Continuing with this defence plan would be a dangerous mistake

Healey is not a minister who resigned lightly or easily. He spent nearly two years delivering much-needed reform on defence, pushing for Britain to accept NATO’s 3.5 per cent of GDP spending target, deepening alliances with Germany, Norway, France, and Poland, and initiating the most sweeping bureaucratic rationalisation in half a century.

That a minister of his loyalty felt compelled to break ranks over the Defence Investment Plan reveals something deeply troubling about what that document contains, and what it leaves out.

The DIP’s troubled passage is the problem in miniature. Originally promised for August, cross-governmental work was completed in January. Five months on, with the NATO summit in July approaching, clearly no meaningful funding decision has been reached.

This is not because the strategic case is unclear. The Treasury has spent those months actively blocking substantive proposals, and Healey, by his own account, was excluded from key negotiations, presented with a settlement, and told to get on with it. A government serious about national defence and a ‘NATO First’ strategic posture does not treat its Defence Secretary that way. It is a signal of where defence sits in the order of priorities, and that signal will have been noted in allied capitals and, more importantly, the Kremlin.

The strategic case for urgent and substantial defence investment has rarely been clearer. Russia is prosecuting a war of aggression on the European continent, and NATO has formally assessed that the alliance must be prepared for potential conflict as early as 2030. That is not a distant horizon; it is four years away.

British forces are simultaneously preparing to lead the multinational Strait of Hormuz military mission, to command NATO’s Arctic Sentry operation in the High North, and to prepare under the Paris Agreement for a potential deployment to Ukraine following a ceasefire. The demands on the British Armed Forces are growing in real time, and the funding base must grow with them. Reaching 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 is not an ambition to be deferred to a future spending review. A clear plan is needed now.

The numbers make that case starkly. Britain will spend 2.6 per cent of GDP on defence next year through already-committed investments, though some of that includes military pensions and intelligence spending. The DIP settlement would supposedly raise that figure by just 0.08 per cent of GDP by 2030. That is not a viable plan. Worse, the additional support is backloaded into later years, precisely when operational pressure demands front-loaded investment.

Readiness gaps exist today. A commitment to address them in 2029 does not repair a warship, prepare a warplane, or stock an ammunition depot in 2026. There are long lead times on turning capability from a funded programme on paper to fielding it in practice. Senior military figures have described the gap between the threat level and the proposed spending as simply untenable, and they are right.

This matters because the Strategic Defence Review set out a ten-year vision: to transform Britain’s armed forces, strengthen alliances, invest in the technologies reshaping warfare, and position defence as an engine for industrial growth. A review is only as credible as the resources committed to deliver it. Meanwhile, seventeen European nations have recently committed to significant spending increases.

Britain is being left behind, having tumbled from European NATO’s second-highest spender on defence as a proportion of GDP to one of its lowest. The gap between the commitments the Prime Minister has made to allies and the settlement he has been willing to fund is now wide enough to be noticed by allies, by adversaries, and by those serving in the British Armed Forces.

At the Munich Security Conference in February, the Prime Minister pledged to ‘spend more, deliver more, and coordinate more’, accepting that greater military investment was in the national interest. NATO’s revised target requires members to reach 3.5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, with an additional 1.5 per cent of GDP on military infrastructure.

The path to that figure must pass through 3 per cent by 2030, with spending front-loaded to address the readiness pressures that are acute now rather than theoretical later. Cross-party support for that vital target exists and can be built upon. The government still has the opportunity to fund the version of the DIP that matches the Strategic Defence Review’s ambition.

Denis Healey, a former Labour Defence Secretary, once argued: ‘once we cut defence expenditure to the extent where our security is imperilled, we have no houses, we have no hospitals, we have no schools. We have a heap of cinders.'

John Healey has paid a considerable personal price for making that argument. It would be a serious mistake for the government to ignore it.

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James Rogers is Co-President (Strategy) at the Council on Geostrategy

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