UK military budget must rise by 56%, Ministry of Defence calculations say
https://www.ft.com/content/42912734-5688-41ea-9194-d759c321da52
by MGC91
UK military budget must rise by 56%, Ministry of Defence calculations say
https://www.ft.com/content/42912734-5688-41ea-9194-d759c321da52
by MGC91
32 comments
>The UK needs to spend 3.6 per cent of GDP on defence if it wants to modernise its military while protecting its nuclear deterrent and meeting Nato obligations, according to internal Ministry of Defence calculations.
>The figure would be a 56 per cent increase on current spending levels of 2.3 per cent, and is widely regarded as a completely unrealistic request in light of the UK’s stretched finances.
>Sir Keir Starmer has given an “iron clad” promise to raise spending to 2.5 per cent, and has launched a root-and-branch review of Britain’s military capabilities that will conclude next year.
>The 3.6 per cent figure would raise spending to about £93bn and take the UK closer to Poland, which shares a border with Ukraine and spends more than 4 per cent of its GDP on defence annually.
>One person involved in the strategic defence review said the mooted 3.6 per cent number was “a wish number doing the rounds around the MoD”. Another said the figure was the number service chiefs “wrote down [in] their Christmas list, knowing that there is no Santa Claus”.
>Without the increase, the UK would have to axe some military ambitions and commitments, people involved with the process warn.
>“Either we are going to have to delete some capabilities or reduce headcount further,” said one senior defence official. “There is a gap between our ambitions and reality . . . even 3.6 per cent may not be enough.”
>Yet the number is far from the highest estimate being fed into the review, according to four people with knowledge of the process.
>The National Audit Office has taken a dim view of some of the ministry’s finalised blueprints. Last year, it called the 2023 defence equipment plan “unaffordable” because it would exceed the available budget by almost £17bn.
>The official remit of the review, or SDR, is to “determine the roles, capabilities and reforms” of the British armed forces so that the country is “secure at home and strong abroad”, all within the “trajectory” of raising defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP.
>The figure would make the UK one of the highest spenders in Nato — and gel with the government’s “Nato first” strategy — even if it falls below a 3 per cent spending target that secretary-general Mark Rutte has suggested in response to Donald Trump’s re-election and the Russian threat to Europe’s security.
>Currently only 23 of Nato’s 33 members hit the alliance’s current spending target of 2 per cent of GDP.
>Officials and analysts have also argued spending 2.5 per cent is insufficient to fully revamp the British military, which has been hollowed out by years of under-investment.
>“The SDR is about injecting a sense of reality and if we want to do all the things that we say we do — and sustain them — 2.5 per cent is not enough,” the same senior UK official said. “Some hard choices have to be made, and they will be politically sensitive and militarily difficult.”
>General Sir Roly Walker, head of the British army, warned in July that the military needed to modernise and be ready to fight a major war in three years’ time.
>Malcolm Chalmers, deputy director-general of the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) think-tank, told MPs last month that “with any conceivable budget, even if it is a little bit more than 2.5 per cent . . . we will not be able to address [the UK military’s] lack of readiness, war stocks and so on”.
>But Francis Tusa, editor of the Defence Analysis newsletter, said the MoD calculations come from “an attitude that being reasonable will get you nowhere, which is compounded by inter-service rivalry”.
>He added: “One trick often deployed is for the services to offer up cuts that chiefs know will be rejected, such as axing the Red Arrows or the Household Cavalry regiment.”
>The biggest single item in the UK’s current £60bn defence budget is maintaining and modernising the nuclear deterrent, which Chalmers estimated cost about £12bn a year, a fifth of its budget.
>The Global Combat Air Programme fighter jet and trilateral Aukus defence pact with Australia and the US are both expected to cost billions of pounds, while existing staff costs and pensions account for almost £17bn a year.
>A further £3bn has been pledged annually to Ukraine, while £4.5bn is spent on the Single Intelligence Account, which funds Britain’s three main spy agencies.
>On top of these are the UK’s Nato commitments, which include a “strategic reserve corps” that would typically require two divisions of about 20,000 troops each, as well as accompanying equipment and ammunition.
>But the UK army’s regular forces, currently about 75,000 troops, would struggle to field just one war-ready division.
>General Sir Nick Carter, a former head of the British military, has argued that the ability to generate a credible and sustained division is premised on the UK having an army that is 80,000 strong.
>Defence officials believe the UK does not get enough credit for the nuclear deterrent it has declared to Nato.
>But they also admit the MoD needs to improve efficiency and overhaul a procurement process so cumbersome that it can take years to turn a purchase decision into a contract.
>Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, overall commander of the British military, reiterated the importance of such internal reforms last month.
>“There is still too much hierarchy and process. Too much duplication and not enough prioritisation . . .[We need] to overcome the organisational inertia . . . that pervades much of our system,” Radakin told an audience at Rusi.
>The MoD said: “This government has a cast-iron commitment to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence and, as the prime minister has said, we will set out the path in the spring.
