“Time and again, leaders have looked the other way, only re-arming when disaster is upon them. This time, it must be different.” These were Keir Starmer’s sage remarks to the Munich Security Conference in February, as he warned Britain’s allies of the urgent need to increase defence investment. Noting that “the very ground of peace” is “now softening under our feet”, the Prime Minister insisted: “we must be able to deter aggression. And yes, if necessary, we must be ready to fight.” As he spoke, his Government’s Defence Investment Plan, the blueprint which tells industry how much money is available for equipment and how it will be spent, was already behind schedule. Four months later, the plan has still not arrived. It is finally expected next week.
On defence, Starmer’s chutzpah has been staggering. He has burnished his image as a determined and principled leader, while doing very little to reverse the perilous decline of the armed forces. Like his Conservative predecessors, he has promised generous military support to Ukraine. He has demanded that Nato gird itself for a possible conflict with Russia, and since the start of the United States’ unpopular war in Iran, he has distanced himself from Britain’s most important ally. All of this might be commendable if it was backed up by action to improve British security and resilience, but it has not been. With the Treasury mismanaging an ailing economy and unwilling to cut costs elsewhere, it is unclear whether Starmer will even manage his target of spending 2.5% of GDP on defence by next year, equivalent to about a quarter of total welfare spending.
The condition of Britain’s armed forces is frankly terrifying. In March, when Cyprus came under attack from Iranian drones, the Royal Navy could summon just one destroyer to defend the island. It took three weeks to get there and immediately had to enter port for repairs. Despite much of the fleet approaching the end of its service, shipbuilding plans will likely be delayed to cut costs. The British Army still relies on tanks from the Nineties and armoured vehicles from the Eighties. It is so short of equipment, weapons and munitions that General Richard Barrons, one of the authors of last year’s Strategic Defence Review, has said that it could only hope to “seize a small market town on a good day”. Various crucial capabilities can only be used with American sign-off. And this is before we reckon with the revolution in military technologies that is now underway, demanding much greater use of complex software systems, high-tech equipment and unmanned platforms such as drones.
The size of the defence budget is not, however, the only thing that matters here. In public discussion, a fixation with headline sums has crowded out the question of whether the money is well spent. The often unspoken issue haunting these debates is the Ministry of Defence’s procurement system, which has a less than stellar record of delivering equipment, and shows few signs of adapting to a fast-changing world. In 2023, a parliamentary committee described it as “highly bureaucratic, overly stratified, far too ponderous, with an inconsistent approach to safety, very poor accountability and a culture which appears institutionally averse to individual responsibility”. This system operates within a defence industry that is dominated by a small number of large, often foreign firms, known as “primes”, which win the lion’s share of government contracts, while controlling the supply chains in which smaller companies must serve as sub-contractors.
An Ajax Ares Armoured Fighting Vehicle at Bovington Camp. (Ben Birchall/AFP/Getty)
The results paint their own picture. Most notoriously, the MoD’s £6.3 billion programme to develop the Ajax armoured vehicle is running 10 years behind schedule, having repeatedly injured its crews during trials. The US-based company responsible for Ajax, General Dynamics, was nonetheless given a £330 million contract in 2016 to deliver a new tactical communications system, and that too has been mired in delays . Another big firm, Babcock, has come under scrutiny for its maintenance of Britain’s nuclear submarines. In one instance, broken bolts inside a reactor were found to have been reassembled with glue . Meanwhile, Britain’s drone capability, likely a central plank of any future force, remains small, beset by technical failures , and dependent on Chinese components. In 2021, the National Audit Office found that the delays forecast on 13 different programme came to a total of 254 months.
One man who is clear about the scale of this challenge is Rob Harper, founder of Rowden Technologies, a British engineering company that specialises in information systems for the battlefield and other “edge” environments. I spoke to Harper at a nondescript industrial park on the northern edge of Bristol, where Rowden is headquartered. “I believe very strongly that the golden thread in so many challenges we face is that they are cultur…
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