Defence resignations expose a brutal truth: Britain is spending billions preparing for the wrong war

There are resignations that matter for the Westminster soap opera, and then there are resignations that should make the country sit up and pay attention.

The Defence Secretary quitting over the Defence Investment Plan is one of them. So is Al Carns walking out of government soon after. Carns is not some random minister looking for a headline. He is a highly decorated former special forces officer, a former SBS commando, and until now he was the Armed Forces Minister.

When someone like that says the Defence Investment Plan is not good enough, we should probably listen.

This is not just another row about Treasury spreadsheets. It is not just about whether the Ministry of Defence gets a bit more money here or a slightly better settlement there. It is much bigger than that.

Britain has a defence problem. A serious one. And the most worrying part is not simply that we are failing to spend enough. It is that even when we do spend money, we seem determined to spend too much of it on the wrong things.

Speaking to my colleague Nick Ferrari earlier today on LBC, Carns put it clearly. Finding the money, he said, is an issue for the Prime Minister. But he also said we need an honest discussion with the public about where that money comes from, and that the defence system itself must make sure the Defence Investment Plan learns the lessons from Ukraine.

His warning was simple, Britain has to be ready to fight the next war, not the last one. That sentence should be translated to Latin and nailed to the door of the Ministry of Defence.

Because since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, we have been reporting on this almost constantly, defence experts and innovators have been calling for modernisation and flexibility in the procurement process.

We have seen drones turn the battlefield transparent. We have seen cheap FPV systems destroy equipment worth millions. We have seen artillery shortages, ammunition stockpiles, electronic warfare, air defence gaps and battlefield adaptation become the difference between survival and failure.

This has been happening in front of us, day after day, for more than four years. It has been filmed, analysed, briefed, reported and discussed endlessly. Ukrainian soldiers have shown the world what modern war now looks like, and they have done it in brutal detail.

So it is genuinely hard to understand how the Ministry of Defence can still appear so slow to absorb the lesson.

This is not a secret. It is not some classified insight available only to people behind a locked door in Whitehall. Anyone watching Ukraine with half an eye can see what has changed.

Which makes the failure to adapt feel less like a lack of information, and more like a lack of will.

That's' the really annoying thing. The junior ranks can see it. Defence analysts can see it. Ukrainians are living it. We have been reporting on it since the full-scale invasion began. So why does the system still feel like it is squinting at the evidence and pretending it is unclear?

The answer, at least in part, is uncomfortable. The senior defence culture is still shaped by people who built their careers around the old model of war. Tanks. Ships. Aircraft. Large formations. Expensive programmes. Long timelines. The big stuff. The impressive stuff. The stuff that looks good in a glossy brochure and gives ministers something to stand beside in a hard hat.

And let’s be honest about this: it is not just the civil servants. Much of the senior uniformed leadership need to look hard in the mirror too.

Generals, admirals and air officers are not innocent bystanders in this. They sit at the top of the system. They help shape the priorities. They defend the programmes. They make the case for the same familiar capabilities, often because those are the things they have spent their careers understanding, commanding and believing in.

That is human. But it is also dangerous. A general who has spent his career around armour is not naturally going to fall in love with a small FPV drone flown by a 22-year-old corporal. An admiral who has built his life around large surface ships is not going to instinctively want to hear that cheap missiles, drones and underwater systems are changing the calculation (and let's not get started on just how vulnerable our undersea cables are). An air officer raised on exquisite fast jets, the Red Arrows and complex air platforms may not be the first person to argue for ugly, cheap, expendable mass.

But the battlefield does not care about career nostalgia. It does not care what looks prestigious. It does not care what has a lobby behind it. It does not care what senior officers are comfortable briefing to ministers.

The battlefield is brutally democratic. It rewards what works and punishes what doesn’t. And right now, in Ukraine, we are watching cheap technology punish expensive assumptions.

That does not mean Britain should scrap tanks, ships or aircraft. That would be ridiculous. A serious military still needs heavy metal. It still needs armour, air power, naval power and the ability to project force.

But it does mean we have to stop fetishising the old answers.

