John Healey, the former defence secretary, resigned on Thursday because the government wouldn’t give defence more money. Experts, military chiefs, and even Keir Starmer have stated that defence is the priority, so what went wrong?
Good defence spending prevents war, because it makes an adversary think twice about attacking you. In a perfect scenario, the guns and missiles are never fired, because the cost of war is greater than the cost of deterrence: Ukraine is spending half of its GDP and losing thousands of lives because Putin thought he could win.
But that money needs to come from somewhere, which is a difficult argument to win: we never see the wars we don’t fight, but we do see the potholes that aren’t filled or the taxes on our payslips. That’s why the former chancellor Phillip Hammond once said ‘there’s no votes in defence’.
The UK has already lost a year of preparation since the SDR was released
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was supposed to tell us what the military needs and the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) was supposed to fund it. Twelve months later, the DIP still hasn’t been published, leaving the defence industry (particularly innovative start-ups) in limbo and costing the military another lost year of preparation.
