Such was Boris Johnson’s need to reassert himself as prime minister in the week after the departure of his chief aide Dominic Cummings, that so many details relating to £16.5bn extra boost for defence spending remain unresolved. Gone are plans to announce the extra funding at the same time as the grand outcome of an integrated review of defence and foreign policy after Brexit, which will now conclude in late January or early February, after an exit deal with the European Union might actually have been sealed. Instead, along with the promise of new money are a handful of announcements, including a long-planned National Cyber Force of military hackers, a slightly less detailed and rather optimistic-sounding Space Command plus an agency specialising in artificial intelligence whose purpose is far from clear. Even a breakdown of how the £16.5bn extra would be spread out over the four years was not immediately available, but that plus £5bn of existing commitments mean that the defence budget will surge by 10-15% a year from this year’s £41.5bn throughout the remainder of the parliament.
It might be tempting to conclude that defence always comes out on top under the Conservatives, but in reality defence spending has been falling in real terms every year since David Cameron walked into Downing Street in 2010, helped by the fact that ground forces have not been officially deployed in combat operations since Afghanistan in 2014. What is surprising, however, is that the surge in spending is for a department noted for profligacy. At one point the Conservatives had claimed its books balanced, but as the National Audit Office recently noted, its equipment budget was £13bn short and veteran Whitehall insiders despair at the ability of the navy, in particular, to overspend.
Meanwhile, Downing Street has dug its heels in on a whole range of financial commitments, at a time when the pandemic has already wreaked havoc with the public finances. It proved quicker, when Johnson put his mind to it, to spend £16.5bn more on defence than £170m for free school meals in the Christmas holidays for English children. What is unclear is what the new money is really for. Although Islamist jihadism remains a threat, the bombing campaign in Syria and Iraq is almost at a standstill. And while there are plans to deploy 300 British soldiers in Mali shortly, to combat an Islamist insurgency, this is not yet a major deployment. The prime minister told the Commons that the international situation was “now more perilous and intensely competitive than at any time since the cold war”. That may be true because of coronavirus and climate change, but is the threat from Russia and China more serious – and more resource intensive – than before? There is no question some areas need more investment; for example, cybersecurity and countering disinformation where Russian and Chinese actors are among those engaged in persistent hacking in an attempt to steal a Covid vaccine or other trade secrets. Offensive hacking will have its uses, although more so in a wartime situation.
Nor is there any doubt that the UK will have to invest in upgrading military technology, which has the capacity to create high-quality jobs at home: in pilotless aircraft, in drones and in a smaller but more highly skilled army able to operate flexibly as easily in humanitarian relief as in combat situations. Yet it is less clear that the British public or indeed politicians have the appetite for a major Iraq-style engagement any time soon. The British army is already unable, for example, to recruit enough soldiers to meet its nominal 82,000 target. It would also be curious if the extra cash for the Ministry of Defence came at the expense of spending elsewhere; in particular, the aid budget, where the Treasury has signalled it wants to cut spending from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%. Johnson swatted away questions on the topic in the Commons on Thursday – a decision is expected next week – but one of the points of appropriately targeted aid spending is to prevent or avoid conflicts.