UK defence secretary demands spending increase kept

Amid the turmoil of the Conservative Party conference, senior ministers are signalling that they will refuse budget reductions to their departments to fund controversial tax cuts. Among the most strident has been Ben Wallace , Britain’s defence secretary, who has demanded that a promise for a substantial increase in spending is kept. He laid down this marker at a fringe event watched by The National in which he declared if Britain wanted to defend itself against Russia as well as becoming an influential international force, it required defence spending to be 3 per cent of GDP, the equivalent of a 60 per cent rise by 2030. He also made a damning criticism of previous defence cuts that had ripped out essential stockpiles, stating that the Ukraine invasion was the ‘emperor has no clothes” moment for western militaries. People also had to accept “attrition” both to their equipment and personnel in any future conflict. The war itself had also taught Nato powers some vital tactical lessons that western armies had to urgently adapt if they were to survive in the new “broadband” warfare, he told the Policy Exchange event. The British government’s commitment means that it will spend an additional £157 billion on defence over the next eight years, which Mr Wallace insisted was necessary in an increasingly unstable world. “This is not a question of whether you should spend 3 per cent of GDP by 2030, it’s that you can't afford not to spend 3 per cent of GDP by 2030,” he said. “The world every year is getting more unstable, more insecure and more anxious. Our constituents are more anxious than ever before.” He said that if Britain was to support its US, Australian and Japanese allies in the Pacific, particularly with the potential of conflict with China over Taiwan, then the increase was crucial. “The tensions in that Pacific region means that if I want to be in two places at once the defence budget of the UK has to grow,” he said. “It simply can't pretend it can do two things for the price of one. It has to be genuinely able to be ready, resilient, employable and able to address the new lessons that Ukraine is teaching us.” Among those lessons was that western countries had to accept “attrition” in terms of losing both personnel and equipment in high numbers. “Attrition is something that's been lost in our vocabulary and the acceptance of attrition,” he said. For too long Nato militaries have spent billions on exceptional equipment that it was too afraid to use in conflict because of its immense cost. “We spend our life buying exquisite military hardware which no one can afford to ever lose, never mind the poor person in them,” he said. “Everyone's terrified of deploying them. Well attrition is a fact of war that has been conveniently moved aside. We need to get back to understanding how we're going to deal with that, especially against the threats such as Russia.” The discussion focused on the government’s new look at the Integrated Review that was originally published in March last year before the Russian invasion. Mr Wallace conceded that policymakers could “draw their conclusions” but was forthright in that whatever they produced needed proper financing as “there’s no such thing as a free lunch”. “If the ambition of the government collectively is to do more in the Pacific or the High North then that's great, but it's got to come with a cheque attached. I believe that 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2025 [then 3 per cent by 2030] is the direction of travel and we will be able to deliver something very important.” In the decades following the end of the Cold War, western countries have attempted to get away with spending much less than 2 per cent of GDP on their defence budgets. But this failure had been graphically “exposed” when they came perilously close to creating a failure in Ukraine after Nato’s armouries had dried up. “I think the war has exposed us, the emperor has been clothed and the boy in the crowd has called out,” he said. Nato under-spending on defence had “hollowed out” defence structures that looked good on the surface, “but underneath, we didn't have the readiness, we didn't have the ammunition stocks, we didn't have the boring things that are so key to keeping the armed forces going”. It was neglecting such things as dry docks for ships or maintenance that serving soldiers only discovered when “you're in a hollowed out unit, as my experience was”, said the former Scots Guards officer. “You discover when the savings came, they fell on the rather unglamorous out-of-sight, out-of-mind, part of the defence budget.” Supply chains had “dried up” because “we're all living on minimal stocks and ammunition, we didn't replace them”. After speaking to a fellow Nato defence chief it was clear there was now a “scramble to resupply”. The Ukraine-wide introduction of Starlink broadband by Elon Musk at the start of the conflict had been a major contributing factor to its success, Mr Wallace said, allowing the country to fly drones and use other technology without Russian interference. But it had also highlighted the fact that “hiding and finding is really important in the future of battlefield”. The ability to fly “cheap drones” over Russian positions aligned with the advances in artillery ranges had led to “the proliferation of precision changes on the battlefield”. “The ability for a 155mm shell to travel 40, 50, 60 kilometres above what we used to get, of about 25km, is a slight game changer,” he said. “Couple that with a cheap UAV that can spot it right on to a target in a way that means your artillery is more efficient means that we really have to be good at hiding or moving pretty quickly.” The key to winning future battles was “who can detect the enemy and who can do something about it quicker than your opponent”.

UK defence secretary demands spending increase kept

Ben Wallace says western armies need to dramatically increase finances to match threats from Russia and others