IT is a terrifying prospect that whoever wins the next election could end up becoming a wartime Prime Minister.
You don’t need to look into a crystal ball to see the threats on the horizon.
GettyRishi Sunak announced with much fanfare that he would raise spending on defence to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030[/caption]
ReutersRussia spews out nuclear threats and President Putin wants a new world order[/caption]
ReutersPresident Xi has ordered his forces to be ready for war within three years[/caption]
A war is raging on our doorstep, in Ukraine.
Russia spews out nuclear threats and President Putin wants a new world order.
Gaza is ablaze, with the Middle East primed to explode.
And China is determined to retake Taiwan.
President Xi has ordered his forces to be ready for war within three years.
His navy is already the world’s biggest and it grows by the size of the entire Royal Navy every two years.
So why are none of our candidates talking seriously about defence?
Of course, voters want to know how much we will all be taxed, who can grow the economy and what that means for the NHS.
But none of that will matter if we are sucked into a global conflict.
Trade will tank, debt will soar and millions could be maimed and slaughtered.
All bets are off if, God forbid, we have to fight World War Three.
But we can’t just pray these threats away. It is madness to ignore them.
Not debating Britain’s defence does not make us any safer. It puts us in greater danger.
It is every Prime Minister’s first duty to keep this country safe.
Sir Keir Starmer, Sir Ed Davey and the rest should tell us how they plan to do it — because one thing is certain, it is not going to be easy.
Whoever wins next month will inherit the UK’s smallest standing army for more than 300 years, at a shade over 72,000 trained soldiers.
When they gaze across the Royal Navy they will likely be the first Prime Minister in UK history to see a fleet with fewer than ten frigates.
And they will be lucky if both of the aircraft carriers are working at the same time.
Their first weekend in Downing Street, if they get a chance to catch their breath, is often the time when new Prime Ministers write their letters of last resort.
These are the final commands to the captains of our nuclear armed submarines.
All Prime Ministers write four letters, one for each of our nuclear armed submarines, to be opened in the event that all contact with Britain is lost.
It is normally the moment when the weight of their responsibility lands fully on their shoulders.
So the potential authors of those letters would do well to know that our nuclear deterrent — the corner-stone of this country’s defence — has been stretched perilously close to breaking point.
Unsung heroes
The unsung heroes of our submarine service have endured record-length, six-month patrols because there have been so few working sub-marines they have had to spend ever longer at sea to maintain a continuous deterrent.
Critical upgrades to our Atomic Weapons Establishment are running up to 16 years late and billions of pounds over budget.
Meanwhile, the RAF struggled to muster more than a couple of transport planes for the recent D-Day commemorations.
Pilot training is now a mess and Top Brass have no guarantees they will ever get their promised complement of 138 F-35B Lightning jets.
Why is this not the hot campaign topic? Tragically, voters don’t care.
Most of us have never known war. We can’t grasp what’s at stake.
Most of us were born in the longest stretch of peace that Europe has ever known. It is easy to take peace for granted.
When the former Army chief raised the prospect of mobilisation this year, it sent shockwaves though the sofas of daytime television.
The message that came back loud and clear was that people want to be safe but don’t want to fight for it.
They don’t want to risk their lives in war.
I understand that point of view. In many ways I agree, because I have seen war up close.
I have seen men turned to meat in Afghanistan and pavements drenched with children’s blood.
GettyGaza is ablaze, with the Middle East primed to explode[/caption]
APFirefighters work after a drone hit buildings in Kyiv, Ukraine[/caption]
PAThe Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales in Portsmouth[/caption]
Crown Copyright 2009The unsung heroes of our submarine service have endured record-length, six-month patrols[/caption]
I have watched families torn apart in Ukraine and cities turned to ghost towns by every kind of Russian bombardment.
We do not want that here. Ever. But we cannot simply wish it away.
The best way to stay safe without fighting is deterrence. Deterrence takes strength and strength takes money.
Traditionally, Conservatives have been seen as strong on defence.
But since they came to power in 2010 we have lost more than a quarter of our Armed Forces.
They inherited a regular force of soldiers, sailors and aviators that stood at 191,000 strong.
Today that figure is 138,000, a drop of 28 per cent.
The Army has gone from 109,000 to just 75,000 — and of those just 72,500 are fully trained and ready for action.
Spending on defence plunged from almost 2.5 per cent of GDP when David Cameron became Prime Minister to two per cent when he left office in 2016.
The budget languished there, a smidgeon over two per cent, until 2020 when it started to recover with Boris Johnson in power.
Boris promised us in 2019 “not to cut the Armed Forces in any form”.
But since then troop numbers have continued to fall.
Falling numbers
The Army lost 800 armoured vehicles and 80 Challenger 2 tanks on his watch.
All of this is to say that the Conservatives can’t really bang the defence drum.
Rishi Sunak announced with much fanfare that he would raise spending on defence to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030.
But this was merely reheating a promise that Boris had made at a Nato summit two years earlier, in the wake of Russia’s assault on Ukraine.
The other reason there is no real debate is that the parties all broadly agree.
Sir Keir Starmer states that “changed Labour” is squarely behind the nuclear deterrent — although Deputy Leader Angela Rayner voted against it in 2016.
The Lib Dems are committed to “maintaining” it. The Reform manifesto is silent.
Labour and the Lib Dems have also both promised to hit the Conservatives’ goal of spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on defence.
The key difference — and this is important — is that they haven’t said when they would do it.
Reform have gone further. They pledged to hit 2.5 per cent by 2027 and then three per cent by 2030.
The difference — and this is important — is they have not said how they would fund it.
One thing Reform and the Lib Dems agree on is the need to reverse Army cuts.
Reverse army cuts
The Lib Dems have a “longer-term ambition” to regrow the Army to 100,000 regulars.
Farage wants to hire 30,000 new troops instead of conscription.
A proper debate would let us ask questions such as, “Are these numbers enough?”
The answer to this is probably not.
We spent between four and five per cent of GDP on defence at the end of the Cold War.
Poland is spending four per cent now.
And how should that money be spent?
Is it OK for the Royal Navy and Air Force to plunder the Army’s budget for hundreds of millions to pay for ships and planes?
Are 147 upgraded Challenger 3 tanks enough?
Do we need a barrel factory, or a sovereign source of explosives?
Do soldiers and sailors need to have better houses?
How can we recruit more hackers and engineers? How can we retain these people?
And crucially, how do we tackle all the mind-boggling waste and Ministry of Defence overspends?
None of this is easy.
More money for defence means less for some-thing else. That means someone, somewhere suffers for the sake of our collective safety.
For most of the last 80 years we have basked in a European peace that was built on two foundations — determination and deterrence.
Both are now being eroded.
Deterrence comes from Nato and its simple yet powerful promise “that an armed attack against one . . . shall be considered an attack against them all”.
But the alliance is only as strong as its members and the top US general warned Britain last year that he no longer saw our Army as a “Tier One force”. The time to reverse that is now.
Determination is a mindset. It was a mindset of the hundreds of millions who survived and endured world wars in their lifetimes.
They vowed “never again” and shaped the world we inherited.
They recognised that peace had a price. It was a price that they were prepared to pay.
Sadly, those people are dying and we forget their lessons at our peril.
War is not inevitable but threats and challenges are.
We must be determined to meet those challenges.
We must be strong enough to deter those threats.
That is what we need from our next Prime Minister.
GettyThe frontline is under pressure after spending collapsed[/caption]
PAPilot training is now a mess and Top Brass have no guarantees they will ever get their promised complement of 138 F-35B Lightning jets[/caption]