In November 1936, Winston Churchill stood up in Parliament and described Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s rearmament plans as being “decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift”. “So we go on”, he continued, “preparing more months and years – precious, perhaps vital, to the greatness of Britain — for the locusts to eat.”
Much the same could be said for Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer’s “step-change in British defense” announced in Making Britain Safer: the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, finally published on June 2.
The external review, led by former NATO chief and Defence Secretary, Lord George Robertson and 12 months in the making, surgically exposes the sclerotic nature of the post-Cold War peacetime British defense establishment and provides a detailed roadmap of 62 recommendations for rapidly rebuilding a national capacity for self-preservation, focused on NATO and the Euro-Atlantic area.
It was, Starmer’s Defence Secretary John Healey said, a “message to Moscow.” But does the Kremlin have any reason to worry?
Starmer’s unwillingness to take the hard decisions needed to properly fund rearmament in good time begs the question: will Britain let the fertile years left to grow these new and resilient defenses be eaten up by the locusts of sloth and risk-aversion?
The Prime Minister’s failure to commit to the minimum of 3% GDP needed to pay for Robertson’s rearmament plan, and to commit to it before 2030, suggests – despite the rhetoric – he does not think the country or his government are yet willing to make the tough choices necessary.
Ministers now accept that a belligerent Russia and China, both of whom are already on a war footing, are real threats, and implicitly acknowledge the UK may have to fight without the United States, something unthinkable for 80 years. But the current commitment to 2.5% of national wealth for defense is simply not enough to meet the nation’s urgent needs. Not even close.
Roberston’s team (including Fiona Hill, who worked in President Trump’s first administration, and Gen. Sir Richard Barrons, former head of the UK’s Joint Forces Command) have done an excellent job of setting out a program of reform — and encouraging reforms already in train — to deliver a larger more technologically agile and integrated defense force of exceptionally lethal fighting power, finely tuned to the defense of the UK and NATO alliance. At its core are:
- An expanded and diversified deterrent of long-range strategic and tactical nuclear, conventional, and cyber weapons delivered from Royal Navy nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, Royal Air Force long-range missiles, drones, and strike aircraft, and by the National Cyber Force.
- An enlarged “hybrid Royal Navy” of crewed and uncrewed vessels and aircraft focused on trade protection, including an anti-submarine warfare barrier across the North Atlantic, force projection into the Arctic, and strengthened subsea defenses for pipelines and fiber optic cables terminating in UK waters.
- An enhanced Royal Air Force integrated air and missile defense system with better persistent airborne early warning and control, crewed and uncrewed fighter aircraft, and missile defense and counter-uncrewed air systems to protect the United Kingdom from long-range drone and missile strikes.
- A 10-times more lethal British Army-led NATO Strategic Reserve Corps comprising a fully equipped high-readiness three-brigade mechanized division built around the “deep-recce-strike” complex, Royal Marine Commando Special Operations Forces, and an expanded and rapidly mobilizable army reserve.
- Reforms to provide the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and wider government with the command and control, space-based intelligence and targeting and commercially contracted logistics enablers, R&D for technological and tactical agility, enhanced “always on” industrial capacity and preparedness (including six new weapons factories at a cost of $2bn), cyber and civil defenses and societal resilience needed to field, evolve and sustain these defenses in in the absence of meaningful support from the US.
None of these strategic imperatives would be unfamiliar to Churchill or Cold War warriors like me. The fundamentals of Britain’s status as a nuclear power, geography and trade-based economy demand defenses which command the air and seas in and over the North Atlantic, deliver overwhelming nuclear and conventional weapons against our adversaries in their own territory, and project small but highly lethal land forces to back-up our alliances in the defense of Europe.
Many have suggested this is a maritime strategy, and there is indeed much focus on the Royal Navy, but history reveals it to be the enduring British way of ensuring the defense of the realm. From William Pitt the Younger to Clement Attlee, successive prime ministers charged with rearmament have built forces designed to deter our adversaries from attacking our islands while taking the fight to our enemies overseas.
Now it is Starmer’s turn to do the right thing. Unenviably, he has to do it in the teeth of demands for more spending on public services from his own back benches, and as an unpopular government losing ground to a populist, and frankly pro-Putin revival on the right-wing of British politics in the shape of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, who were notably absent from Parliament during the announcement of the SDR. The stark fact is, neither the left wing of the Labour party nor Reform will build the defenses and alliances needed to protect Britain’s free society and democracy, nor protect its people from a hail of Russian missiles and drones.
Starmer knows he will have to spend 3% GDP on defense to enable Robertson’s excellent and common-sense plan. And it may be that the twist in the tale will come from pressure within NATO to agree on a 3.5% target for hard defense at the alliance summit later this month.
But kicking such decisions into the long grass only increases the risk of an attack on an unprepared Britain and NATO. The locusts are already swarming. Time is running short.
We can only hope that like Baldwin before him, Britain’s beleaguered prime minister wakes up to the hard truth.
Now is the time to act and inject the urgency demanded by Robertson’s team into the delivery of this seminal Strategic Defence Review.
James Fennell MBE, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, is an international peace and security expert and was Director of the UK FCDO’s flagship stabilization program in Ukraine from 2022-24. Since leaving the Royal Navy he has spent 30 years as a senior executive and government adviser on conflict and security policy in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for FCDO and international organizations. In 2012 he was awarded an honorary research fellowship by the University of Birmingham in peace and security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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