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We are told to spend even more, and more quickly, on the armed forces, whose current budget for this year is expected to amount to more than £60bn (‘Britain ‘needs to go faster’ on defence spending, Starmer says, 16 February). The Ministry of Defence must surely first show it can put its house in order.
The government is considering whether to scrap Ajax, the army’s planned new armoured vehicle, even though more than £6bn of taxpayers’ money has already been spent on the project. Ajax is eight years late, its defects so serious that vibration and noise have made soldiers training on it sick, with some suffering hearing loss.
It is the latest and most egregious example of the huge waste caused by the MoD’s incompetence and profligacy over recent years. It has spent many billions on items, including aircraft carriers, that would be extremely vulnerable in modern conflicts, something that has been evident for a long time.
The chairs of the Commons defence and public accounts committees told the MoD last month that its failure to publish its equipment plan in 2023, and again in 2024, has resulted in an unacceptable gap in parliament and the public’s ability to scrutinise defence spending. Repeated delays in publishing the MoD’s current plan risk sending damaging signals to adversaries, they added. The delays also signal that the MoD culture is unfit for purpose and its leadership cannot be trusted with so much of the British public’s money.
Richard Norton-Taylor
London
Desire for greater security comes from people and countries feeling unsafe and fearful (British and German military chiefs press ‘moral’ case for rearmament, 15 February). But experience has shown that the apparent security that comes from rearmament is temporary at best and can provoke the conflict it tries to prevent.
The British and German defence chiefs may argue that “strength deters aggression”, but this conceals the reality that Britain already has the world’s sixth-largest military budget, and that Nato’s military spending already dwarfs Russia’s. Their argument could easily come from defence chiefs in Russia or any other hostile state. As we are seeing with the US as well as Russia, strength also begets aggression.
Countries aren’t static in responding to each other, and there’s a high likelihood that military buildup in Europe will spur further militarisation elsewhere. Long-term peace comes from building trust, friendship and mutual dependence between nations, not the constant threat of military retaliation.
Oliver Robertson
Head of witness and worship, Quakers in Britain
So the British and German military chiefs are making the moral case for rearmament in order to “preserve peace”. Doing so, they say, is not warmongering. However, when doing so has led to a 45% cut in the government’s funding through the Integrated Security Fund dedicated to building peace and preventing conflict and when the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office is being “restructured” with the loss of considerable conflict expertise, it does rather look like warmongering.
If we are serious about preserving peace, we need to be investing in those diplomats and peacebuilders who are able to de-escalate and reduce tensions. Rearming without investing in these skill sets will simply increase tensions still further. It is the opposite of preserving peace.
Lt Col David Couzens (retired)
Faringdon, Oxfordshire
The defence chiefs of the UK and Germany quite rightly warn us of the increasing threat from a rapidly rearming Russia, and call for “an honest conversation” with citizens about defence being the responsibility of each and every one of us.
Any meaningful conversation must be preceded by a crash course in recent events and an outline of the specific threats. Few people in the UK nowadays have any reason to be concerned about defence, and successive governments have been much too timid to talk openly about the threat of war for fear of spooking the population.
There is one significant omission from the proposed conversation. If the government wants citizens to engage in building a whole-of-society defence, it must spell out in detail how it will protect us should open conflict break out. Civil defence organisations disappeared along with the cold war, and the (very few) nuclear shelters allocated to civilians have fallen into complete disrepair.
Hannah Walker
Wymondham, Norfolk
The British and German defence chiefs write of the “moral dimension” of rearmament and say that weakness invites aggression. I would suggest that the people of Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine have offered no such invitation to their bear-like neighbour. Nor, indeed, the people of Iraq to this country’s catastrophic aggression in 2003. Greenlanders will likewise be anxiously checking their own invitation list.
The top brass are nonetheless right that a whole-of-society approach is required to meet the complexity of threats to the UK and Europe – not just those emanating from Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and their ilk, but also climate breakdown, grotesque inequality, and deadly new technologies. But that approach cannot be reduced to a lecture on how military industries must prevail at the expense of our health and welfare.
Eight months since the last defence and security reviews, we are still nowhere near the “continent-wide conversation with the public” that the prime minister and security elites glibly prescribe. The public remains wholly outside the conversation on its own security, excluded from even tokenistic input to the last national security strategy.
We ignore at our peril how the “peace dividend” investment of the post-cold-war era strengthened our society, as well as how that trust, unity and resilience has been steadily undermined by austerity, corruption, misinvestment in wars of choice, and the politics of polarisation. If morally conscious leaders genuinely want to protect their people, they would do well to listen and look at home too. The UK’s weakened society invites not deflection and aggression, but recognition and action.
Richard Reeve
Coordinator, Rethinking Security
