Britain needs to DOGE its small army and reinvest in diplomatic engagement
The cost of early investment in jaw-jaw rather than war-war could be counted in the millions rather than billions
Increasing defence spending to 2.5% will barely increase the size of Britain’s army. The UK should up its collaboration with Europe, create a DOGE like body and follow President Trump’s lead on diplomatic engagement.
On 25 February, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a plan to increase UK defence spending by 2027. Since Donald Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin on 12 February, European leaders have coalesced around the need to boost defence spending, with an American Article 5 defensive shield no longer guaranteed.
But with British defence spending already at 2.3% of GDP, talking up a 0.2% increase distracts from more significant issues. Britain’s military is tiny compared to Russia’s and we need to work in partnership with Europe.
Russia will spend twice as much as us on defence in 2025, but that money gives it ten times more troops than we have. Russia had over 400,000 troops in Ukraine at any time during 2024. When Britain went into Iraq in 2003, it did so with 46,000 armed forces personnel, our biggest deployment since the first Gulf War, when 54,000 UK personnel deployed.
We would struggle to muster anything near that number of troops to Ukraine in any future peacekeeping operation, even if Russia agreed, which isn’t assured. And despite armchair Adjutants like Boris Johnson and Ben Wallace claiming we should square up to the Russians and give them a bloody nose, Britain is too small to fight Russia alone.
Britain’s armed forces today, include around 132,000 regular service personnel not including reservists while Russia’s numbers 1,320,000.
We get so few troops per pound because only 24% of the budget puts boots on the ground. In fact, the day-to-day budget this financial year to pay for the lads and lasses on the front line was cut by £2.5bn.
Many service personnel worry about whether they’ll have a house to live in. Submariners talk about the increased stress of longer deployments which have been driven by the need to cut costs. I would happily increase defence spending to redress these shortcomings.
But, across the MoD’s resource and capital budgets, Britain spends almost twice as much on equipment as it does on people. And that doesn’t include the £8.8bn worth of military equipment that is either written off or devalued each year. Yet despite this, the deployable equipment is decreasing all the time. For example, deployable anti-submarine forces are a 1/3rd of the size they were in 1985, when defence spending was around 4.1% of GDP.
Adding £6bn per year to UK defence spending – roughly an extra 0.2% of GDP - might just about reverse the 10,000 cut to British troops, baked into Boris Johnson’s 2021 Integrated Review.
But throwing money at the problem isn’t necessarily the right answer. In addition to working more closely with European defence partners, Britain desperately needs to tackle waste and inefficiency.
The MoD has a woeful track record in managing its equipment programmes: whether it’s a £430m overspend on the Warrior programme or £2.5bn overspent on the two new aircraft carriers, a 59% delay in delivering the Challenger 3 tank.
In March 2024, the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee reported that the Ministry of Defence has been consistently unable or unwilling to control the spiralling costs and delivery schedules of its 1800 (yes, eighteen hundred) defence projects.
On 4 December 2023 the National Audit Office produced a review of the MoD’s equipment plan for the next decade concluding that it was ‘unaffordable and facing the largest budget deficit since the plan was introduced in 2012’.
According to the MoD’s estimates, the costs of the equipment programme shot up by 27% or £65.7bn between 2023 and 2024 alone. Add in the ‘worst case’, then the cost shoots up to over £104bn.
By far the biggest area of budgetary pressure is in the nuclear programme which is currently overspent by 62%. This programme includes the seven-year-delayed ‘Dreadnought’ submarine as a replacement for the SSBNSs that carry the UK’s nuclear missiles. There is a joint UK-US project to build a new class of submarines to counter the apparent threat from China. We have a programme to design a nuclear warhead with the US, as if having 225 nukes wasn’t enough.
Before the war in Ukraine started, Britain spent a fraction over 2% of GDP on defence, in accordance with our NATO obligation. Ongoing support for the war in Ukraine and operations against the support to US strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, added a further £3.9bn in spending in 2024/5. That bloated our spending, but gave us no more troops.
Even this meagre 0.2% increase in spending comes at the cost of cutting UK overseas aid by 0.5% of GNI to 0.3%. When the previous Conservative Government cut overseas aid from 0.7% to 0.5% in 2020, this was criticised by Labour as damaging the UK’s reputation abroad. The Foreign Secretary David Lammy, in 2024 spoke of the embarrassment British Ambassadors felt at having to tell their hosts about aid cuts. I wonder how embarrassed he feels now; he certainly appears mendacious.
