When the Defence Secretary John Healey scheduled a speech on reforming the UK’s defence capabilities in the middle of recess, he could not have imagined how perfectly timed it would prove to be. As Europe scrambles to react to President Donald Trump’s rewriting of the geopolitical security order (which Lawrence Freedman writes about for the New Statesman today), Keir Starmer has been mooting the possibility of British troops going to Ukraine as a peacekeeping force. Meanwhile, a former UK army chief has been warning that our military resources are too run-down to offer any such thing, and a furious debate rages about if, when and how the UK can get defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP – not to mention whether that will be enough.
This might not have been the main topic of the Defence Secretary’s speech yesterday at the Institute for Government, but one can scarcely contemplate a more vivid backdrop. While outlining his reforms, Healey spoke of the need to “rearm Britain” in order to provide “a more muscular defence for a more dangerous world”. Right now in that world, the US is negotiating directly with Russia about the Ukraine war and future aggression across Europe, without the input of either Ukrainian or European leaders. The US defence secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that America is no longer “primarily focused” on European security is already old news.
Considering all this, what did Healey have to offer? A major pillar of the reform is accountability, particularly on procurement. Four new leaders in the Ministry of Defence – a so-called quad, including a “national armaments director” as announced in October – will be reporting directly to him, with a “£20bn-plus budget to build [and] sustain our national arsenal”.
Talk to anyone in the defence space and they will bombard you with terrifying tales of how woeful Britain’s preparation for a full-scale war in Europe is, which developments over the last few weeks suggest is more real a possibility than it has been in generations. For all the UK’s reputation as a military power, we lack the capability to defend ourselves. We have next to no missile defence systems. There is little to prevent the undersea cables that connect the UK to the internet from being cut by a hostile power. One defence expert, when asked for an assessment of our readiness for what might be coming, replied: “My one-word answer is ‘not’.”
Part of the problem is money, which is why the conversation over getting defence spending from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP is so heated. (Healey reiterated that the “path” for that would be set in the spring – although the topic will no doubt be raised when Starmer meets Trump next week, who is now demanding 5 per cent.) But it’s also about how that money is spent – and, indeed, who with.
The UK is home to a host of insurgent companies making military equipment, often cheaper and more cutting-edge than the big defence behemoths. But the risk calculation present in every other area of government procurement prevails: taking a punt on a new company offering something innovative is risky, but no one gets fired for awarding a contract to a big-name brand with a proven track record, even if that proven track record is of delivering years late and billions over budget. A blinkered approach from the civil servants in charge of procurement has left the UK with “gaping holes in what we can do”, I was told, because “by the time it’s been built it’s already obsolete”.
This is the problem for whomever is appointed national armaments director. It is notable that the Defence Secretary, hitting the government brief to relate everything to the pro-growth agenda, described them as overseeing “how the defence becomes the engine for driving economic growth”. We’ll see how they get on dismantling a procurement system that is so risk-averse it is itself a security risk.
The other problem is one that emerges every time anything to generate growth is attempted. Think: the bat tunnel that derailed HS2, the fish disco that delayed Hinkley Point C, or the furore over great-crested newts every time we try to build houses anywhere. The same planning issues apply to upgrading military training facilities or building runways to test the latest equipment. “At this point, I think that even if we wanted to be agile, I genuinely don’t know if we’d get planning permission,” I was told by one expert on the potential of scaling-up UK defence systems if the security situation escalates. They cited the issues at Salisbury Plain: when the MoD wanted to upgrade the mock-up villages to make them more realistic, they had to do surveys to mitigate for the environmental harms for everything from bats to microscopic shrimp. “This was a village purpose-built to be used by the army.”
Healey didn’t mention any of this in his speech, of course. But it’s notable how similar the challenges facing the UK’s defence capabilities are to other areas in which the government is desperately trying to kick bits of the state that just don’t seem to be working properly. Could the threat of war in Europe be what provokes the overhaul of government machinery called for by Keir Starmer (and, indeed, Kemi Badenoch)? If we truly need “a more muscular defence for a more dangerous world”, these things matter just as much as whether defence spending increases by two tenths of a percentage point of GDP.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
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