07-06-2025
UK Military Rhetoric Doesn't Match Fiscal Reality
Not long before World War I, HMS Dreadnought, a battleship that made all existing vessels obsolete, was launched at Portsmouth in the presence of the King-Emperor Edward VII. Fire-breathing patriots soon took up the cry, 'We want eight and we won't wait.' Winston Churchill, then a young home secretary in a government committed to spending more on welfare, wryly noted of the popular clamor for a naval race with Germany: 'The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.'
British debates about defense spending follow a familiar trajectory, although this time it's politicians, rather than civilians, insisting that more should be spent on firepower. A military revolution in warfare is underway, too. Drones, off-the-shelf technology far cheaper than Dreadnoughts, are being deployed to lethal effect on the battlefields of Ukraine and further afield - the daring 'Spider Web' raid last weekend destroyed as much as a third of Russia's strategic bombing force based thousands of miles away from Europe.
