Is 2.5% of GDP for UK's defence by 2030 merely a political gimmick?

Some historical perspective

Last year General Lord Dannatt and I published an account of the British Army between 1918 - when it achieved a great victory - and 1940, when it did not. The book was written in part to challenge the UK to think seriously about what happens when our country neglects the requirement for an army able to fight at a high-intensity for a prolonged period against a peer adversary.

Part of our argument was to look at the amount of money the country spends on its defence as a barometer of the seriousness or otherwise of our political masters towards spending money on the primary duty of government, namely the security of its citizens. Our fear is that in the rampant feel-goodery that has plagued the West since 1991 the harsh realities of our unstable world have become forgotten. It has taken Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russia’s subsequent bludgeoning of that benighted country for politicians to gradually wake up to the scale of the threat that this sort of instability offers to the world, not merely Europe or the West.

My fear, like that of many others, is that the wake-up call is taking too long and our country’s defences remain in a parlous state. We haven’t had an army able to deploy at divisional level or above in sustained all-arms manoeuvre for perhaps ten years or more. In other words, our ability to provide what our forefathers would have described as a robust ‘continental commitment’ is almost non-existent.

In the book we trace the origins of the failure to think seriously about the need to have a deployable, expeditionary army, able to fight and operate alongside its allies in NATO on an all-arms battlefield. The reality is that the Cold War forced Britain to retain the ability to fight a general war in Europe, all the while finding the resources to undertake its other commitments across the world. Although worldwide events were dynamic from 1945 to 1989 with further conflicts for the United Kingdom in Malaya, Dhofar, Cyprus, Kenya, Borneo, the Falklands, and the long-running Troubles in Northern Ireland, it was the Cold War in Europe that principally drove the defence agenda and kept the budget at around 5 per cent of GDP. As the major bridge between the United States and Europe, the Royal Navy was heavily committed above and below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean to keep open the sea lines of communication to NATO’s dominant partner, while the British Army retained some 55,000 troops in four armoured divisions as part of NATO’s Northern Army Group and the Royal Air Force was also largely forward-based in West Germany as part of the Second Allied Tactical Air Force. These conventional deployments were all conducted under the nuclear umbrella of Mutual Assured Destruction. By the 1980s, with the West under the leadership of US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and with increased spending on both conventional armaments and the highly experimental Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile Defence system, the strain of strategic military competition began to show on the political and economic stability of the Soviet Union. Despite the perestroika political movement for reform within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the associated openness of glasnost under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the cracks in the Berlin Wall that opened on 9 November 1989 led inexorably to the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later and the old flag of Russia being raised over the Kremlin on 26 December 1991. The Cold War was over, and an apparent New World Order had begun. The historian Francis Fukuyama declared – somewhat ambitiously – the end of history.

It was at this point that international leaders and their finance ministers in the West began to overlook the cautionary tale that the history of the 20th century might have taught them. With the Soviet Union gone and rump Russia apparently enfeebled, Western states eagerly embarked on military reduction and a peace dividend. In the United Kingdom, the ‘Options for Change’ exercise saw a major slashing of defence capability, beneficially coincidental to help ameliorate a significant economic downturn. The British Army was reduced from 155,000 to 116,000 soldiers, notwithstanding the first Gulf War of 1990–91 which many wishful thinkers regarded as something of an aberration. However, despite that war and the subsequent deployment of large parts of the armed forces to Bosnia from 1992 and then to Kosovo in 1999, the new Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair continued with the implementation of its Strategic Defence Review of 1997–98. As a piece of policy work, this was considered an honest review of the United Kingdom’s defence policy and a progressive blueprint for future defence planning and expenditure. Endorsed by Tony Blair and the Chiefs of Staff, this review might have stood the nation in good stead for the future had the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, fully funded its outcome. For his own reasons, he chose not to do so. The underfunding of the United Kingdom’s defence capability began to show its deficiencies a year after with the second Gulf War of 2003, and the situation was then exacerbated by a protracted campaign in Iraq for the British Army lasting until 2009 and an even more intense one in Afghanistan lasting until 2014.

But domestic politics and financial austerity had already begun to undermine the reality of developments within Europe. The new British prime minister David Cameron in 2010 authorised a further reduction in the size of the British Army from 102,000 to 95,000 then another to 84,000 as a response to the economic downturn of 2008 and, notwithstanding the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, a further reduction was ordered by successive Conservative governments to 74,000. It is, perhaps, little wonder that Vladimir Putin, in power in the Kremlin in one appointment or another since 1999, sensed that the West, once united during the years of the Cold War, was ripe for challenge as he saw Western military capability being atrophied in Europe and diverted elsewhere in forays against militant Islamist movements in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East and Africa. He may have taken some comfort when he witnessed the West’s eventual disappointments in Iraq and Afghanistan, notwithstanding the Soviet Union’s own failure in Afghanistan, but he will undoubtedly have been emboldened by the precipitate flight of the United States and NATO’s undignified exit from Kabul in August 2021.

If wrong decisions are made in the aftermath of a major conflict, like the First and Second World Wars and the stand-off that was the Cold War, then the United Kingdom, NATO and the West more generally stand in great danger, when faced by an expansionist challenger. In the 1930s, the liberal democracies of the West set their faces against rearmament and chose negotiation and appeasement as their response to Hitler’s Germany. The war in Europe between Russia and Ukraine represents another moment when Western leaders, and those of the United Kingdom in particular, are faced with a dilemma to know how to act appropriately. They can choose to bury their heads in a Munich-like moment or otherwise embrace difficult and expensive choices, perhaps not popular in the short term but likely to be a sound investment in future security.

In 2022, accepting that Ukraine was not a member of NATO and therefore not under the umbrella of Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, Western states, nevertheless, stood solidly in support of Ukraine as it fought to protect its independence, sovereignty and preferred way of life. But should it have come to this? Had the cautionary tale of the past not been heeded? Had the absence of a response to the rise of a dictator in Europe in the 1930s been mirrored by the hesitant response to the rise of a dictator in this decade? This is the challenge to Western governments in the third decade of the 21st century and to the United Kingdom, in particular, if it wishes to substantiate itself as Global Britain and as a major player on the world stage in the years to come. As a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council it is difficult to conceive how the United Kingdom can duck these responsibilities, but rising to them comes with a price. The Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy published in March 2021 posited, inter alia, a geographic tilt towards the Indo-Pacific region and the prioritisation of new technologies and new ways of warfare; however, a brutal land war in Europe has proved to be a rude wake-up call. While the analysis behind the Integrated Review, largely confirmed by the refreshing of the review in March 2023, may have pointed to the way that the British government wished to act in the competitive age that it described, Vladimir Putin’s violent assault on Ukraine took war back to its bloody basics. His military, having failed in a woefully inept attempt to make a lightning strike on Kyiv, had to resort to relentless pounding by rocket and tube artillery as a precursor to hapless Russian infantry being pressed forward to possess shattered territory. More than two years into this war Russia’s determination to continue battering Ukraine from afar sees no let up. What has reduced is the West’s determination to meet its rhetoric with the arms and ammunition that Ukraine needs to push this predator back to its pre-war boundaries.

So, what should be the response of the British government in the face of current events? The argument remains very strong that defence spending should rise to closer to 3 per cent than 2 per cent of Gross Domestic Product, much of which needs to be spent on a major investment in the United Kingdom’s land power capability. Planned cuts to the size of the army should be questioned, as should decisions to reduce helicopter and tactical air lift capabilities. The Challenger 3 tank modernisation programme should be accelerated, and the numbers significantly increased from the paltry plan of just re-fitting 148 main battle tanks. Following the decision to remove the Warrior infantry fighting vehicle from service, it still remains vital that a suitable replacement is procured to enable armour and infantry to manoeuvre on the battlefield at a similar speed. Moreover, as the war in Ukraine has shown, rocket and tube artillery numbers need to be dramatically increased as does air defence capability, needed to meet conventional aerial threats and now that from armed drones. Underpinning all this must be a modern and secure communications system to enable agile command and control, all supported by robust logistics and adequate holdings of ammunition and other combat supplies. Without these enhancements and more, the United Kingdom will be unable to stand on the borders of Europe as a serious NATO partner and play its part in the future deterrence of further aggression from a newly aggressive Russia. Wishful thinking does not buy peace, but hard power does. A well- found army in being is a strong deterrent in its own right. It was absent in 1939 and disaster followed in 1940.

The history of the 1930s showed the folly of not acting in a timely manner while the draining away of the United Kingdom’s military capabilities since the end of the Cold War shows a remarkable tendency to allow history to repeat itself. If our book is indeed a cautionary tale, its message needs to be carefully considered and acted upon without further delay. Defence spending of 2.5% by 2030 - especially when that figure includes such items as service pensions and the independent nuclear deterrent - will simply not be enough to enable us to be prepared for war. Today’s news that a new Labour government would not stick to even the commitments made by Grant Shapps yesterday (24 April 2024) underline the essential fragility of this commitment. With a general election on the horizon, its does appear that the current government is trying to re-secure the moral high ground with respect to defence spending. Cynics might simply see it as electioneering, given that they might not be in a position to deliver on it. We need to be better than this. Defence expenditure is the insurance premium that any responsible government must pay to protect the security of its territory, its national interests and its people. The premium may have just gone up, but the alternative is a disaster. Ukraine is Europe’s wake-up call. We must listen and act. We might not be given a second chance – again.