A tank is not useful because it is a tank. A ship is not useful because it is a ship. A fighter jet is not useful because it looks impressive screaming over an air show.

They are useful only if they can survive, fight, be sustained, be replaced and be integrated into the kind of war we are actually likely to face.

As Al Carns told LBC this morning, "tanks last about an hour and a half once they're identified in the battlefield," so why are we wasting so much cash on them.

Talk to people closer to the sharp end and you hear the frustration. Young soldiers, sailors, airmen and women, drone specialists, analysts, engineers and operators can see how quickly war is changing. They can see what cheap systems are doing to expensive ones. They understand that constant surveillance, electronic warfare and cheap precision strike are not future problems.

They know that kit which looks impressive on a parade ground may last minutes under a sky full of drones.

They know the system is too slow and procurement is broken.

And, off the record, many of them know some of the people at the very top are part of the problem.

The people who may have to fight the next war can often see it more clearly than the people designing the force to fight it.

A modern armed force needs mass. It needs resilience. It needs the ability to replace losses quickly. It needs soldiers trained to operate under constant drone observation. It needs counter-drone systems pushed down to the lowest possible level. It needs electronic warfare baked into everything, not treated like an exotic add-on. It needs logistics that can survive being hunted. It needs ammunition stocks that last longer than a long weekend.

It also needs the humility to admit that Ukraine has changed the argument.

The MoD does not just have a funding problem. It has a cultural problem.

It is too slow. Too comfortable. Too attached to the things it already knows how to buy. And when people with live experience of modern war say the battlefield has changed, too many in the higher echelons seem to hear it as an inconvenience.

Russia doesn't care if our procurement model is neat or fair. Iran does not care whether our equipment plan is balanced across traditional capabilities. China does not care that we have a ten-year strategy document. Hostile states, terror groups and non-state actors are adapting at speed because they have to. They are testing cheap technology, new tactics and ugly workarounds every day.

Meanwhile, Britain is still arguing about whether it can afford to defend itself properly. and there is only one correct answer to this.

Not because defence is politically useful. Not because it sounds good at a NATO summit. But because the first duty of any government is to protect the country.

We have hollowed out the Armed Forces for years, then acted shocked when the cupboard is bare. We have asked too much of too few people. We have allowed accommodation, recruitment, retention, procurement and morale to become running sores. Then, when the world gets more dangerous, we produce plans that still feel too slow, too cautious and too rooted in the past.

That is why these resignations matter. John Healey walking out tells you the Defence Investment Plan is not just a technical dispute between the MoD and the Treasury. Al Carns going too tells you something else: people who understand the threat do not believe the system is moving fast enough.

I find that quite worrying but this cannot become another Westminster psychodrama about who is up, who is down, and whether Keir Starmer is having a bad week (he is). The real question is much more serious.

Is Britain preparing to defend itself against the world as it is, or the world as the MoD still wishes it was?

If the Defence Investment Plan is just another exercise in protecting legacy programmes, spreading money on the things we've always spent money on and pretending hard choices can be avoided, then it will fail. Worse than that, it will give the country a false sense of security.

We need to spend more. But we also need to spend smarter. That means drones, counter-drones, electronic warfare, cyber, ammunition, air defence, logistics, resilience and rapid procurement. It means listening to people who have seen modern war up close, not just those who know how to defend the last generation’s equipment plan.

It also means the top brass cannot be allowed to mark their own homework.

Generals, admirals and air officers should be challenged properly, not treated as if rank automatically equals foresight. Some of them will understand the change. Some will be pushing for it. But others will be clinging to the world that made their careers, and that cannot be allowed to dictate the future shape of British defence.

Britain does not have the luxury of nostalgia. The next war will not arrive politely, wearing the uniform we expected. It will be faster, messier, cheaper in some places and brutally expensive in others. It will punish delay. It will punish arrogance. It will punish anyone who mistakes tradition for readiness.

Al Carns is right. We need an honest conversation with the public about defence.

But the MoD needs an honest conversation with itself first. And that includes the people wearing the most gold braid.

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