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Britain’s decision this week to pull its flagship aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth from leading a major Nato exercise because of a propeller problem seemed to symbolise the overstretched state of the country’s military. A committee of MPs warned on the same day that UK armed forces were underprepared to fight an all-out war. The US navy secretary recently urged the UK to reassess the size of its armed forces “given the threats that exist today”. These messages must be heeded by this UK government, and the next.
Despite 30 years of under-investment since the cold war ended, UK armed forces still have some excellent capabilities. Britain is America’s key military partner in protecting Red Sea shipping. It has a leading role in providing equipment and advice to Ukraine. Its more than £50bn annual defence spending is Nato’s second highest after the US, and at 2.3 per cent of gross domestic product it is one of only about a dozen members to beat Nato’s “guideline” of 2 per cent.
Yet there is a gap between UK military resources and what is being expected of them. Policy reviews have confirmed maintaining Euro-Atlantic security as the top priority, alongside a “tilt” to the Indo-Pacific. The Ukraine war has signalled not just Russia’s return as an existential threat to the west but a reversion to the kind of large-scale, mechanised, interstate warfare that was thought to have given way to a new era of high-tech conflict.
Britain is not alone in being caught underprepared. But Euro-Atlantic allies must together be able to field the full panoply of assets, from tanks and heavy weaponry to fighters, drones, cybertools and AI — with the military-industrial capacity to keep them resupplied.
As the Commons defence committee has highlighted, UK armed forces are overstretched even fulfilling today’s commitments; in a peer-to-peer conflict they would exhaust their capabilities in a “couple of months”. The overstretch is leading service personnel to quit faster than they can be replaced. Stockpiles of arms and ammunition have been run down to send to Ukraine.
Part of the answer must be a change of culture to ensure money is spent more efficiently. Top commanders complain of intolerable bureaucracy in the Ministry of Defence. MPs warned last year that the UK’s military procurement system was “well and truly broken”, typified by problems with the £5.5bn Ajax programme to produce next-generation armoured vehicles.
Politicians must be able to guarantee value for money if they are to make the necessary case for higher overall spending. The government’s “aspiration” to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP “as circumstances allow” is inadequate; in the cold war era of the 1970s and early 1980s, spending topped 4 per cent.
With the tax burden at a postwar high and public services under huge strain, there is no easy answer to where to find the resources. But the military and, above all, politicians need to hold a grown-up conversation with the public about funding. It is hardly responsible for a government that claims to be serious about security to be scrambling to find tax cuts as a pre-election giveaway.
Army chiefs, who have warned that Britain would have to field a “citizens army” if conflict came, have been criticised for scaremongering. As in the cold war, heightened threats carry a price — though that may come through changed tax and spending priorities than through conscription. Even without the possibility that a new Trump presidency could cut US support for Nato, the task for Britain and its allies is to rebuild military capacity to the point where they can once again deter adversaries from ever starting a wider war.
