Dominic Lawson is wrong about defence spending

Targeting 2% of GDP is completely arbitrary … but when you’re falling out of a tree you should grab any branch you can.

Dominic Lawson has written in The Sunday Times (link) that it is a mistake to use share of GDP as a benchmark for defence spending. To support this argument he makes two points:

The point should not be whether we can “send a message” by pledging a certain amount of expenditure, but whether the UK has the readiness and capability to do what might be necessary—such as to field a division (as the US army chief of staff Raymond Odierno questioned last week.

The story of British defence procurement [e.g. Nimrod MRA4 and over-ordering of consumables] has been of vast amounts of public money catastrophically misspent.

There is almost nothing better designed to perpetuate wastefulness than the knowledge that the overall budget is guaranteed, linked in perpetuity to national income, come what may.

It is hard to imagine anyone standing up to defend the so-called military-industrial complex. There are many in the defence community who simply think the whole enterprise is not up to the task (Jonathan Shaw being one), and that a number of our generals should have been sacked already. Problems with procurement are widely recognised (and as the Apache debacle shows, so is the role of politicians in making them worse). It is also hard to argue that, in an ideal world, we would be targeting defence inputs rather than security outcomes—2% of GDP, let us be honest, is a completely arbitrary target.

But none of those things mean we that should not be demanding that our politicians commit to exactly that, for several reasons.

Most importantly, the world believes that we committed to spending more than 2% on our military, and will use this as a yardstick to measure our commitment to defence. This is slightly ironic, because if you read the Wales Summit Declaration declaration carefully you’ll see that we committed only to an attempt and not an outcome on defence spending:

Allies currently meeting the NATO guideline to spend a minimum of 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence will aim to continue to do so (emphasis added).

The prime minister has been particularly mealymouthed on the topic. In his end of summit press conference, he was happy to brag about the UK’s defence spending:

Second, NATO needs to be even stronger. Britain is one of only four countries that currently spends 2% of its GDP on defence. But others will now do more.

But Cameron carefully stopped short of actually committing the UK to that spending level, though by repeating “aim” he did reveal that its appearance in the declaration was no accident:

With today’s Wales Pledge every NATO member not spending 2% will halt any decline in defence spending and aim to increase it in real terms as GDP grows, and to move towards 2% within a decade (emphasis added).

Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this silliness doesn’t wash in the big world. The Americans have certainly been watching:

In a blunt warning not to cut the UK defence budget, the US President personally insisted to the Prime Minister that a failure to hit the 2 per cent of GDP spending target would undermine the military alliance.

One American official confirmed Washington had been applying pressure at a “high-level”.

He said: “We’ve been saying, ‘We are worried that you are not going to hit two per cent, after all you said in Wales.’” (link)

The US permanent representative to NATO Douglas Lute piled on as well:

There’s no doubt everyone else is watching, too—and some people are even getting a bird’s eye view:

But there are other good reasons for the 2% target beyond symbolism.

First, as Christopher Elliott writes in his book High Command, we have no way of knowing just how much defence we need. This has never been more true than now. Who could have imagined during our time in Helmand that the UK would shortly be sending military aid to Ukraine and tanks to Poland? Matching spending to need would be impossible, and we must adopt a more philosophical—and conservative—approach.

Second, it is very difficult to measure how much defence you actually have. Even seemingly unbiased measures such as a division’s worth of manpower are easily manipulated. This is important, because you cannot trust politicians on defence spending. They are incentivised to under-invest in the military in order to hand out more candy to the voters. Anything that ties their hands has value.

Third, the immediate context is deep cuts to defence. When you are falling out of a tree you should grab whichever branch you can on the way down.

Finally, tying defence spending to share of national wealth is morally right. Defence is not just another government programme—it is the preeminent programme, the foundation on which our national wealth is built. Making that link is entirely appropriate.