Policy Exchange : The Defence We Have Chosen

Wednesday 29 April 2026

Well, thank you very much indeed Dean, it’s a pleasure to be back at Policy Exchange, indeed, this is where I started my political career with the ‘Fog of Law’ paper as you quite rightly reminded me.

And in the years since I’ve left the Army, you’ve given me, kindly, a platform. And I’m grateful that today you are giving me a chance to share some thoughts on the dangers that we face, too many of our own choosing and exposed by a war we should have predicted that will have a much more fundamental impact on our lives than many that we choose to remember.

The Iran War has revealed in many ways the reality of the British way.

It has shown us to be legalistic, ill-equipped and unprepared. It has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks that we’ve hidden, not the resilience that we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to a normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.

We have come, in many ways, to a moment like William Stead’s in 1884, when he had to ask: What is the truth about the Navy? What followed was the realisation that the maritime power that sustained empire had rotted in port. What followed that was the Naval Defence Act of 1889.

We are at a similar moment as, if you will allow me, I hope to demonstrate this morning. In the past two months, let’s just look at what has happened.

Allies for the past century have wondered if our own legal constraints mean that we can be relied on, not just to plan operations from our bases, but to fly defensive sorties from theirs.

Our sovereign bases have come under attack and been defended not by British forces, but by French.

And the Defence Secretary has confirmed that Russian submarines spent much of March and April mapping our undersea cables, while the best that we could say was that we had watched them do it.

We have ceased to be a serious military nation, and if we fail to use the moment that this gives us to realise the challenges that we face, the next wake up call may cost us very dear indeed.

That’s why I wanted to talk to you today.

Now, many of us have known the truth about our defences for some time. The facts are not hidden and many of the gaps have been visible for decades, not just years. But today, with the threats to our allies in the Gulf, and to the communication cables around our coast, the risks are not theoretical.

They have already arrived.

We are no longer planning for an uncertain future, but a clear and dangerous present.

Without changing our approach we won’t be stocking up on self-built security, we’ll be panic buying whatever we can at the highest prices when the urgency demands immediate action. If there is one lesson from the Covid pandemic, it’s that behaving like that will cost us for generations to come.

And that is the reality of where we are now.

British defence, under governments of every political stripe over three decades, has deteriorated steadily, in plain sight, and as the end-product of a series of democratic choices whose cumulative effect was not so much concealed from the public, as simply unquestioned within it.

When the Iran campaign began, there were no Royal Navy vessels in the Gulf after the admirals were forced to choose between protecting our home waters or our vital interests.

And as the drones struck cities now home to thousands of Brits, the Royal Air Force was limited in its ability to defend our interests and our allies despite the United Kingdom maintaining four airbases in the Gulf.

Set that against 1982, when a Royal Navy task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands at the other end of the earth was assembled in a weekend. That Britain and this Britain can hardly be called the same country.

The purpose of speaking to you this morning is not to diagnose any single failure of policy, because one attributable failure doesn’t exist.

I want to offer a rather fuller audit. A reckoning of where British defence actually stands and to argue that the accumulated evidence compels a diagnosis, and that that diagnosis, however unwelcome it will be, is the necessary precondition of any serious prescription.

That cure, a grand strategy backed by a clear-eyed understanding of how things really are, is what we have failed to achieve because the defence and security reviews – including the last one drafted by my friend John Bew and others – have lacked the resources they required.

For three decades we have been projecting an image of a Britain that no longer exists. Before it can decide what to do next, we must be prepared to look honestly in the mirror and realise the truth about ourselves.

I’m not just talking about kit.

Over the last few days we’ve seen stories that bring home the true erosion of the fighting capability of our forces that I first described in a report for this very organisation some years ago entitled ‘the Fog of Law’.

Over a generation, the legal expansion has enshrined a pharisaic approach, building fence upon fence around the law in the belief that this constitutes moral seriousness, mistaking the mechanism of legal process for justice itself.

The revelations published in the Telegraph in recent days confirm what many of us had long feared: the legal culture that grew up around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was not, in its most aggressive expressions, a neutral application of principle.

