To think that we should spend less on defence

I would like for us to stop throwing money at other countries and use our money to invest in ourselves, including our military

I think people don't always understand that a nuclear submarine is not a submarine armed with a nuclear warhead; it is a submarine that runs on nuclear power. Most navies have nuclear submarines these days; the Royal Navy has no other kind. Doesn't mean most navies' submarines have nuclear bombs.

Just thought I would mention.

@GasPanic

Building expensive nuclear submarines for example to address submarine threats in the north sea is silly.

..but surely that's not what the nuclear boats are for or where they would operate.

Rumour has it the attack subs main job in wartime would be to either assist the surface fleet (well, somebody's surface fleet) in anti-submarine operations out in the North Atlantic or elsewhere, and also, perhaps doing other tasks maybe further north.

I think the bigger question when it comes to the Navy is quite where do the two carriers fit into the equation, especially when there appears to currently be a lack of RN escorts, and the fix for that seems to be a somewhat fanciful plan involving in part drone escorts..it'll probably be fine once it's working..

That is such a daft arguement. Do you want to suffer like Ukraine has over the last years. I don't.

There is a book called 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff in which she publishes letters which were exchanged between her and the staff of a bookshop (she discovered second-hand books while living in New York, and it was cheaper to buy them from England than to get them new in America; also the quality was better) to whom when she discovered what the food situation was like in London she sent food parcels. There's one letter in which she panics because she has sent a ham and then realises this might have been a bit of a clanger because the name of the shop is "Marks & Co" and she's afraid this might mean they are Jewish. (One director, Mark Cohen, almost certainly was but was not at all offended.) The staff shared out the food parcels between them and sent her grateful letters about how happy she had made their for instance parents with actual meat.

Defence spending is a difficult one.

Up until recently the UK has been spending more and more money on smaller and smaller numbers of state of the art equipment. F35 fighters, astute class submarines and type 45 destroyers are some examples of this.

These are the very best, but highly expensive. They take a long time to build, and are expensive to operate, but are world class in terms of capability. We do not have that many of them because they are so expensive.

One of the issues is that because these systems are so expensive to operate and repair with defence spending and defence priorities being lower down the pecking order we have been spending less and less money maintaining these few state of the art weapons. What that means is now a significant % of them (and we didn't have many to start off with) are laid up and unusable because we haven't been spending the money to properly maintain them.

This is against the backdrop of the Russian Ukraine war. Wars tend to push technology and change strategies. New tactics are developed. So both Russia and Ukraine have been developing new strategies to wage war. Many of these involve low tech but numerous weapons that are cheap to build and can overwhelm high tech defences (such as ours) through sheer numbers rather than advanced technology. This has also been shown in the US-Iran war, where again the threat of numerous low technology weapons against the US high technology weapons has been difficult for the US to deal with.

So in summary the UK has some issues. Firstly a high % of our sophisticated weapons are out of action. Secondly the weapons we do have are not good in addressing the cheap numerous threats. Thirdly there has been a resurgence in Russia as a potential threat to us.

So there must be some good news and there is. The good news is we are developing new weapons to deal with the numerous cheap weapons. But doing this costs money. We can get our more sophisticated weapons back in action, but again this costs money. Or, the alternative is we can do none of this and hope we will be able to muddle through.

For me in the future we need to balance the weapons better to address both the high and low technology threats. Building expensive nuclear submarines for example to address submarine threats in the north sea is silly. We only need those for power projection. So we need to have a better balance of numerous low tech and high tech weapons. Again making the change is going to cost money.

To me the defence spending in the UK very much mirrors a lot of spending in the NHS. Where medics often want the best technology, not necessarily to spend money on the technology that will do the most good. This is why for example scans in the Far East may cost much less than in the UK. The UK has the best equipment, but has low throughput, whereas in the Far East they have much more lower tech equipment that can be used to treat more people. The diagnostic capability is of course lower but the overall good that can be done is higher. A philosophy to think about.

It's not even summer - it's the end of autumn and the storm clouds on the horizon are gathering at an alarming scale.

I'm a proper paid-up Guardian-reading leftie and see the current Russian posture to be the most threatening at any time since 1968. I have lots of work colleagues from Finland, the Baltics, Poland and the Balkans and they all say the same.

