Recommendation 102

Professor Bronk told us the choice was stark: either sufficiently resource the UK Armed Forces to allow them to have “full spectrum forces that can concurrently provide a reference force as a backbone of European NATO, while also doing expeditionary things for signalling, diplomacy and all sorts around the world” or to ruthlessly prioritise: If you specifically tasked the MoD and said, “Your primary role now is to provide a backbone of European deterrence against Russia, with credible warfighting capabilities in Europe in the next three to five years”, you would see an enormous change in the way that it plans its force structure and its planning, but you would also find a lot of objections from people … If you want to keep doing what we are currently doing and get ready for warfighting in three to five years’ time, it is probably [needs to be] closer to 3% of GDP as a ballpark figure. If you were to say, “This is now all hands on deck. We need to get the force we currently have as ready as we can, but we are prepared to pull the plug on all sorts of things and go right down to just getting ready for the big fight, as it were, and buying weapons stocks,” you could probably do it with a relatively modest uplift, but you would have to cut so much in terms of what people are used to seeing as the standard pattern of activity to do it.217