This research note from Policy Exchange, written by Air Marshal Edward Stringer (Ret’d) CB CBE – Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and former Director-General of the Defence Academy – reveals the reality of defence spending in the UK.
The paper argues that whilst the Government has been voluble in resetting the narrative of decline in our defence capacity, the reality is that neither spending nor front-line capabilities have kept pace with the rhetoric. Target dates in the 2030s are far too late, and such assurance are neither reassuring our allies our impressing our adversaries.
The Government’s procurement agencies have not absorbed the Government’s message on the seriousness of the times and the threats we now face, and the ‘business as usual’ ticks along, promising to be better by the 2030s while troubled programmes such as AJAX absorb billions for equipment that simply doesn’t work.
Author of the piece, Air Marshal Edward Stringer (Ret’d) CB CBE, comments:
“During the period of American-policed ‘Rules-Based International Order’, we increasingly relied on borrowing off the Americans while making cuts to vital capabilities. The optics of occasional tactical excellence obscured the increasingly hollow nature of our sovereign capacity.
But now the USA is signalling strongly that it is putting ‘America First’ and the rest of NATO will have to look after its own defences. This fundamentally challenges the model that we had semi-accidentally slipped into: our national defences have been revealed to be a flimsy facade. The tide has gone out and we can now see that the UK military was not wearing any trunks.
The Say-Do gap between the image of ourselves we have come to believe – and the reality of the hard power we can project in practice, is stark. The first necessary step is to recognise that, and recognise that the methods that got us into this mess have to be discarded ruthlessly.”
The launch of this report was covered by: