Ben Wallace has said he would be prepared to speak out from the backbenches if Rishi Sunak does not stick to his promise to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP in the run-up to the election. The defence secretary, who announced over the weekend that he would resign his post in the next cabinet reshuffle, was speaking before unveiling a defence strategy paper on Tuesday that will lead to no extra money allocated to the armed forces despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Instead, the military will reprioritise £2.5bn from within its budgets to replenish weapons stockpiles depleted by gifts to Ukraine, and previously announced cuts in the size of the army to 73,000 by 2025 will go ahead as planned. Wallace said he would try to ensure that Sunak and the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, would keep their promise to lift defence spending from the current 2.16% of GDP to 2.5% at some point in the future, when fiscal conditions allow. “What I will say is that it’s important that everybody sticks to the pledges that they have made,” Wallace said when asked whether he would hold the prime minister’s “feet to the fire” once he steps down.
Britain is one of a handful of countries not to have revised its defence strategy or upped spending in the light of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine last February, and the latest paper is being billed as essentially an interim update. Wallace said the document was designed to ensure Britain’s military would be “match fit” and able to “absorb the money to modernise properly” if and when funds were made available. Labour criticised the plan as “not a good enough response” to the Russian invasion. John Healey, the shadow defence secretary, said: “The British army is being cut to its smallest size since Napoleon and there is still no plan to ensure our Nato obligations are fulfilled in full.” At the strategy’s heart is an emphasis on the Ministry of Defence working in a more integrated fashion with arms makers to solve problems quickly, as demonstrated by some of the previously unannounced wartime innovations shared with Ukraine. British military scientists worked with the arms company MBDA in the early days of the war to provide Ukraine with a long-range weapon to counter Russian tanks. Engineers modified a Brimstone air-launched missile system so it could be fired from the back of a Toyota truck with the help of a generator bought from B&Q. The initial concept was prepared in a single weekend within a couple of weeks of the war starting and the truck-launched missiles were first used in the Donbas in the summer. It showed “how to create an entirely new system composed of relatively old parts”, said James Heappey, the armed forces minister. But there will be no creation of a specialist drone unit yet – despite the fact that small, remotely piloted craft have been intensively used by both sides in the war – in a strategy that even its advocates concede will read like something put together by a management consultancy.
Several other countries have promised to dramatically increase their military spending since the start of the Russian invasion, including Poland, which is lifting its defence budget to 4% of GDP. Early in the war, Germany said it would invest €100bn to modernise its army. Wallace insisted the UK was not “hiding behind” other countries in deterring Russian aggression, and argued that it had to operate in alliance with others. “We haven’t unilaterally been able to mount a large-scale conflict for hundreds of years. That’s why we’re in Nato,” the defence secretary said.