The United Kingdom’s allies in Europe are concerned that the British government is not allocating enough resources to defence and that our armed forces’ capabilities are already suffering as a result. No one likes to be openly chided by their friends – and it stings all the more because it is true.

Last week, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, appeared before the House of Commons defence committee. He had admitted that ‘we are not as ready as we need to be for the kind of full-scale conflict that we might face’. He would not confirm reports that £28 billion extra funding would be needed to make the armed forces ‘war ready’ by 2030, but framed his answer differently:

‘If we are going to transform our armed forces and invest in UK capability, that will require us to make changes to the rest of the programme… if we wanted to do everything that is currently in the programme and do all the extra things in the SDR, could we do that with the budget that we have got? And the answer is no.’

Simply put, we are failing across the board. The National Audit Office, for example, discovered in the summer that in 2024 the RAF’s fleet of F-35B strike aircraft was only achieving half the Ministry of........

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