Letters: the joy of a male book club

The state of our defence

Sir: Your article on the etiolated state of European, including Britain’s, defence, is spot on (‘The price of peace’, 27 April). Rishi Sunak’s belated conversion to increasing defence expenditure is welcome but is, frankly, too little, too late. What it most definitively does not do is place the UK on a ‘war-footing’.

By contrast, Russia is already in that state. It spends between 6 and 8 per cent of its GDP on defence. It has established strategic alliances with China, Iran and North Korea, and now much of West Africa too. We need a severe dose of realism.

To begin, we must stop pretending that Ukraine has any hope of pushing Russia back to the 2014 borders. By all means, give the Ukrainians the means to defend themselves, but our focus must now be on our defence.

The list of what is missing is almost endless but let us start with ‘stopping the rot’: sort out pay, terms of service, and accommodation, so that personnel want to serve and recruits want to join.