Interestingly, it now seems to be those on the right who are now claiming that Russia and Putin are our friends: witness the spectacle of the Tate brothers and various rightwing US commentators making arses of themselves at Putin's International Economic Conference. How things have changed since the 70s and 80s when little jaunts to Moscow was the preserve of the socialist left.

The US may blow up nato

the US no longer is a reliable ally, it may even decide it wants part of the U.K., like it wants to own Greenland

the whole world order is changing

sleeping on defence is shortsighted

Exactly. So left wing bias. I didn't read the article (because it would irate me) We definitely need to spend more on defense. Its a no brainer, so much conflict in the world atm.

For context, the Russians can't beat the Ukrainians, whose army is over 10 times bigger than the UKs.
I certainly think the MOD could manage things better. And be less wasteful.

Russia can't and won't? Really...... Russia picked on Ukraine purely for the fact it can, simple. Russia is also not our only threat.

I am quite concerned at some of the views being posted here tbh. They are very naive to think we are not at risk of an attack that can wipe out the South of England in a matter of hours because thats where they will hit first.

I always joke that where I am rurally in Scotland, that at least we are outside a nuclear blast zone, however I don't think I'd actually want to survive it.

Do you mean a Baltic cruise? Not sure what the Balcans have to do with Finnland...
But I get your point re Finnland. Russia is the present and they have been hostile for many years now.

My grandfather served in Europe during WWII and spent time in England during the run-up to Operation Overlord. He became friends with a British officer who was later KIA, and after the war, would send his family a smoked ham (a cooked gammon) by post at Easter and Christmas, knowing how hard it was to obtain meat in the post-war years.

You're NOT being unreasonable. Russia isn't a threat to us, that's all classic 'look over there!' propaganda. It's 'our own' government that's the biggest threat to us!
And they should bloody well sort the NHS out, instead of financing their murder games!
(Can't believe the ratio here 😳 oh wait, I can)

And also… have you heard on the news about the drones that have been monitoring our nuclear defences?

OP have a listen to the Rest is Politics. It’s a useful guide to what’s going on and really explained to me why we need to spend more. In a nutshell Trump is not going to defend us or anyone else in NATO and we are in a dangerous world. Putin is not sensible and there are many other predators who will disturb the balance. We are a tiny island we need to be able to defend ourselves. This wasn’t so urgent before the advent of Trump.

We lost a very large number of men just getting food into the country during WWII, and food was rationed until almost ten years after the war ended; we all (yes, even the wealthy) went a bit hungry almost all the time.

We are now less able to feed the population of these islands than we were in 1939, not more able.

Not a good position to be in if another country attacks us.

Yup, an island nation has its advantages, but it also has massive disadvantages.

The first duty of government is defence of the realm. They really need to take that seriously, otherwise they may find we have nothing left to defend. If we are prepared, we are less likely to have to use our weapons than if we are not. There are also the disproportionate costs of war - if someone is chucking drones at you (cheap) then in order to stop them, you need to deploy missiles (expensive). The other thing is that armaments, like everything else, are constantly evolving. No point fighting the next war with the weapons and tactics of the last one - which means spending money.

There's also the fact that as an island nation, GB is heavily dependent on ocean transportation for food, bulk chemicals, and other essential goods. A Russian missile attack on key port facilities would put them out of action for months. Those missiles can be launched from Russian warships and submarines, and you have no adequate defenses to stop them.

If they then take out your natural gas infrastructure and key communications nodes, you're well and truly screwed.

That would be a grasshopper talking to an ant, right?

It's summer, why spend on preparing for winter?

Tell me, would you be happy for a Russian army to behave here as they have in Ukraine? Or for Russian weapons to do to this country what they have been doing to Ukraine for the last few years?

Unless the answer to that is "yes", we need to make the Russian leadership feel that if they lay a finger on us we will take their hand off at the elbow. To do that, we need defence. To get defence, after the way the forces have been treated this century, we need to spend money on it.

After all, bombs make much bigger craters in the roads than the ones we have at the moment; better to avoid them, and all the civilian deaths (and torture and rape and the rest of it).

Incidentally, you accuse a poster of sitting in a Moscow basement to make a post. Since one lot of people who would gain from a defenceless Britain are the leaders in Moscow, that looked to me very much like a case of "he who smelt it, dealt it."