The Defence Investment Plan announced yesterday by the outgoing Prime Minister from the offices of a drone-making BAE Systems subsidiary represents a dangerous failure of imagination.
The last 25 years have seen major UK military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. In addition, the UK has been heavily involved in wars and atrocities in Yemen, in Gaza, in Syria, providing equipment, training, targeting, and ammunition. All told this militaristic violence has killed over a million people, with the vast majority civilians.
If the world is now “less safe” than it was, it is in large part because the continual wars waged by the UK and its allies have been drastically ineffective in providing any kind of security. And once again, the demand is to fund even more of the same.
Although the Prime Minister talked a great deal about drones and AI, the details of the proposed military spending hike reveal that in fact the majority of the funding he spoke about is going into nuclear weapons and nuclear powered submarines.
The biggest single line item in the outline spending plan was, “More than £63 billion over the next four years to strengthen the UK’s nuclear deterrent and to fund Dreadnought and SSN-AUKUS submarines, a new warhead, and other crucial nuclear work.” This in addition to £29 billion being spent on naval bases in Portsmouth, Faslane, Devonport, the latter two being bases for the Trident nuclear missile (Vanguard) submarines and nuclear-powered attack (Astute) submarines respectively. The Prime Minister also allocated more billions on munitions, including “long-range strike weapons, low-cost cruise missiles and one-way effectors.”
None of these weapons have a protective function. They will not stop incoming missiles, provide humanitarian aid, guide shipping through safe routes, or clear mines. They are designed simply for killing and destruction, with weapons launched in huge numbers and guided by AI being used to depopulate entire areas, as seen in Gaza, Ukraine and Iran, with the inevitable loss of civilian life and destruction of infrastructure. The only people who will benefit from this spending will be the shareholders of the big arms companies, including most notably BAE Systems whose subsidiary hosted the Prime Minister today.
Nearly £2 billion is being allocated to a new “Digital Targeting Web,” designed, in the government’s own words, to enable “faster decision-making and speed in destroying identified targets.” Such systems raise the spectre of fully autonomous weapons systems, where decisions as to who and when to kill are completely outsourced to AI systems, with no human control or accountability. We don’t need to imagine what this looks like. Israel developed their own Lavender AI System, with support from Palantir, using the same motivation, and murdered thousands of innocent civilians. AI did not make killing more precise. It made it faster, more automated, and easier to distance yourself from, all while increasing the death toll.
We also know that much of what the Ministry of Defence gets, it wastes. The recent history of the Department has been littered with an ever-growing list of failed multi-billion pound projects. None of these failures seem to slow the incessant demands for increased expenditure set against an arbitrary percentage of GDP.
Meanwhile, surveys continue to show that most Britons’ concerns around security centre on domestic issues such as access to healthcare, the affordability of housing, transport, food and energy, and reducing the risk of street crime. A nuclear missile does nothing to provide any of these. The Government itself admitted that energy and transport projects would be put on the back burner to pay for the new weaponry, at a time when greening our energy and transport systems has never been more important, as illustrated by record temperatures across the UK this last week. The £15 billion increase to defence spending will further be funded by cuts to capital budgets across government departments, at a time when austerity continues to reduce healthy life expectancies across deprived areas of the UK.
CAAT’s view is that the UK Government needs to think again. It needs to focus the resources of the UK on meeting the human needs of its population during a time of climate catastrophe, huge levels of poverty and inequality, and severely underfunded public services.
Meanwhile, we must work with other countries, and to build peaceful international relations. This is possible. For many decades the UK feared invasion from Germany and France. The fact that the possibility of this is now remote is due to long term relationship- and peace-building between these countries. Such international cooperation is understood to be the only way to tackle the climate crisis, which is the single greatest threat to people in the UK and the world over. Contrasted with the seemingly intractable war with Iran and the genocide in Gaza, which are the end result of unfettered militarism, this has to be a better, more sustainable alternative.
This new spending plan will not make the world safer, it will simply promote more of the same: war, destruction and the impoverishment of the majority, to enrich and empower a small and already rich and powerful elite.
