US demands Britain 'steps up' as Starmer's new defence secretary joins Nato meeting without any plan for extra funding

Britain is operating a “Swiss cheese” military which urgently needs to close gaps in its capabilities – ranging from threadbare munitions stockpiles to rebuilding the Royal Navy – if it is to be able to confront Vladimir Putin by 2030 and beyond, according to defence insiders.

In his incendiary resignation letter, outgoing defence secretary John Healey force-fed Sir Keir Starmer his own words by citing a warning delivered this month by the Prime Minister that Russia could attack NATO “as soon as 2030”. It is a doomsday deadline, which Healey strongly implied the UK was in danger of not being able to meet.

The details of the troubled and troublesome Defence Investment Plan (DIP), the 10-year blueprint which will outline what and how the UK intends to spend to overhaul the armed forces, remain under wraps as wrangling continues at the highest levels of Whitehall over just what the UK needs to protect itself and what it can afford to do so. In the meantime, Washington is pressing ahead with reducing the US military presence in Europe.

Experts and insiders have outlined a list of priorities, and delayed projects in pressing need of a green light, which they say are vital if Britain is to be able to offer a coherent – rather than what one defence source described as a “dangerously piecemeal” – response to the threat posed by a bellicose Russia .

As the source put it: “We want to tell ourselves we have a Swiss army knife military with the tools to punch above our weight. The truth is that right now it more resembles a Swiss cheese.

“There are capability gaps, some of them quite basic, which mean there is a risk our ability to defend against a Russian attack [on Nato] would be dangerously piecemeal. We need to address that very quickly now.”

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) insisted that the DIP, currently being scrutinised by Healey’s successor, Dan Jarvis, will ensure UK forces have the weaponry they need. A spokesperson said: “The Defence Investment Plan will be crucial to ensuring our personnel have the kit and technology they require. The Defence Secretary is working through the detail now so that the plan meets the needs of our Armed Forces.”

Munitions factories

Any doubt that there is considerable nervousness in the upper reaches of both Government and the armed forces about the depth of Britain’s war-fighting ability has been discomfortingly dispelled.

In 2024, John Spellar, a former Labour defence minister, disclosed an American estimate that the British Army would run out of munitions after just 10 days of entering a war.

Just three months ago, General Sir Richard Barrons, a former senior commander and a co-author of last year’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), said the army was so depleted that the limit of its capabilities would be to “seize a small market town on a good day”.

In military parlance, the UK is suffering from a lack of “magazine depth”, and it is a shortfall which the Government has already recognised.

Upon publication last June of the SDR – the key document designed to act as a template for just how the UK should confront a world of geopolitical uncertainty and sharply rising threat – ministers committed themselves to spending £1.5bn on six new “energetics and munitions” factories. They also set a target of building a stockpile of 7,000 long-range munitions such as cruise missiles and precision artillery rounds for use in a time of war.

The problem, according to experts, is that there is insufficient evidence that the required industrial capacity will be in place any time soon. As the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank put it this week: “New missile and munition production remains an aspiration.”

The Government has announced a series of “investment windows”, starting in August this year, whereby companies can bid for up to £45m at a time to build munitions plants. But, to date, none of the six new facilities promised last June is out of the ground and questions about the scale of production remain.

The opening of a separate new facility in Glascoed, Monmouthshire, for producing artillery shells has been delayed after a decision to double its capacity. Once in production, the automated factory owned by defence giant BAE Systems will churn out some 80,000 shells a year – a 16-fold increase on current levels.

But this is considerably less than the 1.1 million annual capacity of a new plant being opened in Germany by arms manufacturer Rheinmetall next year.

When the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was challenged last week on progress in building its stockpile of 7,000 missiles and projectiles, it said only that the DIP would address the matter.

6G fighter jets – and drones

Japan, along with Italy, are partners with the UK in the Global Combat Aircraft Programme (GCAP), the project to build a so-called sixth-generation fighter jet to replace the RAF’s increasingly ageing fleet of Eurofighter Typhoons by the mid-2030s.

The new aircraft, to be called Tempest in the UK,…