You only need tanks if you want to win
Cross party Defence Pledge calls for 2.5% spending - but it's not enough
The call for an uplift to UK Defence spending got a boost this week with the publication of the Defence Pledge – a cross-party campaign led by the Council on Geostrategy. It calls for all parties to commit to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, rising to 3% by the rest of the decade.
It’s good but it is not enough. If we assume the UK Defence budget is a notional £60bn (because MOD spending is always more than what it says in the Budget ) then – taking OBR predictions for GDP – the outcome looks something like this:
2.5% gives you an extra £9 billion a year by 2029
3% gives you an extra £25 billion a year by 2029.
In short, 2.5% could plug the £17bn hole identified in the MOD’s 10-year Equipment Plan. But 3% gives you choices.
I was intrigued by the reasoning in the Defence Pledge. It lists the threats, which are growing. It says:
“To deter them and properly protect our interests, we need stronger armed forces, particularly a larger navy, better air defences, and enhanced cyber and space power.”
Missing word? Land.
Given the open row between pro-maritime and pro-land advocates in the British defence establishment this omission is significant.
Britain’s Land vs Maritime debate
In January, General Sir Patrick Sanders gave a controversial speech, which made headlines because it speculated on the scenario of war with Russia, and was described as “unhelpful” by Downing Street. However, the real payload for the UK Defence community was this:
“As CGS, I must deliver the British Army that NATO needs. And I call-out those who extrapolate our maritime heritage too far, judging that our NATO contribution can be largely limited to the maritime and air domains. Kaiser Wilhelm’s memorable and gleeful remark that “dreadnoughts have no wheels” reminds us that the enemy gets a vote.
Land will always matter because it’s where people live. You can’t lead NATO from the flanks and if we want agency in the way in which our big blind could be spent, we must be able to credibly fight and win wars on Land.”
This was an undisguised swipe at the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, who in 2022 offered the view that:
“Britain is an expeditionary rather than a continental power…that our operational advantage comes not from the mass but through disproportionate effect”.
This, then, is a live debate. As readers of this newsletter know, I tend to stand on the side of land and mass – but the whole problem can only be resolved once we have an accurate net assessment of Allied strength and commitments.
Now here’s what the Defence Pledge says:
“Absent this investment, British interests could suffer defeat, making the disruption we have experienced in recent months look moderate. Due to the reductions to the size of the fleet, the loss of a warship against a swarm of drones would exhaust the Royal Navy’s ability to protect our vital trade routes. Our inability to muster sufficient forces to protect our allies may encourage hostile states such as Russia to invade them, sparking an international crisis. And the erosion of our position as NATO’s premier European military power would weaken our hand in Washington, Brussels and other capitals at a time when our leadership is needed more than ever.”
With respect to the authors, that’s not an accurate description of the problem. Catastrophic loss in any domain, including maritime, would not just be a problem for Britain’s “trade routes”. What we are defending is Europe, and thereby the global system our national security relies on.
Our capability gaps across all five domains, for sure, could encourage Russian aggression. As for our position as “NATO’s premier European military power” that’s an illusion. All contacts with both US and East European defence decision makers confirms this.
I want the UK to be at the very least co-equal to France as the leading military power in Europe. If Trump gets a second presidency, Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron will have to hold the fort for four years in NATO – requiring a Defence budget much bigger than 3% pronto. But that’s for the future.
The question now is how to win the argument for higher Defence spending and what to spend it on.
Prioritising the urgent
I am on record as calling for all Defence spending hikes to be funded through borrowing. The Defence Pledge doesn’t touch this issue but it is important. That’s how it was done in the 1930s, and there’s a strong rationale for doing it through debt now.
If we raise Defence spending to £70bn a year – I favour a mid-year increase in an early Autumn fiscal event this year – here’s what I would spend it on:
A significant hike in forces pay and investment in forces accommodation, to halt the recruitment crisis. That might cost a notional £2bn a year if you did it properly.
Plug the £17bn capability gap – which also might cost £2bn a year.
Hike aid to Ukraine from £2.5bn to £5bn a year, with state-led investment to significantly increase the output of 155mm ammunition, air defence missiles, advanced drones and long-range strike capabilities for Ukraine.
That probably leaves you £3.5bn a year for one big discretionary new programme. Its aim should be to send a strong deterrent signal to Russia and to bolster the UK’s reputation within NATO as a country that means business.
There are three options. The first is to deliver a fully modernised manoeuvre division, capable of rapid deployment either to the Baltic States or Finland. That would involve investing fast in artillery tubes, more GMLRS, a replacement for the Warrior, a lot more ground based air defence, more precision strike missiles, a replacement for BOWMAN, a lot of new land-focused drone and EW technology, and reversing some cuts to army numbers. You would need a lot of this to be brought forward to 2027-8, not the end of the decade.
The second is to invest in Integrated Air and Missile Defence for the UK, alongside a programme to disperse and harden our air defences against potential attack.
The third would be to focus on maritime. But there is very little you can do in the time available to remedy the problem alluded to in the Defence Pledge: that Britain’s surface combatant fleet is “too small to fail”.
You could bring forward the delivery times of a couple of frigates, but where’s the capacity? Thanks to a decade of austerity and under-investment, it’s not readily available.
So if we wanted to send a deterrent signal by investing in maritime, we could properly commit to, and speed up, the F-35B programme; or order three more Astute class submarines; or spend more on the deterrent. The latter is, rightly, a black box to public debate, but my hunch is that, as its systems age, it could always do with more money.
If the backers of the Defence Pledge win their argument, I am in favour of doing one of the above with conviction and vigour. Which one should be the subject of an informed, public debate.
However, to properly deter Russia we should be doing all of the above.
3% gives you a strategy
And that is why I favour 3% as the immediate target for the incoming government. Yes it would probably push debt back up towards 99% of GDP – which would be low compared to our major allies, the USA, Italy and Japan. But it would give you choices.
In his IAVC speech, Gen. Sanders borrowed a quote from the US Army’s chief of staff, Gen James McConville:
“You only need tanks if you want to win”.
Sanders pointed out that what the UK armed forces need, if they’re to help deter Russia by denial in Eastern Europe, is not just the ability to field a modernised warfighting division.
It is the ability to regenerate battlegroups while in combat and seize the initiative. It is Corps level assets like land-focused C4ISTAR and very long range precision strike missiles. And, he said, it’s our inability to buy this stuff that’s getting in the way of our strategic decision-making.
[Incidentally, if you are wondering where to find Gen Sanders’ speech, it was prised out of the MOD by a Freedom of Information request and can be found here.]
So we could rephrase McConville’s quote as follows: you only need to spend above 3% of GDP on Defence if you want to win.
I want to win. And – to quote Sun Tzu – to win without fighting. That’s why we need investment across all five domains, and why the Defence Pledge wording – to deliberately omit investment on land – seems perverse.
I hope the initiative gains traction. But Britain needs to be spending above 3% of its national output on Defence by the middle of this decade, with the option to scale beyond that if Trump walks away from Europe. The sooner we realise that the better.
I’ve kept this one free as it’s about the public interest. Thanks for reading Conflict & Democracy - please share and subscribe. There’s more about the Defence Pledge here.
The problem with tanks is they are very expensive. Whereas the drones to knock them out cost relatively little.