Labour's defence review will be largely pointless

Yahoo

01-06-2025

So it's Strategic Defence Review time again. Soon we'll know what the not-so-new Government will do to sort out our long-neglected defences so that we can be secure in an increasingly dangerous world.
The document we will see will likely not have much in the way of numbers or detail in it – for these we will have to wait until the autumn. But it doesn't matter, because the drafters of the review have been set an impossible task. They have been told they can have a derisory budget increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP – and even that will not arrive this year.
The Government does not envisage this figure reaching 3 per cent until 2034, nine years from now, and even that is 'if economic conditions allow'. Even the defence minister's suggestion last week that spending will jump to 3 per cent of GDP by 2034 is inadequate. What is actually required is 4 per cent or more, as in the Cold War. And we need to start spending now, not in a decade's time.
Today, it is no exaggeration to say that our Armed Forces are on their knees. The Army's sole war-fighting division is supposed to have three brigades. It is actually a reshuffled two-brigade force with enough equipment for just one. The single brigade we could realistically send to war would probably be cut to pieces on a modern drone-swarm battlefield, and if that somehow didn't happen it would run out of ammunition within days. For this reason, Healey's decision to spend £1.5 billion on massively ramping up Britain's production of artillery shells and explosives is at least welcome.
The Royal Navy, by borrowing most of the ships from other nations, has just managed to deploy its carrier strike group on a cruise to the Indo-Pacific – but the aircraft carrier has only half the jets it was designed to carry, those jets aren't properly armed, and the vital airborne radar is a highly unreliable helicopter-borne system.
With those aircraft away at sea, the RAF has only a handful of modern fifth-generation planes remaining. It's reliant on the fourth-gen Eurofighter Typhoon. This jet is similar in capability to the French Rafale, which appears to have come off worst against Chinese technology in the recent aerial clash between India and Pakistan. This doesn't bode well for any future fight against China's other allies.
As for airborne radar, the RAF is currently in an even worse position than the Navy: it has no airborne radar planes at all. For context, Egypt and Mexico both have airborne radar planes.
Just to round things off, our nuclear enterprise is in a shocking condition. We have in recent times not had a single working attack submarine. We have just barely managed to maintain a deterrent submarine continuously at sea, but it is now proving so difficult to get the next boat ready that our submariners are routinely having to stay out for six months, eventually coming back into harbour with the sub encrusted with barnacles and weed. Money needs spending here, too.
It would not be hard to find that money. According to the OBR, government spending for 2024-25 should come in at £1,279 billion with just £37.5 billion on defence – that's 3 per cent of spending, or around 1.3 per cent of GDP. (There are other, concocted, figures out there for current defence spending. They include pensions and other non-defence outgoings. The '2.5 per cent' plan is on such a basis.)
Any competent government would double or triple defence spending by making cuts elsewhere: it wouldn't cause significant pain – we spend so much more on other things. But we've not had a competent government for a long time now.
Until we get one, defence reviews like this one will mean precisely nothing.
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