Army chief General Sir Nick Carter will call on the Government to boost defence spending today as he warns that Britain would struggle to combat Russian forces.
“Our ability to pre-empt or respond to threats will be eroded if we don’t keep up with our adversaries,” Carter will say, according to excerpts from the speech, published by The Guardian.
Article continues belowThe Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
It is “highly unusual” for a serving senior officer to speak so frankly about threats, says The Times , which reports that the general will say “Britain would struggle to withstand Russian forces on the battlefield”. The intervention “appears designed to raise public awareness of the scale and urgency of the challenge”, says the paper, “and to ratchet up pressure on Philip Hammond to award more money to defence”.
BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale says the likelihood of British forces leading a direct military confrontation against Russia seems extremely remote. “That’s why Britain is part of Nato,” he says, but some of the UK’s weapons are outdated. “While Russia’s been developing new Armata tanks, the British Army’s Challenger 2 hasn’t been modernised for 20 years.”
Russia may also present a threat to the UK through hybrid warfare, says The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Ewen MacAskill, through “the use of deniable acts of disruption, primarily cyberattacks on the UK that could disrupt essential services or interference in the democratic process, such as in elections”.
The general’s comments “reflect concerns among the top brass and some politicians that defence spending is being too tightly squeezed because of wider fiscal austerity”, reports Reuters.
The UK spends 2% of GDP on defence, according to The Guardian, but the Ministry of Defence wants that figure to rise to at least 3%.