UK Military Spend: Wanton Waste

Introduction

On 25th February, PM Keir Starmer announced a massive slash in the overseas aid budget, in order to fund an increase in defence spending – up to 2.6% of GDP by 2027 (and up to 3% after the next general election, Labour alleges). This has happened, with the Ukrainian war marching on and the election of President Trump across the pond, amongst a changing political climate in Europe and worldwide: uncertain times call for certain strategies. Though this rise broadly follows the trend since 2018 – when defence spend was at only 1.9% of GDP – the decade previous generally entailed a gradual decrease. Besides the sharp British decline at the start of the previous decade, French military expenditure generally followed a similar track: French spending drifted between 0.1-0.3% below that of the UK. German military spending in the same time has consistently wavered between 1.3% and 0.8% less. And yet, the disparity in quantity and quality would not seem to match the disparity in spend.

Franco-British Comparison

As can be seen, at no point has French or German military spend (as proportion of GDP) come close to that of the UK since 2010. However, as of 2023, the French have a far larger military force, having 83,000 more personnel than the Brits across the army, navy and air force (BFBS, 2023). Though this is boosted by the French Gendarmerie Nationale forces (accounting for as much as 100,000 of the personnel listed in 2019 (Ministère de l’Intérieur, 2023)), these are forces that are militarily trained, and would have the capabilities to be deployed abroad if necessary. They also outnumber their cross-channel neighbours in attack helicopters, frigates (by more than 50 times), and combat aircraft (Grylls, 2023). Added to all of this, the French can boast to have their own fully independent nuclear arms. As much as the UK often claims to have similar capabilities with its Trident system, the reality is far from this claim: the system is regularly serviced in, mostly operated by, composed of parts from, and was designed in part by the US (CND, 2018). The last successful test launch by the British government was over a decade ago in 2012, with two failed test launches since to boot (Alberque, 2024). The 2.3% the UK spent on defence in 2023 equated to roughly £53.9 billion (Kirk-Wade, 2024), with Trident the same year costing around £23 billion (Mills and Kirk-Wade, 2024): 42.67% of the total defence budget. That is almost half of a defence budget entirely rested upon the whim of a separate sovereign entity than that which is being ‘defended’.

Germano-British Comparison

This comes to why Germany is included on the graphic above. By sheer size of economy, the 1.5% GDP spent by the Germans on military in 2023 did equate to around $66.8 billion (Statista, 2025) – only a few billion short of UK spend once converted. However, they still manage to outnumber British personnel by some margin.

These disparities call into question where the extra spend is really going in the UK’s case.

The British army would also be outgunned in terms of combat aircraft (Bundeswher, 2024), main battle tanks (Thomas, 2024; Heiming, 2024) and attack helicopters (Bundeswher, 2024). Though the Brits maintain nominal artillery and naval superiority the latter is hardly surprising given its historic, island-nation naval prowess. Germany’s unbreaking commitment to abstaining from nuclear weapons development seems to have in turn allowed it to expand its militaristic capabilities far beyond that of its island compatriot.

Where to go from here

At current, the British Army lags behind its two largest continental neighbours by some margin in a number of departments. Its only particular advantages would appear to be in artillery, and drone warfare (Polle, 2018) – an underdeveloped topic in this case, but one in which there certainly is potential for the UK to become a region-leader.

This is not strictly a case of abandoning the nuclear capabilities adopted by the UK since WWII, and this piece is not necessarily an argument for that. However, one certainly wonders what the economic and militaristic efficiency of the current system is. The Trident system is attached at the hip to American equipment and expertise, thus, as an extension of this, American foreign policy. One can see how this is beginning to affect future plans given the volatility of President Trump and his administration, underlining the mistake of investing so much into the fabled ‘special relationship’, and the effects are likely to be drastic on the British budget and economy, and consequently the British people.

Though this piece advocates no specific policy, clearly one could see two bold strategies emerging from these analyses: the decommissioning of Trident, and a yearly saving upwards of £20 billion; or the attempted decoupling from US and further entrenchment into the deterrent strategy, including deeper spending on training British personnel and funding British facilities.

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