A military expert has warned that the UK is ill-prepared for a major conflict and could sleepwalk into having to introduce conscription. Former Air Vice-Marshal Sean Bell, speaking on Sky News after John Healey resigned as Defence Secretary, suggested that Sir Keir Starmer was unwilling or unable to overrule the Treasury to secure a sufficient increase in defence spending, leaving the UK less safe.
While the Government has committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035, Healey said the plan presented to him moved too slowly, with defence spending rising to just 2.68% in 2030 after hitting 2.6% next year. After Healey stepped down, Al Carns also quit as a defence minister, writing to the Prime Minister that he could not defend “a level of investment I know to be inadequate to the task”.
Cold War spending levels
Bell noted that during the Cold War, more than 4% of the UK's GDP was spent on defence due to the credible threat from the Soviet Union. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Britain “largely been fighting wars of choice” and enjoyed a peace dividend. If spending had remained at Cold War levels, an additional £1.4 trillion would have been invested in defence, but that money was used elsewhere, and the UK tailored its military for overseas interventions.
“Now, with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, suddenly we're faced with wars of national survival,” Bell said. “And that's very different, and we've seen over the last few weeks and months. The Royal Navy has been ill-configured to support conflicts in the Middle East. We've also got huge shortfalls in our ability to protect our nation from ballistic missile threats and stuff like that. And all of that means that you need to spend significantly more money.”
Military leaders silenced
Bell added that Britain's military leaders are “not allowed to speak publicly about this. They are filtered by the political classes, and therefore, their anger, their frustration has been building. And, quite bluntly, at the moment, it does feel as if we are singly ill-prepared.”
“The best way to deter war is to prepare for it. If we don't prepare for it, then it'll rush at us in a hurry, and we'll be faced with conscription and all sorts of really horrible outcomes,” he concluded.