It was instead the instrumentalisation of law, the deliberate use of legal process not to defend justice but to pursue a narrow political agenda, at the direct expense of the men and women ordered into battle by the British state.

The choice to fetter our forces with reams of red tape, and to help our enemies continue the fight when the guns go silent, has done more to weaken our country and endanger our future than any number of lost battles in foreign lands.

Let’s be clear what we have seen:

Soldiers fighting hand-to-hand against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, being hounded by those same militias under a legal mandate carved out by solicitors paid by the very taxpayers who looked to these soldiers for protection from Iranian aggression, only to see that aggression empowered by the courts while their protectors are persecuted.

And that’s not just a one off.

Ever-higher fences of prohibition around every possible action, and then accountability for decisions made in the most confused and conflicting of circumstances has created a straitjacket leaving British forces constrained in ways that have no parallel in our own history and no equivalent among our closest allies.

This isn’t abstract or theoretical, it has direct operational consequences.

Soldiers are paralysed as both action and inaction leaves them liable to prosecution and danger.

Commanders are unable to react, changing tangibly what a force can accomplish and what it cannot.

And who pays for that? Not just the millions in legal fees, but what are the consequences? Well we know, don’t we, it’s the British people.

By treating our soldiers as scapegoats we have torn down our walls and punished our guards. Now we’re surprised that too often our friends ignore us and our enemies mock us. We shouldn’t be.

We have done more to undermine morale than any failure of accommodation or pay.

I will turn to the hardware audit but this is never discussed enough in procurement debates and it should be.

As Napoleon said, morale is three times more important than kit.

Two former SAS commanding officers and a former Chief of the General Staff have already exposed how corrosive this has been to unit morale as this inversion of responsibility has seen those who order an action washed of consequences as the burden falls on those ordered to act.

Those who order wars know what will follow. It is absurd that those who take the greatest physical risks are also those left most personally exposed to legal jeopardy for decisions made from necessity in the confusion of battle. It is no surprise so many are choosing to leave.

Just to be clear, none of this is an argument for immunity. Crimes happen in war and they must be prosecuted.

But the civilian law is pointless in battle. Actions essential to victory in war are absolutely intolerable in peace, and confusing the two simply leaves the vulnerable weak, and the tyrant strong.

We can all see it. That’s what makes the events following the Battle of Danny Boy in 2004 so offensive to us all.

British soldiers fought and survived one of the most intense engagements of the Iraq war and then spent years, in some cases the better part of a decade, under investigation for alleged unlawful killings.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team pursued them and the Al-Sweady Inquiry consumed millions of pounds and caused immeasurable personal suffering to those soldiers who were caught up in it.

Its conclusion, when it finally came, was that the gravest allegations were not merely unproven but had been entirely false and based on “deliberate lies.” In effect, the Iranian IRGC had exploited our own system to punish soldiers for their courage and deter others from following them.

Can we honestly say, seeing the failure of recruiting today and the gaps in our defensive support to our allies in the Gulf, that their strategy failed? Can we honestly say that Russia and others having witnessed the example as an effective way to undermine morale of every soldier who may be sent against them won’t try and do the same?

And all this comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding. A soldier is by definition the state’s instrument of violence in pursuit of national policy.

They do not act alone or on their own behalf and their actions should be weighed as part of a whole. It is the nation that bears the responsibility for the use to which they are put.

Instead we have seen moral cowardice from politicians who asked soldiers to step up, and then left them to hang alone.

What is worse is the complicity shown in those who seek to poison the reputation of our forces by some of our most senior lawyers. What they have done is not just immoral, it is a betrayal.

Knowingly spreading lies about our forces, or recruiting others to do the same, or praising others who have done the same, leaves our soldiers more likely to face attack from those misled into hating them; and puts our country at greater risk.

You may have thought that praising the recruiting sergeant of His Majesty’s enemies would make you ineligible to serve in His Majesty’s Government. Well, apparently not.

The government asks why they can’t hit recruitment targets for our Armed Forces. They ask why half of our young people say they would never fight for their country. Well, they should start by looking at their Attorney General.

