UK Defence
There might be a question of whether or not the Treasury is sympathetic to the need for more defence spending. But I think there is also a debate under way inside defence about how the money is spent because after all, there's going to be £65 billion going into defence over the next 12 months and to slightly contest what he just said, it hasn't been a straight downward trend in terms of defence spending. Yes, as a proportion of GDP, but actually defence spending has yo-yoed around in real terms. The main problem has been that ambition has almost always outstripped the very modest increases that have taken place over the past 20 years or so. In terms of the basics of transforming the armed services, what needs to be done? Well, the challenge that the forces have is that the money that has been added, which is as you know, a modest increase and then goes up more significantly after 2027, is mostly going in at a pace that isn't going to match the ambition to do two things. And the first is to fill in all the gaps in our capabilities in terms of rebuilding infrastructure, helping out with personnel, spare parts, maintenance, the boring but vital bits that, you know underpin military capability, weapons stockpiles as well as help with the transition to a mix of still very expensive large crewed systems and add in more of the things that we need, like uncrewed systems and ways to defend against drones, as well as better use of artificial intelligence and other capabilities."
