The United Kingdom’s allies in Europe are concerned that the British government is not allocating enough resources to defence and that our armed forces’ capabilities are already suffering as a result. No one likes to be openly chided by their friends – and it stings all the more because it is true.
Last week, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, appeared before the House of Commons defence committee. He had admitted that ‘we are not as ready as we need to be for the kind of full-scale conflict that we might face’. He would not confirm reports that £28 billion extra funding would be needed to make the armed forces ‘war ready’ by 2030, but framed his answer differently:
‘If we are going to transform our armed forces and invest in UK capability, that will require us to make changes to the rest of the programme… if we wanted to do everything that is currently in the programme and do all the extra things in the SDR, could we do that with the budget that we have got? And the answer is no.’
Simply put, we are failing across the board. The National Audit Office, for example, discovered in the summer that in 2024 the RAF’s fleet of F-35B strike aircraft was only achieving half the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) target for mission-capable rate, ‘meaning the amount of time aircraft could fly and perform at least one of the seven F-35 mission sets’.
It is embarrassing that our allies feel able – or perhaps compelled – to be even semi-publicly critical. One source, speaking to the Times, described the condition of the armed forces as a ‘big problem’ They referred to the poor rate of availability of Royal Navy warships, after problems with submarines, destroyers and royal fleet auxiliary landing ships.
Another warned that the British army was too small. In the last quarter, its full-time trade-trained strength (those ready to undertake the duties for which they have been trained) was 70,300 troops; those who have only undergone phase 1 training is 75,080. The last time the army was this small was in the 1770s.
None of these facts are new. None is hidden away in top secret documents
A third dismissed the usual rhetoric of difficult choices between defence and other spending priorities, saying that the UK needed to get its ‘priorities right’. Britain is not unique in facing challenges, political and financial, when balancing the public case for higher defence spending against funding for all the other services the state provides and with which people interact much more directly. There may be an unanswerable argument that the RAF’s F-35B strike aircraft need a stand-off weapon more urgently than the expected ‘early 2030s’ in-service date of the SPEAR Capability 3 missile, but nurses’ pay or disability benefits will always win the race for public sympathy. As the source pointed out:
The excuse there is no money is not there anymore… we all face the same challenges. The money has to come from somewhere.
The most humiliating accusation for a country which proudly recalls Churchill’s grave commitment in June 1940 that we would ‘outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone’ is that we are not pulling our weight. Yet some of our European partners feel that we are failing to shoulder our share of the burden when almost every nation is having to find more money for defence.
There are plenty more examples of why their fears are not without foundation. The Royal Artillery currently has a grand total of 14 self-propelled guns, having purchased the Archer 08 from Sweden’s BAE Systems AB as an interim solution; there is no fixed in-service date for its RCH-155 replacement, and the older AS-90 guns have been donated to Ukraine. The RAF has no New Medium Helicopter capability, and the government’s continuing tardiness in awarding the contract to the sole bidder, Leonardo UK, has caused its CEO to threaten to close down the whole British arm of the company. Availability of the royal navy’s five Astute-class attack submarines has been dismal, with possibly only one boat being operational at some points last year.
None of these facts are new. None is hidden away in top secret documents. They are not a revelation to our European allies but rather painful truths they can no longer ignore.
Our partners in Europe know we are not spending enough on the capabilities we claim and promise. Washington certainly knows. We can be certain that our adversaries in Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang and elsewhere know. The political establishment in this country knows. The MoD’s response to the comments from our worried allies?
The UK is the third-highest defence spender of 32 Nato nations… We are stepping up on European security, with a Nato-first approach and UK leadership of the coalition of the willing to secure a peace in Ukraine.
So this prompts the question: if all of those above know, who is the government trying to fool? Or are ministers conjuring up an illusory situation to comfort themselves?
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