“We are not at peace.” This was the message that Nato’s senior executive was determined to hammer home to an audience in Hampshire last week.
Wes Streeting, newly installed as the UK’s defence minister, needs to take note of the words of Dr Benedetta Berti because the battle over the defence budget that precipitated his predecessor’s resignation fails to grasp the immediacy of the challenge the UK and Europe already face.
After years of running down defence capabilities, a pledge to lift spending on them from 2.6% of GDP to 3.5% by 2035 lacks the urgency that is demonstrably necessary. The repeated plea from sceptical Nato allies is that the UK should not “back-end” its spending plans, as the previous administration had pledged to do.
The new chancellor, John Healey, must surely feel obliged to provide the funds to meet that promise, having resigned as defence minister over the issue. The new prime minister has proclaimed his willingness to prioritise defence spending but his list of priorities is ever-extending, and bringing down the cost of bus travel and energy bills offers quicker wins than finding big sums for the military.
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Nevertheless, Andy Burnham, on his first day in office, put in an appearance at the Farnborough Airshow, as did Streeting. The former was there via a recorded message, so was not able to hear the disquiet from many of the government and military representatives there who shared Dr Berti’s view, with Russia more often than not the perceived enemy.
Cyber-attacks are commonplace; disinformation and interference in electoral processes the norm; but threats to vital cables have multiplied and there is a growing propensity of Russian submarines and aircraft to venture where they should not go.
Vladimir Putin’s wounded and angry ego makes him particularly dangerous. Estonia’s ambassador to London, Sven Sakkov, remarked wryly that “we are frightened by our neighbour, and I don’t mean Latvia.” But while a shared border might invite incursions, technology shrinks distances and increases every country’s vulnerabilities.
Burnham and Streeting have both been selling the principle of defence spending as a means of helping to reindustrialise the country and create new jobs. The MoD has no difficulty in spending money but its procurement is notoriously dire.
Streeting has already declared his intention to clamp down on waste in the MoD. One of his first tasks should be to force a realistic assessment of what is genuinely required to build defence capability. The answer may not be the latest aircraft. The innovative Ukrainians are keeping the Russians at bay in part with drones that cost less than the latest iPhone.
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Spending on equipment and building up manpower, though, is not enough to ensure a nation’s resilience. The UK’s insistence on measuring capability simply through inputs is dangerously simplistic.
Writing for Rusi (the Royal United Services Institute), experts in government finance warn that inputs don’t equate to readiness: “Spending is not capacity.” They urge a holistic approach, taking into account the need for maintaining equipment. As we saw when the only appropriate vessel to send to the Strait of Hormuz was marooned in dry dock, mere possession is not sufficient to ensure defence readiness.
The UK is not ready to tackle threats that are already materialising. Successive ministers say that defence must be a priority, but matching that sentiment with the desire to be the benevolent bestower of the “feelgood factor” creates an insoluble dilemma for the bouncy new PM.
He has to be honest with the public, and until he is, the defence industry will be loath to gear up for the demands that could come their way.
