A bill is arriving for British defence. In Westminster, the argument is how to pay. Spend more, says Lord Robertson, former NATO chief. Spend faster. Britain is “unprepared”, “under-secured”, “unsafe”. Keir Starmer promises to raise defense spending to 3 percent of GDP, with new NATO targets pushing it even higher: 3.5 percent for the military, 5 percent for “security” by 2035. The number goes up. The plan does not exist. No one can yet say publicly and in detail what this money is intended to buy. Not what threats he responds to. Not what weaknesses it reduces. Not what addictions it ends up with. Only the percentage.
Robertson is not a neutral voice in this debate. As defense secretary, he wrote the 1998 Strategic Defense Review that set Britain on its current course: a “expeditionArmy built to act alongside the United States in global interventions, not primarily to protect Great Britain. As historian David Edgerton says observed at that timeBritain was committing itself to acting as Washington’s “principal partner”, with only a minority of spending directed towards national defence. That model of force projection – embodied in aircraft carriers – has endured. Robertson’s revision in 2025 leaves it largely untouched. Today, he sits in the transatlantic defense industry he helped build, advising firms through the Cohen Group, urging more money to be spent on the system that produced Britain’s dependency.
Cross the Atlantic and the logic becomes clearer. Donald Trump is seeking a US military budget of $1.5 trillion – a major expansion of the most funded war machine in history. The markets understand what this means. Since 2022, the share prices of Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics have increased, considering the price conflict as a stable condition. War is a growth sector. And the US defense industry doesn’t just benefit from public spending. It helps shape it. The industry spends more than $100 million a year on lobbying, with tens of millions more flowing through campaign donations each election cycle.
In Washington, the line between contractor and policymaker is often a door on a hinge. The system does not simply respond to threats. It helps produce them – turning public fear into private profit. Britain is retreating deeper into this region. Money pours into politics. Politics amplifies the threat. The threat justifies the expense. Expenses are returned as profit. Or more bluntly: Britain is being pushed to become a vassal buyer in a US-led military market – paying more, for less control.
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The debate starts in the wrong place. Defense is framed as a share of GDP, as if a percentage were a strategy. No serious state budget for health or education in this way. You decide what to do, then you give it the resources. Here, the sequence is reversed: a number placed externally, internally internalized, and then justified. The result is a ratchet without a plan. Then comes what that money buys. Britain’s procurement model routinely promises more than it can deliver. National Audit Office (NAO) found the 2023 defense equipment plan is already £17 billion in the red. Put simply: even before the next spending increase, Britain is committed to spending money it has not budgeted for.
More money in that system does not guarantee more security. Guarantees a bigger bill. But cost is only half the story. The deeper issue is addiction. Take the F-35. The Ministry of Defense estimated the cost of the fighter jet fleet at £18bn, but the full life cycle cost it goes to 70 billion pounds. And after all that, Britain does not control what it has bought. It relies on US-led architecture for maintenance, upgrades and software. Even basic skills are delayed. return on investment, according to the words of the ZKAit was “disappointing”.
Trident is more politically guarded, but no less revealing. The British ruling class and media routinely present the nuclear deterrent as the ultimate guarantee of independence. The system tells a different story. The rockets are American. Serviced in America. At key points, the system depends on US Defense chiefs who can call it sovereignty. But it is doing political work that the hardware tries to maintain. There hasn’t been a successful test launch in over a decade.
Step back and the pattern is unmistakable. Since 2022, arms imports to Europe have increased. According to data from the International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm, nearly two-thirds of these imports came from the United States. At the same time, Europe has absorbed the shock of an energy crisis that transferred huge windfall profits to US firms. Transition Security Project research suggests that the EU and UK absorbed an estimated $1.8 trillion in direct costs from the 2022-2025 energy shock, while US companies realized a $241 billion windfall in 2022 alone. Energy and security alike: dependence deepened and paid for.
Even in war, boundaries show. During the bombing of Iran, the US late deliveries to the European allies, as it prioritized its own reserves. After the Iranian attacks exposed the vulnerability of US bases in the Persian Gulf, air defense systems were redeployed to protect higher priorities while personnel were withdrawn from exposed sites. Here is a lesson for those who have eyes. Britain hosts more than a dozen US bases – part of the same expeditionary system built to project power abroad. In a crisis, they are targets. And the decisions about them may not be made by us. There was another way. In 1966, President Charles de Gaulle removed American bases from French soil and withdrew from the NATO command structure to seek autonomy. Britain chose integration – and, in time, dependence.
Now the bill is coming. After Robertson’s intervention, Health Secretary Wes Streeting said higher defense spending “would have to come from somewhere”. We know what that means. Last year, ministers tried to cut around £5 billion from welfare, targeting disabled people who need help with the most basic functions of everyday life – getting out of bed, using the bathroom – before public outrage forced a retreat.
This is the real choice. Not between safety and risk, but between reforming a system that wastes money and gives up control – or maintaining it, and asking the vulnerable to pay the difference. If the government was serious about cutting welfare spending, it would start with one of its main drivers: housing costs. Only the benefit of the apartment goes to more than £37 billion a yearincreasing with rents. Raise rents and that bill falls in real terms over time – saving billions without taking away support from those who need it. But this would mean confrontation with property interests.
The world has become more dangerous. This is not in dispute. The United States is more chaotic and violent than it has been in decades. Supply chains are fragile. The infrastructure is exposed. Power systems, logistics networks, submarine cables – all are potential points of failure. This is exactly why strategy matters. Because the lesson of recent wars is not that money wins. The United States is preparing to spend $1.5 trillion a year on defense. Iran spends a fraction of that—about 1 percent—yet has been able, through strategy, geography and planning, to withstand and deter a much larger force, using relatively inexpensive drones against much more expensive surveillance systems.
Britain needs a new security strategy built on a different premise: that spending must reduce dependency, that capability means control, that resilience – in energy, infrastructure, logistics and industry – matters as much as firepower, and that every pound should be judged by what it delivers, not by how well it pleases NATO’s accounting. Otherwise, we will continue to pay more for less – buying addiction at a high price and mistaking the bill for a shield.
(Further reading: Nigel Farage fights for attention)
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