Europe and the UK might no longer be able to rely on the United States for their security. The military spending increase needed to adjust to this new reality will have to go well beyond Keir Starmer’s recent announcement, argues Richard Mottram.

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On 25 February the Prime Minister made a statement to the House of Commons about the implications of the international situation for Britain’s national security.

Not coincidentally the PM made his statement before he travelled to Washington for his first formal meeting with President Trump and implications were expressed through the measuring rod of percentages of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) devoted to national security. He announced that government spending on defence (on the basis measured by NATO) would be increased to reach 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, from 2.3 per cent currently, and remain at that level for the rest of this Parliament. In the short term, the 2.5 per cent pledge is to be funded through cutting spending on development assistance from 0.5 per cent of Gross National Income today to 0.3 per cent in 2027.

The Prime Minister went on to say that: “Subject to economic and fiscal conditions, and aligned with our strategic and operational needs, we also set a clear ambition for defence spending to rise to 3 per cent of GDP in the next Parliament.”

Defence up, Foreign Aid halved

So what of the consequences in terms of policy and programmes? Taking into account that a significant part of the aid budget is spent on asylum seekers in the UK, the amount available for overseas aid might roughly halve. I leave it to others to spell out the consequences though they seem likely to risk major harm to some of the world’s poorest people and to the “soft power” element of the UK’s national security strategy.

Clearly there are major shortfalls in the defence programme that this increase can help rectify, though two years away. 

From the defence perspective, the increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP is worth broadly an addition of £6bn in the financial year 2027/28, an increase of around 10 per cent. The Ministry of Defence plans its programme over a ten-year forward period (particularly for major equipment programmes) and the implication of the Prime Minister’s statement is that it can confidently build an annual addition of this amount (uprated for the impact of economic growth on the size of UK GDP and for future inflation) into its forward plans.

Clearly there are major shortfalls in the defence programme that this increase can help rectify, though two years away. The shortcomings include inadequate force structures and major equipment particularly for the Army if the focus is to be on European security, the need to build up the trained strength of the Services, and weaknesses in the readiness of our forces for warfighting and in war stocks of spare parts, missiles and munitions (illuminated by the rate of usage in the conflict in Ukraine). To put these right will take time, money, and new supply chains. But were the Government’s aspirations to contribute militarily support towards a lasting truce in Ukraine to be achieved, there may well be further claims on the government’s financial Reserve in the next few years.

Devising effective defences in Europe, possibly with a much-reduced American contribution, is not fundamentally an impossible funding problem.

Funding and reshaping effective defence in Europe

What of the case for spending 3 per cent of GDP on defence and more, for which offsets elsewhere in public expenditure have yet to be identified? To state the obvious, our defence contribution in Europe has been made for the last almost 75 years as part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). In addressing a possible rebalancing of effort between the USA and the European members of NATO including the UK, the economic reality is that the latter have a combined GDP in terms of purchasing power parity more than four times that of Russia. This suggests that devising effective defences in Europe, possibly with a much-reduced American contribution, is not fundamentally an impossible funding problem. But, in order for that to happen, several questions would have to be thought through besides the one about how they can increase their defence spending. For example: how the European members of NATO could devise effective command arrangements not dominated by the Americans, pool their efforts for much more militarily-effective results and, similarly, develop more cost-effective sourcing of their equipment.

Even if these issues can be successfully addressed, there are conventional capabilities currently supplied by the Americans that would be very difficult to replicate even over the medium term, and a large difference between the diversity and scale of the nuclear forces of the two nuclear weapons states in Europe (the UK and France) and those of Russia, if the credibility of US nuclear deterrence in Europe were to come into question.

We would appear to be in the midst of fundamental changes in the US government’s attitude towards its European allies and the US contribution to European defence.

The challenges for UK security strategy

We would appear to be in the midst of fundamental changes in the US government’s attitude towards its European allies and the US contribution to European defence. While some of the UK’s European partners, like France, may see these developments as an opportunity to seek to achieve “strategic autonomy” or at least to devise a necessary response to the reality of a changed US strategy, they represent a profound challenge for the UK’s security community. The US and the UK are closely bound together in intelligence cooperation and integration within the “Five Eyes” framework, and there is a long history of US/UK military and scientific cooperation, including in nuclear weapons and nuclear-powered submarine design and technology and support for the operation of the UK nuclear deterrent. Unsurprisingly, in his statement the Prime Minister emphasised the importance of the bilateral relationship with the USA and he has repeatedly stated his reluctance to choose between relations with the USA and Europe. But the US President is in the driving seat in shaping the context in which the government makes these choices.

Given all these uncertainties, the problems in reshaping public expenditure 5-10 years ahead to find offsets for a further increase in defence provision worth another 0.5 per cent of GDP, and that the decisions will fall to the next government to take, it is unsurprising that the government’s 3 per cent of GDP commitment is essentially a declaratory “ambition”. The Ministry of Defence would no doubt have preferred a firmer financial basis for longer-term reshaping of the defence programme in the Strategic Defence Review. An even more acute challenge is how the UK’s defence strategy and programmes can be reshaped to hedge against the probability of the need to contribute to fundamentally different security arrangements in Europe.

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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