The UK's defence investment plan & AUKUS
Labour falls well short of headline spending demands
Stephen Lovegrove was right. Last week, when I asked him if he held concerns that underfunding of defence would affect the UK’s long-term plans to build nuclear-propelled submarines for Australia, he said no.
Lovegrove remains Keir Starmer’s Special Representative for AUKUS and wants to continue in the job under Andy Burnham, who has given little clue about what he plans to do when it comes to national security, other than viewing defence procurement as a ‘Buy Britain’ exercise. What could possibly go wrong?!
This policy was confirmed in the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan released by Starmer on Tuesday.
The headlines in the UK media are all focused on the headline spending figures, which fall well short of even Australia Labor’s defence spending, which hits around 2.8 per cent of national income, if you are allowed to calculate according to NATO standards, including pensions and so on.
Starmer announced spending of £300 billion over the next four years — just £15 billion constitutes new money. His legacy will be a spending target hitting 2.7 per cent of GDP in 2028.
MPs, including the former Defence Secretary John Healey, who quit, saying Sir Keir’s defence funding plans would leave Britain less safe, demanded a clearer timeline for when the UK would hit 3 per cent. None was given.
To recap, the NATO target demanded by US President Donald Trump and agreed by all allies except for the socialist Spanish government is to reach 3.5 per cent by 2035. Starmer is leaving a lot of heavy lifting for his successors to achieve over the next two parliamentary terms, including an immediate figure of £4.7 billion in funding for the prime minister-in-waiting to find.
Starmer acknowledged this, saying a higher target must be the ‘number one priority’ of the next spending review and that the UK was on a trajectory to reach 3 per cent in the next parliament, of which he is unlikely to be a part.
Burnham’s coronation is likely around mid-July. It is not yet known if he will endorse Starmer’s plan, which was released ahead of next week’s NATO summit in Ankara, which Starmer, not Burnham, will attend. Before releasing it to the public, Starmer hosted NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who later endorsed the spending levels.
The UK fell to twelfth position in this year’s NATO league tables and already several allies have exceeded spending the NATO target. They do not need to wait, or be told, to see the Russian threat to their security. The UK’s politicians behave as though there is still time.
Pity today’s military planners trying to guess what capabilities will dominate tomorrow’s battlefield. The war in Ukraine and the war in Iran have shown the immense power of cheap drones, and the innovation cycle is superfast — for drones, this can be a matter of weeks. To this end, the UK is scrapping the Royal Navy’s destroyers to free up funding for autonomous systems.
But where the UK has sensibly gone all in is its nuclear deterrent which wins £63 billion in funding over the next four years. And this is good news for AUKUS.
The defence investment plan cites a ‘new nuclear age’ and worsening security environment characterised by ‘Russia’s aggression, China’s nuclear expansion, and North Korea’s destabilising weapons programme.’ Curiously, it states an intention to maintain a military presence in the Indo-Pacific, perhaps through AUKUS submarines.
The UK is one of three NATO countries to field nuclear weapons and the only one to declare them to the trans-Atlantic alliance. It delivers its nuclear deterrent through its Vanguard-class submarines and will buy American F35 jets to deliver it also by air.
Of the £63 billion to be spent on nuclear submarines, £47 billion will fund boats, including maintenance and infrastructure, £13 billion on the warheads, £1.7 billion on nuclear fuels and £290 million on skills.
The sum is the single biggest spend on military capability after salaries and pensions, and dwarfs the £28 billion spent on air.
The UK says it will cut steel on the first AUKUS boat next year and plans to build up to 12. It will upgrade the Clyde naval base in Scotland where the Vanguards are based as well as build three floating docks at Faslane so all boats can be received and maintained as well as enabling out-of-water engineering.
The Derby Rolls-Royce facility, where the submarines’ nuclear reactors are built, will also be expanded.
Professor John Bew of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies served as foreign policy advisor in Number 10 to several prime minister and was in the role when AUKUS was signed in 2021.
He rarely give media comment but he did so on this occasion, telling me: ‘The Defence Investment Plan should reassure on the AUKUS front. The nuclear and submarine enterprises have been granted significant resources.’
The Chair of the parliamentary group on AUKUS, Labour MP Michelle Scrogham, who represents Barrow and Furness, where the AUKUS shipyards are located, said the priorities were right.
‘I welcome this Defence Investment Plan which has prioritised our nuclear deterrent and submarine programmes,’ Scrogham was quoted as saying by The West Morland Gazette.
‘This government has once again reinforced its commitment to Barrow and Furness with more than £63 billion [of] investment in our submarine programme over the next four years, delivering Dreadnought and up to 12 SSN-AUKUS boats along with the upgrades to infrastructure needed to get us to a drumbeat of a boat every 18 months.’
The UK’s submarine production has been woefully behind schedule and overrun with costs. Of the seven Astutes, first commissioned in 1997, BAE has delivered just five of the seven.
This is why there is so much doubt among AUKUS-backers about whether the UK can deliver its end of the bargain. Australia will buy three used submarines from the United States over the next decade and then co-build with the UK the follow-on to the current Astute class, SSN-AUKUS.
Starmer did not mention AUKUS in his prepared speech, nor was he asked about the project by the British journalists that his office selected to ask him questions. The UK’s Ministry of Defence does itself no favours when it comes to communicating to the British public and the invested countries about AUKUS. It is something the next Defence Secretary should prioritise.
Fixing up shipyards is boring, totally unsexy work (well not to me!) but it is the nitty-gritty stuff that shows they are serious about meeting AUKUS.
This piece draws on an article first published in The Nightly