His position is completely untenable. He has prioritised – by choice, if also by ignorance – the interests of agents of the IRGC, a terror organisation.

Even if his action was unwitting, his belief that those who pursued prosecution of those we ask to protect us are more worthy of praise than the soldiers who risk their lives demonstrates a failure of judgement and raises real questions about the advice he offers this government.

Those who lie about our troops encourage others to kill them. That’s treason. No minister, no citizen, should praise that.

This new legal dominion is putting creed over need and doing more than just eroding our fighting power, it’s leaving our allies and friends wondering what we have become.

Just look at the words of our ministers.

In recent debates on European security and rearmament, Baroness Chapman, responding to contributions from Lords Godson and Verdirame, saw fit to criticise Lithuania for wishing to withdraw from the Ottawa treaty so that their small army could use landmines to protect their children from the Russian troops who we have seen raping and murdering civilians in Ukraine.

It is, frankly, extraordinary that a British minister should criticise a NATO ally for putting the safety of their children over a treaty which others – including, of course, Russia – have not signed.

To some it seems their aim is to be the most righteous soul in the graveyard. Those words come from those who do not understand war and do not believe in the devil.

Our government should support our friends, not lecture them with pompous piety about legal compliance.

Poland, Estonia, Finland – countries that have made admirable investments in their own defence, that have looked at the world as it is and responded with seriousness – do not need lectures from us, they need our commitment.

They need to know that if the moment comes, the British state will act with them, not judge them for the violence that has been brought to their homes by the enemies we all see.

In the United States, the lesson has been heard even more starkly. Senators who oppose the war in Iran, who judge the action unwise and the strategy unsound are appalled at the absurdity of Britain refusing to allow bases to be used against a nation that has spread death across the region and tried to murder even our own citizens.

There is a strong political argument against the war in Iran.

There is a powerful strategic argument against the war in Iran.

But the idea that there is no respectable legal argument for striking the missiles and bases of a regime that has killed British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and murdered thousands, hundreds of thousands, across the region is ridiculous, as Professor Ekins and others have made clear and as the government itself has now conceded.

We need to choose – are we here to patronise or to partner? Unless you believe in miracles, only one of those will keep us safe.

Now I will turn to hardware.

Threats that the United States may consider leaving the NATO alliance have left many on this side of the Atlantic nervous, but it’s worth asking: who is really pulling us apart?

If we’re not capable of carrying our share of the burden, why are we surprised when others consider going it alone?

Let’s start with the Royal Navy.

Despite months of warning and the biggest military build-up since the Iraq operations, not one of Britain’s six purpose-built vessels capable of air defence was in position and ready at the start of the Iran War.

Three were stuck in Portsmouth for engineering work. One had spent more time in refit than at sea, and another was in maintenance.

The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began.

Now, that’s not a huge surprise. We commissioned 12, we built 6, we got missiles for 5 and parts for 4. Frankly, this is a Dutch auction of capability that is coming home to roost.

The same is true across the rest of the fleet. HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are extraordinary ships built for a combined cost of approximately £7 billion, but that doesn’t include the planes.

Without the US Marine Corps’ F-35Bs and the Dutch and US escort ships, the Royal Navy’s flagships would have never been operational.

This is in stark contrast to our history. In 1982, Admiral Leach was able to assemble a task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands in a weekend. 127 ships set sail to reassert Britain’s commitment to global order, and to defend our people.

Today the Royal Navy has 13 frigates and destroyers, not 17 Mr Healey, down from 59 back then.

The standing tasks – the work we must do just to play our part in NATO and keep ourselves safe, requires more hulls than actually exist.

Now, every First Sea Lord has known this for decades but it has taken the actions of this February to make it clear to the world.

After needing the army to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course surely that must be different? Right?

Wrong.

The British Army is down to approximately 74,000, from 109,000 in the year 2000. That’s the smallest force since Bonaparte threatened invasion. That’s regiments gone and battalions disbanded, eroding capability and cohesion.

Some have been replaced with tech, and the advances that have been made by the Army are impressive, but people still matter.

