What Nobody Will Admit about Defence Spending

The government has kept defence spending low for the last 12 years while health and education have enjoyed spending increases of over 100 per cent since this government came to power. Last December, the government cut £2 billion from the Ministry of Defence's budget. These cuts don't just affect our operational effectiveness, they also affect morale across the board. If you have ever worked hard for a department which was doing a great job in difficult conditions but then had its budget abruptly slashed, you will know the feeling. It feels worse when you are far away from your family for many months a year on a base in Afghanistan. But these are not sentiments you are likely to hear from our military; servicemen and women do not like to complain. It is partly this quality which makes the British military so good at what it does.

These cuts have come in an atmosphere in which the public seem to have a dwindling understanding of the need for consistent defence spending. This is partly because the wars which we have fought in recent years have been far away and have not led to a public wartime mentality, as previous wars have done, and partly because of the perception that the world has grown safer since the Cold War ended and that current threats to Britain do not require a military response.

In this atmosphere, it is timely that the United Kingdom National Defence Association (UKNDA) has brought out a report reminding us of the case for holding firm against the pressure to reduce defence spending. The report restates some important arguments which deserve to be taken more seriously in our national political conversation than they have been.

The heart of the argument is that the current debate on defence spending has rested on two premises which are dangerously false.

The first fallacy is the idea that you can work out how much to spend on defence in the same way that you work out how much to spend on schools, clinics, parks, or any other area of domestic spending — by looking at how much you spent last year, then looking at whether you have more or less to spend this year, and then working out how much to spend based on that. That is how most government departments do it, and it works for most types of spending.

But defence spending is different, because it is about keeping the nation safe. You have to work out the potential threats, and then spend to guard against them. The UKNDA contrasts the zealous redoubling of efforts by our terrorist and Taliban enemies with the deskbound Treasury bean-counters blithely deciding defence spending based only on last year's accounts.

The government has refused to make this assessment properly. A strategic Defence Review is long overdue. The last one was pre-9/11, in 1998. Since then, we have deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, and Kosovo, and the global scene has changed out of all proportion. I do not see how any politician who seriously believes that the government's first duty is defence of the realm could honestly argue against the proposition that that defence involves assessing current threats before deciding how much to spend on countering them.

By 2011, Iran could have offensive nuclear capability and give dirty bombs to Hamas and Hezbollah, who could easily use them to threaten the West. Unless we secure Afghanistan, the Taliban will return and once again use it as a base from which to plan attacks on our soil. The Argentinian President, Christina Kirchner, is again openly demanding the Falklands Islands from us. The UKNDA report points out that if the country did try another invasion of the islands, we would be relatively "poorly placed to respond", having withdrawn our last serious escort ship from the Falkland Islands patrol.

This brings me on to the second false premise on which the current debate is based: that we only need to prepare for threats which we can see coming. This relies on the ostrich-like position that what we cannot see or predict cannot hurt us. The ridiculousness of this position is borne out by a cursory look through history. As the report reminds us, nobody in 1981 expected to be fighting in the Falklands in 1982, nobody in 1989 expected to be fighting in Iraq in 1990, and nobody in 1914 expected to be fighting in Belgium (as opposed to France). The report aptly quotes General Sir Richard Dannatt's apposite observation that "the man who looks ten years out and says he knows what the strategic situation will look like is, frankly, the court jester". The threats that we face are not likely to be foreseeable. Deciding defence spending based on only foreseeable threats is a dangerous mistake.

Any politician who really believes that the government's first duty is defence of the realm would do well to heed the UKNDA's cogent arguments.

Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Scholar at the International Security Program, Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a World Fellow at Yale University.