever before. Cheap but smart weapons seem to have achieved some supremacy over expensive platforms. Repurposed “civilian” technology can meet military needs at a fraction of the cost. All these factors require us to reconsider the established military modus operandi.
So yes, we may have to spend more on defense because the world is not safe and stable. But before we waste money on reinforcing yesterday’s ways of fighting, let’s first consider where the real future threat is coming from.
Let’s make sure that our modernized “theory of victory” is able to match it and that it can be maintained alongside our allies in a real conflict. Then let’s figure out how to buy what we need, not what the services want, to put resources behind this winning theory and in a less wasteful way than has become the norm. Only then can we assess and justify any increase in defense spending. It’s unlikely to be a round number as a percentage of GDP.
Air Marshal Edward Stringer CB CBE is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and former Director General of Joint Force Development
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