Dr Lee Rotherham has twice been a Conservative parliamentary candidate, three times a council one, and is a good governance campaigner.
In a past life and deployed to Iraq, an unusual report crossed my path. Coalition troops had apprehended a wannabee suicide bomber. The individual in question had, however, made two fundamental mistakes.
The first was that, instead of explosives, his suicide vest was packed full of accelerant, meaning that had he triggered it rather than blowing up he would just have gone up like a Roman Candle – spectacular, but not in the terrorist sense intended.
The second emerged when he was apprehended and questioned. Challenged with why he was wearing this unusual formal attire, he claimed it was for self-defence purposes. This was an inventive defence, but not one I suspect even Lord Hermer wouldn’t have given much credit to.
I was reminded of this preposterous position when putting the finishing touches to a new paper that has been published by the Centre for a Better Britain. In it, I review the current state of the UK’s defences in the wake of years of calamitous underspend. Increasingly, Downing Street’s reinterpretation of its high stakes gamble has mimicked the detainee’s unconvincing and exposed position when confronted with the facts.
Now I will be the very first to agree that the paper is not as profound as a Strategic Defence Review. By necessity it cannot dig as deeply, over as much time and drawing on as wide a set of manpower and resources; nor can it deploy insider knowledge into classified Whitehall stats or contractual business estimates. Some might argue that even the last SDR itself, constrained by its financial starting points, inevitably failed to deliver on those. But what we can do is to take a step back and audit what shortfalls have been admitted by UK Defence plc, where the generation of those critical gaps was conceded by the MoD on the specific proviso that it was only a temporary measure and at acknowledged risk, but where they even now long years on remain left dangerously unplugged. That list is broadly costable, at least to a point where we can start to have a debate about whether we should cough up to regenerate that capability or just very quickly lose the next war we go into.
So what do we find? Our estimate is that the cost of plugging the shortfall runs to £70.3 billion, with an annual long term additional commitment of £4.7bn needed to sustain and maintain what is being regenerated. That figure compares with the current Defence budget which is an expected £62.2 billion across 2025/26. The expenditure-to-GDP metric is now more widely known and is the baseline against which national seriousness is marked at NATO and beyond: in these terms, the UK is currently committed to 2.4 per cent, and that surge would mean the equivalent of a one year jump to 5.1 per cent to play catch up.
Of course those percentiles are somewhat unreal, given in the first instance the way UK Defence spending statistics are massaged to include pensions and now include the strategic deterrent cost too, not to mention the impracticalities of finding and spending the whole lot in one insta-splurge. But it gives us a hard edged number to talk around.
Note too that that figure, £70.3 billion, is merely the estimate for being able to stay in the next big fight for more than a week – and, more immediately, for looking like a sufficiently serious threat for a peer or near-peer power not to chance their hand and start it.
£70.3 billion is not the figure that’s needed to properly overmatch the adversary and have a good chance of winning the conflict from the off. Nor does it address enduring issues around long term procurement which will have to wait for another paper; nor obviously cover decision-making processes within Whitehall comitology which merely push problems round in circles; nor consider any of the optionals beyond the critical shortfalls that still add real value. I do make a couple of exceptions relating to defence diplomacy and strategic influencing that can help plug some gaps immediately while the ordered kit comes online. But overwhelmingly this is not a fancy Christmas wish list but rather a desert survival packing list.
In our paper we consider the five great and terrible scenarios of our times: Homeland Defence; East of Suez; South of Suez, the Russian threat; and the China menace. The relative importance of these areas for the nation today, and the role the UK would play as these scenarios develop, can and does need to be a matter of political and considerably wider social debate. Acknowledging them to be interconnected does though allow us to tease out which assets are already overcommitted. As the Defence Select Committee has itself noted, in a conflict a given platform can only be in one place at one time, even when it is multi-roled across just the single theatre as opposed to five.
From missile defence and deterrence to plugging the surface fleet shortfall; from cyber defence to Field Army having some actual field artillery to support it; from minesweepers to regenerating a functional expeditionary capability; these are the astonishing gaps that we now need to fill. The details in the paper are for budget managers and strategic analysts to argue over. What’s needed immediately though is the admission that the £28 billion assessed shortfall that got leaked by an MoD insider is only the politest of British understatements in terms of where we need to be at. Because right now we are in a world where General Sanders, the former Chief of the General Staff, as recently as last year said the UK needed to accept that war with Putin by 2030 was a “realistic possibility”.
That, in official MoD parlance, puts war with Russia in the 40-50 per cent probability range. Perhaps more people in charge of budgets should be aware of the stakes now in play.