Poland is building a standing army of 300,000 and Germany has announced 460,000 trained personnel as its target. We’re not even close.

Worse, we’re not even close to what we promised.

NATO’s Force Model expects Britain to contribute a corps headquarters and two divisions. That’s simply not credible. We’d be hard pressed to deploy a brigade and as a General who commanded a brigade in the 1990s told me, the entire fire power of the British Army is less than he had in his brigade then.

The Falklands, Cyprus, Brunei, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, the Ukraine training mission, and the enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia each demands troops and is only possible if every other operation remains quiet.

That’s a strong bet in this world.

At least the Air Force, the home of innovation for a century, will have what it needs? No.

Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers couldn’t sustain a campaign at the scale of recent operations. F-35 deliveries remain below the programme’s own ambitions and the RAF has gone from 54,600 personnel in 2000 to 31,940 today, the steepest cut of any of the three services and not all of this is down to automation.

Amongst that is an ambition for an air-launched nuclear weapon, adding cost when we can’t even resource what we have today.

Even our allies are wondering what comes next. The Global Combat Air Programme, a strategic partnership with Italy and Japan and an initiative that this country should support, is years from delivery, underfunded by the Treasury, not by Tokyo or Rome, and dependent on them for its continued progression.

Alliance brings strength, dependency breeds resentment.

Across all three services we are seeing budgets of billions delivering outputs that leave us short of personnel and power.

This isn’t about housing or pay, it’s about mission and purpose, and neither are possible without the vision we’re lacking.

The Strategic Defence Review of 2025 tried to fix this with a reset in ambition. But since it was published, each of its authors has pointed out that without corresponding spending commitments the review is just a wish list, not a strategy.

That’s not good enough. Since the end of the Cold War, we have slashed the defence budget and failed to re-equip for the world as it is, not as we wished it was.

For all our talk of hitting 2.5 percent, and now boasting of the largest increase in the defence budget, let’s face it we’re just not being honest.

Ever since the nuclear deterrent was included in the defence budget in 2010 and pensions added in 2016, we have really been spending about 1.7 percent, now that’s much closer to the derided Spaniards than the prepared Poles.

From 2027, the Single Intelligence Account, £4.6 billion this year rising to £5.4 billion by 2029, will be reclassified as NATO-qualifying defence expenditure, to push the defence budget, in name only, to 2.6 percent.

In other words, we are busy playing accounting tricks in the purser’s office of the Titanic. Do you really think that anyone believes that Treasury tricks make us safer?

It’s a con and we can all see it. And worse, when the Prime Minister goes to the States, or sees our NATO allies, they see it too. He’s selling them a lie.

But that’s not all.

There is another number that every officer and analyst in this room I’m sure already knows, but must be repeated constantly to burn the shame of it into the hearts of those who can change it - that number is Eight.

The United Kingdom can sustain major combat operations for approximately eight days. That’s it.

Eight days.

The Chief of the Defence Staff didn’t contest this figure when pressed on it in the Defence Committee. Others have reported it clearly. We now have, according to some, the thinnest munitions stockpile of any first-tier NATO state.

In Ukraine, Russia is firing up to 10,000 shells a day and has learned to use drones at scale. Ukraine is said to be building as many as 9 million drones this year.

We’re losing credibility and as history shows, not least when we last left the Falkland Islands unguarded, weakness is provocative and costs many many times more than deterrence.

Let’s just look at what’s happening at home.

We have no integrated short-range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure.

We have no contracts or budgets allocated to repair our airfields if they’re damaged or destroyed.

The seas that carry the vast majority of intercontinental data that powers our economy through undersea cables are being systematically surveyed and mapped by Russian naval vessels, and may already be being sabotaged.

As the Russian tankers breaking sanctions through the English Channel show – we’re not really deterring that much.

Just imagine, if you will, the frustration of those who are capable of intercepting our enemies, but are forced to watch – restricted not just by kit but by the quiet suffocation of overcautious legal interpretations.

That doesn’t stop our enemies or encourage our forces, and our civilian resilience sadly is no better.

