How war in Gulf reveals the ‘cut corners’ on British defence

If Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a wake-up call for Nato, the war in the Gulf has brought some harsh realities home to the British public about the state of the UK’s armed forces.

While air defence systems and fighter jets were already in place or deployed relatively swiftly, the time it took to send a single destroyer to Cyprus in the form of HMS Dragon focused minds on Britain’s military readiness and capabilities.

An added sense of urgency came on Tuesday in the form of the intervention by George Robertson, a former Nato secretary general and author of the government’s strategic defence review, who accused Keir Starmer of showing a “corrosive complacency towards defence” that put the UK in peril.

Ministers’ response has been to say they are wrestling with “decades of underinvestment” by previous governments when it comes to defence and are now embarking on the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the cold war. The Ministry of Defence also highlighted its target of spending 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035.

A glance at spending on defence as a share of GDP since 1991 shows just how much it dropped after the collapse of the Soviet Union led western governments to channel a “peace dividend” into other public services.

The end of the cold war also led to the shrinking of the army, in particular. From 155,000 troops in 1991, with nine armoured and four infantry brigades, last year its strength was 75,000 troops in two divisions, with two armoured and three infantry brigades.

Defence analysts such as Ben Barry, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, blame the squeeze on the army’s resources on a “lethal combination” of Treasury hostility to defence spending and the Ministry of Defence favouring investment in ships and aircraft.

Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute says: “The army has suffered the most because it’s been pulled in the most directions and it’s really struggled with its biggest programmes, but it’s also the area where you’ve had the huge change in how land forces might fight in the future, so they are the ones who are in the need the most remedial work to make the match fit.”

More broadly, Savill says the UK has a decent spread of reasonably modern capabilities in most areas, whether in countering submarines or providing air defence, but also several problems. One is mass: Britain does not have enough for its ambitions to be globally deployable and able to intervene at a high state of readiness.

“Problem number two is that we are thin in some areas. We’ve cut a lot of corners and in many cases we rely on our allies. That means we’re particularly reliant on the US and others in certain areas and it can come back to bite,” added Savill.

While Robertson and others delivered the strategic defence review last year, the spark for his ire has been delays in the appearance of the 10-year defence investment plan to fund it.

Even before this, defence experts cautioned that Britain was slow to transform its defence. While the armed forces now have, for example, counter-drone systems and there is much being learned from their use in the Middle East, they are not being introduced in large enough numbers.

“The problem with the defence investment plan is that on the current spending trajectory, we can do transformation but it’ll be slow that’s that’s going to look bad in terms of our level of preparedness for modern warfare,” Savill added.

Of course, Britain is not alone in grappling with these questions. Elsewhere in Europe, the proximity of Russia and the war in Ukraine has prompted a military transformation by Poland, which is raising defence spending to 4.8% of GDP, higher than almost all other Nato countries.

Britain’s more comparable peer is nuclear-armed France, which experts such as Savill say the UK can learn from, even if it is also struggling with some of the same trade-offs when it comes to defence spending. Indeed, a UK commitment to increase spending on defence to 2.5% of GDP from April 2027 is somewhat more ambitious than the French.

He added: “We could look at Germany, who are coming from a quite poor baseline and are about to massively increase their defence. They will be a test case – which will be watched her as closely as anywhere – for whether you can inject that much extra money into a medium-sized military and get rapid results.”