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.
Subscribe to The 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 “That’s why Britain is part of Nato,” he says, but some of the UK’s weapons are outdated.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%.
-
What we know about the Copenhagen mall shootingSpeed Read Lone gunman had mental health issues and not thought to have terror motive, police say
-
Texas school shooting: parents turn anger on policeSpeed Read Officers had to be urged to enter building where gunman killed 21 people
-
DJ Tim Westwood denies multiple sexual misconduct allegationsSpeed Read At least seven women accuse the radio and TV presenter of predatory behaviour dating back three decades
-
What happened to Katie Kenyon?Speed Read Man charged as police search for missing 33-year-old last seen getting into van
-
Brooklyn subway shooting: exploring New York’s ‘steep decline in law and order’Speed Read Last week, a gunman set off smoke bombs and opened fire on a rush-hour train in the city
-
How the Capitol attack investigation is splitting the RepublicansSpeed Read Vote to censure two Republican representatives has revealed deep divisions within party
-
Is sentencing a Nazi sympathiser to read Shakespeare an appropriate punishment?Speed Read Judge seemed to think introducing student ‘to high culture’ would ‘magically make him a better person’ said The Daily Telegraph
-
Sarah Everard’s murder: a national reckoning?Speed Read Wayne Couzen’s guilty plea doesn’t ‘tidy away the reality of sexual violence’