The National Health Service has no mass-casualty plan designed for industrial-scale warfare. The Cold War infrastructure that provided such a plan was dismantled in the late 1990s on the assumption that it would never be needed.

Indeed, when 9/11 happened, Number 10 couldn’t even find the key to the Prime Minister’s bunker.

We have made choices and saved pennies until the gap between what we say and who we are has become a chasm.

That’s not bad luck. That is the bill for 30 years of choices, arriving all at once.

Now, the hardware can be fixed with cash. What’s harder to change is the understanding that we need to make tough choices – now.

So let’s be honest – this isn’t just about politicians, we have our own share of the guilt. It’s about all of us and the kind of country we want to be.

In 1990, as the Berlin Wall came down, most people wanted to cut defence. Of course they did. Peace allowed us to spend more on our wants not our needs.

And that switch in focus – the so-called peace dividend – has left us disarmed but it wasn’t imposed on an unwilling electorate; it was demanded.

Successive governments delivered what was consistently asked of them.

In forced-choice polling even today, defence ranks eighth out of 13 priorities, behind the NHS, pensions, disability benefits, education and policing.

The question is not whether Britain can afford to do better than this. We can. The question is will we choose to change our priorities to make sure we stay safe.

While we’re spending just over £63 billion on defence, we spend more than five times that on welfare – more than 10 percent of our GDP.

The state pension costs taxpayers £146 billion and other pensioner-related benefits bring the total to about £180 billion.

Health and disability benefits cost £76 billion, more than we spend on deterring war, and that’s likely to rise to £100 billion by the end of the decade because the demographics are just so unforgiving.

Now today, there are three and a half working people supporting each pensioner. By 2050 there will be only two.

I don’t believe our economy can shoulder more taxes than today’s peacetime high. That’s why I argue we need to look again at where money is going.

By 2030, the Triple Lock will cost £15.5 billion more a year than if it were linked to earnings – that is three times the original forecast.

In cash terms, that’s the equivalent of a 20 percent increase in the entire defence budget.

A pensioner-protecting alternative which still tracks earnings but smooths out the volatility would save £6 billion a year by the end of this decade.

That’s five frigates, or 70 F-35s. Every single year.

That’s not all. As Fraser Nelson has shown, the number being moved on to sickness benefit has surged to a scarcely-believable 5,000 a day against 2,000 a day when Labour took office.

Around 90 percent of those granted sickness benefit were still on the benefit, and not working, two years later pushing the annual sickness and disability bill higher by £20 billion since 2019 alone.

That’s how much we spend on every soldier currently serving in the British Army, nearly four times over.

Let’s be clear, those bills are not being paid through taxation but debt. The costs are falling on our children.

What we owed cost us approximately £49 billion in 2019, today it’s £110 billion. Quantitative easing, Covid and welfare all racked up the bill. And it keeps rising.

That’s why this can’t go on. We can’t promise pension rises or sickness benefits that leave us so exposed.

We won’t be able to pay for anything if our cables are cut and energy is severed. The Triple Lock and health demands of a generation that should be at work, not off work, have left us living on a prayer.

These choices haven’t been foisted secretly upon an unknowing electorate. They’re the cumulative product of government policy, the legal culture, and our public discourse – and now we’re here living with the consequences of those choices.

We can blame others and play politics but that will change nothing.

This is our watch and the seas have turned rough.

It’s time that we were honest with ourselves.

At one time, we were.

When Britain helped write the rules of the post-war world we knew we had to help enforce them.

Along with other free nations, we invested in the Bretton Woods framework, the Atlantic alliance, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Commonwealth, and so much more.

British diplomats drafted the language that British ships, garrisons and planes made count. We knew that soft power was the velvet on the mace – softening the ask, veiling the threat.

Rule-writers and rule-enforcers were the same countries, because the architects of the post-war settlement understood that words without weapons are just wishes.

After the end of the Cold War, we forgot that we still had to pay the bill.

The speeches from Number 10, the Foreign Office and the MoD have barely changed, but the ships, planes, people and bases; the factories and stockpiles, have all dwindled.

