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?

One danger of switching to spending "smartly" is firstly nobody really has any idea what smartly really is (not everything we're seeing in Ukraine is inevitably going to be relevant to a future conflict) and there's a danger that spending smartly with a view to the future means current capabilities get neglected.

A lot of people fairly clued up on this are worried some politicians have drunk far too much Drone branded coolaid....

Spending has to be balanced....

That’s a story I never understood. What took too long to get to Cyprus ?

We have an RAF base there at Akrotiri, and our military aircraft were there, able to act in defence of the facility. What actually needed to be brought in additionally and to fulfil what capacity ?

It took so long because of low levels of readiness and too few warships.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/hms-dragon-cyprus-uk-royal-navy-b2935750.html

For whatever reason, the RAF base wasn’t able to adequately defend against drone attacks.

We live in a world where it is impossible to work out which country or international actor is the one who will be the biggest threat to us in five years time and we need capabilities to fight a number of different theoretical types of war. You can’t just create defensive capability overnight - it takes a long time to build it up. If you don’t build it up enough that you have sufficient capability to defend yourself whilst you expand capacity - when you are attacked you won’t have time to fix the problem. Our protection in a very big world is also dependent on alliances globally that mean we need to be prepared to fight with our allies as well. Overall - you’re a fool if (a) you think we are in a good place with our defensive capabilities or (b) we aren’t but it doesn’t matter because other countries will protect us even if we don’t help them.

It's a long story but airfield defence has been a lowish to almost zero priority for HM Forces for many years.

There might have been some Typhoons at Akrotiri at the time, I can't remember, but it seems there were no air defence systems there on any state of readiness that could engage the uncrewed systems (drones) that were fired from Lebanon.

As I recall it the immediate fix was to fly in some Royal Navy's Wildcat helicopters armed with Martlet missiles to do point defence of the base areas, and then eventually send HMS Dragon which is better equipped for wider area and longer range defence.

It's a sad reflection on the difference between now and 2004. When the Royal Navy decided to send HMS Chatham to assist in Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day tsunami wiped out a 200-yard-wide swathe of the coast there, she had sailed before the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, had time to come back from his holidays and announce to the nation that he would be sending a Royal Naval vessel to render assistance.

Yes, it was a bit lucky that Chatham had just arrived for a New Year's run ashore in Dubai, and the crew could be turned round off leave in half a day and prepared to depart (and the BBC crew that were filming the documentary about that ship, "Shipmates", got all their gear back off the dock in under an hour and went too), but they were ready, and they went. And yes, all right, she was already sea-worthy; she'd been at sea for I think it was four weeks at that point. Even so, it's a bit of a contrast.

(I know about this because I got a signal from my son, serving on Chatham, to tell me what was happening and why he wouldn't be in contact on New Year's day as planned; it reached me the day before Blair's announcement was broadcast.)

Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April, 1982. Two Royal Navy aircraft carriers and two troopships set sail from Portsmouth three days later, and were reinforced en route. That showed a high level of readiness as well.

I think the Argentinians expected the U.S. to stay neutral, which was a bizarre assumption to make.

If you haven't read it, I do recommend Rick Jolly's book The Red and Green Life Machine, about being a medical officer during the Falklands campaign.

It's possible I may have mentioned it before. If so I apologise for repeating myself.

The fact that you feel the need to put scare quotes around the word pandemic tells me that you're probably not a huge fan of well-researched and well-evidenced science and research. Luckily, people who's opinions actually count disagree with you.