Defence spending lost to MoD overdraft, warns chief

The former head of the RAF has warned that increased defence spending in the UK is being “eaten up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD)’s overdraft” with the UK’s military footprint shrinking at a critical moment.

- DAVID MADDOX

The intervention by retired Air Marshall Edward Stringer comes just days after Sir Keir Starmer committed to sending UK troops to Ukraine as part of the coalition of the willing to protect any peace agreement from Russian aggression.

But it represents the third warning by a former member of the UK’s military top brass in less than a week over how the UK’s commitments to Ukraine and elsewhere are not matched by resources in the armed forces and manpower.

Air Marshall Stringer, in his report for Policy Exchange, warned that the UK gets much less “bang for its buck” than its competitors - so despite headline budget increases to 3 per cent of GDP with an aim of 3.5 per cent, the front line continues to shrink.

The report, entitled “The Say-Do Gaps in Defence”, notes that the British Army now has just 14 howitzers in total; the Royal Navy has been unable to put more than one attack submarine to sea for a while; and the RAF had to send training unit pilots to sea to guarantee certification of the F-35 Force on the carrier.

Warning that not a single formation in the British military is currently sustainable in combat as a sovereign entity with the full Order of Battle, Air Marshal Stringer wrote: “Our national defences have been revealed to be a flimsy facade. The tide has gone out, and we can now see that the UK military was not wearing any trunks.”