Spend 2.5% on defence if you want to. But if we really want to sharpen up our armed forces, the UK should, as Donald Trump has done, create a DOGE like body. Turning the decrepit aircraft carrier of British government waste and graft will take many years. Before then and more immediately important, Kier Starmer might follow another of Donald Trump’s leads – by talking to Vladimir Putin and Russia.
Britain has avoided most attempts to engage in dialogue with Russia for over a decade already. The recent US-Russia talks in Saudi Arabia focused in significant part on reestablishing diplomatic ties in the respective capitals. The UK Embassy in Moscow is now a dusty Potemkin house with empty rooms inside. The cost of early investment in jaw jaw rather than war war could be counted in the millions rather than billions, and offer an immediate complement to the UK’s longer term boost in military capability.
Trump knows that his side has lost so is trying to salvage the situation with less egg on his [America’s] face. Starmer can’t look himself in the mirror and see his face is completely covered in egg and that again, the only thing he and his country can do is hold on to Big Daddy [a.k.a. America’s] coattails and ride this one out. I’m sure he’ll be able to think of something clever to say in front of the cameras like Trump did (we want to stop the killing on both sides).. but his minders should make sure not to feed him sausages before he steps in front of the mic 🤣
Britain is a middling power that still has not been able to shake off its imperial past. It has no morality (think Gaza, Ukraine most currently) and no strength to boast about and, internally, its economy is in shambles and its own people have stopped believing in project Britain.. it is losing fast to other countries which are technologically, economically and militarily superior. As for Kid Starver and his cadre of nincompoops, another in a series of no good, horribly bad, self serving idiots pretending to be adults while expediting the country’s demise. What a $hitshow.. I think the direction that Britain is heading towards of complete and utter failure and irrelevance is irreversible at this point. It’s not clear America might make it either to your earlier point about DOGE..
Thanks for putting that together, Ian. Always helpful to have some numbers to look at. For instance, only 24% of the budget putting boots on the ground. Or parade ground anyway.
I have to disagree with the DOGE notion. Adding in another layer of administration to cover for people that aren't doing their job is just adding admin costs. The Ministry of Defence just needs to manage its budget better. And I do have some sympathy as all big capital projects overrun, whether it be military-related or building hospitals. There appears to be no getting away from it.
And we do have a National Audit Office, which I'd guess the USA doesn't? Maybe they need more clout? Although the audit profession does have a reputation for hiding bad news I'm afraid.
I'm going to stick my neck out and suggest that there is probably no 'holistic' (for want of a better word) view of the military budget but rather it is very much a what the army wants plus what the navy wants plus what the air force wants, if you understand what I'm trying to say.
A 0.2% increase will be divvied out more or less proportionately to keep the three bigwigs quiet?
Whereas what is needed is to look at what we actually need, as a nation, and if that means decimating one of the three services to boost the others, then go ahead and do that then.
What do we need tanks for? Even just one? Tanks are getting destroyed by drones in Ukraine.
I'd presume that nobody in the country objects to military spend that is, as the name of the ministry suggests, on DEFENCE.
However it is plain as day that Britain tends to use its military in meddling, particularly in the Middle East. Stuff like using our position in Cyprus to help the Israelis commit ethnic cleansing.
Speaking very broadly, our nuclear shield is enough to defend the nation, which is after all an island nation. Our defence budget really ought to reflect that fact.
But the problem with having a percentage-of-GDP defence budget is that budgetholders will always always without fail spend what they are offered, even if they don't need it. Nobody ever hands back 'free money'.
And so what we get is a military that is not capable of taking on a superpower such as Russia, but we could just rely on the nuclear protection, after all, that is its entire raison d'etre.
Not being able to fight a conventional war with say Russia, we still decide to spend the budget on conventional stuff that seemingly inevitably ends up getting used for meddling, not defence.
Governments of all colours call this meddling "defending British interests". They might as well call it what it is: imperialism.
As a British citizen I don't begrudge a single penny of defence spend. But I do want to see the money spent on doing imperialist shite like helping the Israelis commit ethnic cleansing stopped.