>“Nato is the cornerstone of global security and the UK will remain a leading contributor to the alliance, alongside our ironclad support to Ukraine.”
It is a ‘must-have’. Especially for naval and nuclear submarines fleet and their warheads, because the UK is slowly giving up it’s status of the ‘Queen of the Seas’ by not paying attention to these crucial issues.
This is one of this classic instances where how some politicians, the British establishment, institutions and military see Britain in 21century and the economic reality of Britain in 21st century collide.
They’re not wrong. This country has long underfunded its military, and it shows. But the only way that kind of funding commitment can be made would be by actually taxing large corporations. And I’m not sure any party that has a shot at power has the stomach for that.
We need to do what the Americans do – think of defence spending as domestic investment.
We’d be making 10 ships, but what we’d really be doing is regenerating a port and securing a manufacturer for the next 20 years.
The Government does spend billions investing – kill two birds with one stone by ensuring that investment is in defence. You’re not necessarily spending anything extra.
We should stop trying to pretend we’re a military power anymore and instead just horde nuclear weapons, North Korea style …
So why do we sell/give weapons to others?
Why do we need anything except naval and air equipment and a small army?
Who is going to invade us anytime soon, the closest threat is US Military bases in our country that might do something if we go against their interests 1 too many times.
There are so many more important places we can use this money.
My department at work also says we need a bigger budget.
Good luck with that. Reality is a 5% cut, and we are also funding the war in Ukraine.
Definitely going to need to legalize weed then as there’s f all else economic activity left to tax outside London.
I guess if they’d said 57, people might not have taken them seriously.
The trouble is that the unit cost of everything has risen exponentially. Warships, for example:
The Leander Class frigates built in the 1970s cost about £80 million each in 2024 prices.
The Type 23s built in the 1990s cost about £367 million each in 2024 prices.
The Type 26s which they’re building now are over a billion each.
Of course the technology is far superior but at those prices you can’t have anything like the same number of hulls. And whatever their capabilities, no ship no matter how modern can be in two places at once. So numerical decline is inevitable.
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Why can’t the uk just build corvettes with basic equipment and policing weapons to take the strain off the bigger ships
Too much best of the best …and not enough numbers
.it’s a really sad decade for the UK atm..I can’t see it even recovering from 2008
It was on the bones of it’s arse twenty years ago in Iraq and Afghan with troops less equipped than smaller Polish, Czech, Danish, Italian contingents, logistics threadbare piggybacking on the US. Tories have only slashed funding and numbers since, needs more investment with the current threat.
You can build an army on indoctrination or materials incentive.
The UK for far too long almost criminalised patriotism and national pride. That rules out indoctrination to build the UK army leaving material wealth.
We don’t need it to rise at all and should just spend our money better
You cannot make capital investment in war if you haven’t made capital investment in peace
America was so well positioned in the 1930s, a few years after its Great Depression, because it immediately rejected the religion of the invisible hand. Stalin the same, but he had much less to start from, and hadn’t learned the balance of a mature regime.
The UK is nothing if it sells off everything. It’s just a business park and run down mall.
Doesn’t matter how much the budget is when it’s all lost on systemic procurement problems.
And what about our salaries, how much do they need to increase to match pre inflation level?
Rebuild British manufacturing!
But… We won’t, because of net zero.
Absolutely! The threats out there would make your hair turn white. We and Europe are all laughably blaise about the reality we face in a next conflict, with the assumption that the Americans will always be there to save us.
What do we need this for, as it’s defence, who is attacking us with military weapons realistically, seems it’s a projection of power
So where does net zero go into this? Lol
Surely they won’t be building electric tanks, submarines and “planet friendly” nukes
So….they going to buy new bus passes for everyone then?
But this increase will happen anyway when Labour deliver on their key manifesto promise of delivering growth, because military funding is allocated as a percentage of GDP and is not a fixed amount.
So that’s just a misleading headline.
Defence budget should go up, says ministry of defence
Maybe they can raise our military bills like they are raising our water bills
Lmao the funding for a lot of things needs to dramatically rise. That’s what happens when you underfund things systematically for decades while allocating the money to somehow flow into private pockets and disappear somewhere.
Sorry, all my money i have left after mortgage is going towards paying for the price increase in water, electricity, gas, internet, council tax, transportation, fuel, insurance premiums, home repair.
I thought i earn enough but just living life is draining my account faster than I can fill with zero help from the govt and now this. Just fuck off.
Problem is everyone is too comfortable with the peace dividend and believes our way of life is a given and not actually a hard fought right that isn’t the norm in history or even around the world today.
Look at recent surveys and the opnions of the masses. Few will fight to defend the country due to a mixture of selfishness, lack of appreciation for what we have or they’re simply unwilling and thinks it should be someone else’s job. So military spending now is possibly irrelevant as come a major war a draft will fail and we’ll just surrender.
Is this the cost of staying ahead in global defense, or a heavy burden on taxpayers?
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