Dr Lee Rotherham’s new paper for the Centre for a Better Britain can be found here
Dr Lee Rotherham has twice been a Conservative parliamentary candidate, three times a council one, and is a good governance campaigner.
In a past life and deployed to Iraq, an unusual report crossed my path. Coalition troops had apprehended a wannabee suicide bomber. The individual in question had, however, made two fundamental mistakes.
The first was that, instead of explosives, his suicide vest was packed full of accelerant, meaning that had he triggered it rather than blowing up he would just have gone up like a Roman Candle – spectacular, but not in the terrorist sense intended.
The second emerged when he was apprehended and questioned. Challenged with why he was wearing this unusual formal attire, he claimed it was for self-defence purposes. This was an inventive defence, but not one I suspect even Lord Hermer wouldn’t have given much credit to.
I was reminded of this preposterous position when putting the finishing touches to a new paper that has been published by the Centre for a Better Britain. In it, I review the current state of the UK’s defences in the wake of years of calamitous underspend. Increasingly, Downing Street’s reinterpretation of its high stakes gamble has mimicked the detainee’s unconvincing and exposed position when confronted with the facts.
Now I will be the very first to agree that the paper is not as profound as a Strategic Defence Review. By necessity it cannot dig as deeply, over as much time and drawing on as wide a set of manpower and resources; nor can it deploy insider knowledge into classified Whitehall stats or contractual business estimates. Some might argue that even the last SDR itself, constrained by its financial starting points, inevitably failed to deliver on those. But what we can do is to take a step back and audit what shortfalls have been admitted by UK Defence plc, where the generation of those critical gaps was conceded by the MoD on the specific proviso that it was only a temporary measure and at acknowledged risk, but where they even now long years on remain left dangerously unplugged. That list is broadly costable, at least to a point where we can start to have a debate about whether we should cough up to regenerate that capability or just very quickly lose the next war we go into.
So what do we find? Our estimate is that the cost of plugging the shortfall runs to £70.3 billion, with an annual long term additional commitment of £4.7bn needed to sustain and maintain what is being regenerated. That figure compares with the current Defence budget which is an expected £62.2 billion across 2025/26. The expenditure-to-GDP metric is now more widely known and is the baseline against which national seriousness is marked at NATO and beyond: in these terms, the UK is currently committed to 2.4 per cent, and that surge would mean the equivalent of a one year jump to 5.1 per cent to play catch up.
Of course those percentiles are somewhat unreal, given in the first instance the way UK Defence spending statistics are massaged to include pensions and now include the strategic deterrent cost too, not to mention the impracticalities of finding and spending the whole lot in one insta-splurge. But it gives us a hard edged number to talk around.
Note too that that figure, £70.3 billion, is merely the estimate for being able to stay in the next big fight for more than a week – and, more immediately, for looking like a sufficiently serious threat for a peer or near-peer power not to chance their hand and start it.
£70.3 billion is not the figure that’s needed to properly overmatch the adversary and have a good chance of winning the conflict from the off. Nor does it address enduring issues around long term procurement which will have to wait for another paper; nor obviously cover decision-making processes within Whitehall comitology which merely push problems round in circles; nor consider any of the optionals beyond the critical shortfalls that still add real value. I do make a couple of exceptions relating to defence diplomacy and strategic influencing that can help plug some gaps immediately while the ordered kit comes online. But overwhelmingly this is not a fancy Christmas wish list but rather a desert survival packing list.
In our paper we consider the five great and terrible scenarios of our times: Homeland Defence; East of Suez; South of Suez, the Russian threat; and the China menace. The relative importance of these areas for the nation today, and the role the UK would play as these scenarios develop, can and does need to be a matter of political and considerably wider social debate. Acknowledging them to be interconnected does though allow us to tease out which assets are already overcommitted. As the Defence Select Committee has itself noted, in a conflict a given platform can only be in one place at one time, even when it is multi-roled across just the single theatre as opposed to five.
From missile defence and deterrence to plugging the surface fleet shortfall; from cyber defence to Field Army having some actual field artillery to support it; from minesweepers to regenerating a functional expeditionary capability; these are the astonishing gaps that we now need to fill. The details in the paper are for budget managers and strategic analysts to argue over. What’s needed immediately though is the admission that the £28 billion assessed shortfall that got leaked by an MoD insider is only the politest of British understatements in terms of where we need to be at. Because right now we are in a world where General Sanders, the former Chief of the General Staff, as recently as last year said the UK needed to accept that war with Putin by 2030 was a “realistic possibility”.
That, in official MoD parlance, puts war with Russia in the 40-50 per cent probability range. Perhaps more people in charge of budgets should be aware of the stakes now in play.
Dr Lee Rotherham’s new paper for the Centre for a Better Britain can be found here