To think that we should spend less on defence

[Blightfitting]

Interesting article in the paper today
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/01/britain-military-spending-defence-keir-starmer

It chimes with my thinking recently. Why is it that people are completely convinced that we need to spend way more on defence (and thus cut or borrow or raise taxes at home)? Why is the conversation not more nuanced?

How can Russia simultaneously be so shit that it can't beat Ukraine in 4.5yrs and also a looming threat to us?

I get that they can fight a shadow war, with cyber attacks and lone-wolves and infrastructure stuff. But the way to stop these things isn't aircraft carriers and tanks! Ukraine are holding their own using teeny tiny cheap drones, so why do we need to spend billions on battleships? And don't get me started on Trident. Why do we need to have so many nuclear weapons when surely one will do?

I honestly don't get it. Yes we need to be capable of defending ourselves, but the proposed ways of doing this seem bizarre and insanely costly relative to the actual threats we face. AIBU?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

@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..

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.

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

It’s not just the US blowing up
NATO.

Europe Has been spending the peace dividend on welfare.

I understand the US not wanting to carry most of the defence spending for us as well.

I think the USA, in the loud and bombastic person of Donald Trump, is the only NATO nation that has stated it wants NATO to be disbanded, isn't it? Though I suppose trying to prepare a fall-back organisation so that when the USA blows it up the other NATO countries still have an alliance, just one without a thoroughly unreliable ally in it, could be seen as being prepared for it no longer existing and thus blowing it up. Seems slightly stretched reasoning to me, though.

And of course the USA has no need of any bases in the nasty old NATO countries that are not kowtowing well enough to Trump.

Next time he calls (and loses!) an elective war against a non-belligerent country and demands NATO must join in, he mustn't be all surprised if NATO countries tell him he may not use their countries for his aggression, nor overfly their countries as part of it. Not when the war he's called is not a defensive one; NATO is a defence organisation, and Trump is not particularly interested in defence: that why he tried to rename the Department of Defence, the Department of War. (Has that gone through yet?)

The astute class nuclear subs have to be anything we want a sub for because that's all we've got (apart from the the nuclear deterrent, and they have to be hidden as much as possible so are generally out in the oceans).

Why do the Astute class subs have to be hidden any more than any diesel sub used to have to be?

I wish you were right about them being "out in the oceans", but they are not; all five of them are in dock at the moment for one reason or another. https://www.forcesnews.com/services/navy/former-sub-captain-says-problems-run-deep-unlike-astute-boats-all-five-remain-dock

The first responsibility of any Government is to protect and safeguard it's citizens. If a Government can't protect it's citizens - there will be no Welfare. For me there is no tradeoff, so talk of 'there will have to be cuts in Welfare to fund increases in Defence' - so be it.
Saying that, defence procurement is dire. Too many cost over runs and poorly thought out policy.

Yes I get it...the point is I suspect (and of course the submarine lot are very secretive) you really need the Astutes with all the knobs and bells for the deep water/ocean stuff, that's their natural element.

What the RN/HMG aren't doing is building nuclear boats simply to address submarine threats in the north Sea, which is how your comment came across....apologies if I misread it.

The focus should be on what we spend it on, not an arbitrary amount. Outcomes not inputs.

Nuclear weopons will be proliferating in future, not diminishing, because absolutely everyone can see that Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine if they still had the nuclear weopons they used to have and gave up.

Nuclear-powered boats are also far more survivable in war than diesel-powered ones, which have limited range and must rise to periscope depth regularly to recharge their batteries and load fuel.

Having a uniformly powered submarine fleet also simplifies the logistical support and training required.

Thank goodness you’re not in charge. 🙄

Imagine… no avocado, no pineapple, no sweetcorn, no anything that has to be grown overseas. No spare fuel for greenhouses, so spuds, carrots and cabbage for all, hopefully grown in your back garden just where your lounge seating used to be. No longer enough meat for barbecues so that’s not needed either. No cyber, irregular power, it goes on and on. Life would change immeasurably.

Not to mention the occasional drone targetting your garden because you could grow food in it.

Tell us the exact reason why another country would wish to physically attack the UK?
I'm continually stunned at the amount of people who eat brainwashing propaganda whole. All, of course, from 'our own' 'government' who crowd control us most effectively via our minds - usually using FEAR tactics.
Psychopaths and their war games, using the ordinary masses as fodder!

The Guardian is the most laughable propaganda shitrag in this country. That became blindingly apparent during the 'Pandemic'. You'd see reality more clearly if you stepped away from it!

Let's cut the benefit bill anyway, just in case.

Russia has no interest in physically occupying the UK. They do, however, see it as a historical enemy and adversary. So they would be quite pleased to neuter it militarily and economically if they could do so at minimal risk to themselves.

You are aware, I hope, that Russia has used chemical weapons to kill innocent people on British soil.