We told ourselves fairy tales, we remembered the glorious past that was written in our history and pretended that that would automatically lead to a gentle future forgetting the price of peace.

Our diplomats, the BBC, the British Council, the City of London, the English language itself are all soft power. They can, we are told, carry a load that, until 1990, had needed steel and strength.

We’ve forgotten the truth:

Soft power is not just weaker than hard power, it depends on it.

The institutions through which soft power operates – the alliances, the multilateral frameworks, the treaty bodies – derive their authority from the order that hard power maintains.

Britain didn’t trade hard power for soft power, we sold it, just as a banker has sold the gold that underpins a currency and is now surprised when there is a run on his trust.

The consequence, as every senior civil servant involved in multilateral diplomacy privately acknowledges, is that Britain has fewer seats at the tables where the rules are made.

Because power is not hereditary. It’s bought with ships, aircraft, battalions and the industrial capacity to make them and the willingness to act.

As I warned when I took over the Foreign Affairs Committee 8 years ago, you can’t hide behind treaties and pretend peace is eternal. You will be found wanting.

Now, with the world in flux and the tide going out, I’m reminded of the words of Warren Buffett: we’re finding out who has been swimming naked.

For a trading nation that depends on the sea, there’s a threat, not just to our influence but to our economy. For a rules-based state that needs to shape the words that constrain us, our voice is quieter than it has been for generations.

We’re spending our children’s inheritance and we’re not securing their tomorrow but comforting our today.

The evidence is now too great to be ignored.

France defends British sovereign territory.

The United States takes decisions that determine our future without consulting us. And the reason is clear.

We have too few ships, too few soldiers and too few planes.

We have factories receiving too few orders and the armouries holding too few stocks. And worst, we have a government too keen to punish those who try to protect us. Those are not opinions. They’re facts.

But I’m not going to end on that.

I think there are three tests for us to turn around where we are:

The first, is a short term test: the ‘Falklands test’ if you will. Britain must be able to assemble a credible task force within 72 hours and deploy it to any sovereign British territory within the time window required to prevent its loss.

Second, is the medium term test: the ‘Technology test’, if you will. Britain must be able to match and defeat a modern, fully equipped peer adversary in the air, on land, at sea, and in the electromagnetic and cyber domains, with the drones, integrated air defence, long-range fires, and the resilient command-and-control that contemporary warfare actually requires.

And the third, in the long term: the ‘North Atlantic test’. Britain must be the most capable European power in the most important domains for our national life: the North Sea, the Baltic approaches, the North Atlantic, and the GIUK Gap securing our energy and communications connections.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be setting out the choices we must make beyond the tax changes and legal reforms that have been demanding our attention for so many years. What must be built is the work of the speeches that I will draft in coming days.

We face an industrial question: can we restore the sovereign capacity to produce the ships, the steel, and the munitions on which hard power depends?

A technological question: can we keep up and overtake the advances in drone warfare, artificial intelligence, and open-source intelligence being demanded by today’s battlefields?

A diplomatic question: can we reawaken the partnerships that will endure for another generation or more and remember the ties that bind?

And lastly we have a legal question: can we rebuild a framework of laws allowing British forces to operate in the world as it is, not as we wish it had become?

I will be addressing each in turn.

Now this has been pretty bleak, but let me be clear, it’s not too late.

Poland has tripled its defence spending in a decade because successive Polish governments made the case and argued the need.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia all spend more than we do as a proportion not because they want to, but because their leaders said the hard things clearly, and their citizens, who want peace as much as ours do, chose to be serious when presented with the reality of the choice before them.

What we need now is not just the money or the mass; most importantly, we need politicians willing to say, clearly and repeatedly, things that for thirty years have been thought unsayable.

The diagnosis has not been comfortable and the remedy won’t be simple or cheap. The evidence, however, is clear. And the choice, for the moment at least, remains ours to make.

The last remaining question is whether the national conversation that reinforced our predicament is capable, in the years immediately ahead, of producing that cure. Now that question, well that’s really for all of us to answer in our own way.

Thank you.