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. We can then progress to improving our air- and missile-defence systems; establishing a demonstrably credible nuclear deterrent; an armoured division that has more tanks and armoured vehicles than smoke and mirrors, and a defence industry that works for the country, not its shareholders.

Beyond defence, national resilience needs a civilian infrastructure that can withstand the shocks of war, and a populace who are prepared to shoulder the burden.

But where are we as a people? Consumed by identity wars that divide us; self-flagellating ourselves over alleged ‘wrongs’, from climate change to slavery. Some are not even sure that ‘defending our national interest’ is ethical. A marginal increase in a defence budget from 2.3 to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 will make not one iota of difference: it doesn’t even touch the sides.