UK defence spending is way too high

Greg Landon

Name:Greg Landon
Occupation: studying at university in Cardiff
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Military spending presents a dilemma for any government. To improve current personnel and equipment is incredibly expensive; yet saving such funds could potentially leave you militarily vulnerable, and will almost certainly lead to political labels of ‘unpatriotic’ and ‘weak’. So what kind of balance are we striking in this country? Well, as far as I see it, not an economically sustainable or viable one.

Photo by Shandchem

Let’s start with the numbers, courtesy of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, who publish figures every year on almost every country’s military expenditure. According to them, Britain spends over 57 billion dollars ($57,424,000,000 to be exact) a year on defence. This is the equivalent of over £38 billion and makes it the fourth largest defence budget in the world, behind the US, China and France. Why does a financially struggling country smaller than Guinea and with fewer people than Thailand feel the need to pump considerably more money into protecting its resources than the developing powerhouses of Russia, India and Brazil?

What should we be spending on defence? Probably the best place to start is by looking at what similar countries spend. Amongst our European neighbours, only France spends more in total, but actually devotes 0.2% less of its GDP to defence than the UK’s 2.7%. Other EU nations are even more frugal; the traditionally well-armed Germany spends just 1.4% of its GDP, Italy under the power hungry Berlusconi devoted only 1.8% of its resources, the Dutch spend 1.5%, Sweden epitomises low Scandinavian spending with just 1.2% and the Spanish are perhaps the most peaceful of the lot with a lowly 1.1%. Who exactly is going to attack these countries? A question Scandinavia and Spain seem to have a more convincing answer to than we do.

Of course as an island that isn’t fully integrated into all aspects of the EU, Britain probably should spend more than most of its European neighbours on defence. So what of countries who are geographically and economically more similar to us? Ireland spends just 0.6% of its money on defence, less than a fourth of the percentage the UK does, while Japan’s military expenditure stands at only 1%. This is surprising given Japan is much more geographically isolated than the UK, is situated next to the supposedly power hungry Chinese and the traditionally unstable region of South-East Asia. Yet despite having more resources at their disposal and being the world’s third largest economy, they spend less in total on defence than we do.

If you’ve found those facts alarming, then this next bit will come as a shock. Statistically, the UK spends more on the military than many of the world’s dictators and single party regimes that are so castigated by our own media. Who would you say have been the most dangerous and violent world leaders in the last couple of years? How about Gaddafi, whose weapons stores were so widely shown in Western news broadcasts after his overthrow? Well in 2008, he spent just 1.2% of his GDP on the military. What of President Ahmadinejad in Iran, a country much of America is quick to tell us poses the next imminent threat to the West? His 2008 defence expenditure stood at only 1.8% of GDP. Moving away from the Middle East, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela is often portrayed as selfish and dangerous, yet little is made of the fact he pumps a mere 1.3% of his resources into defence. In fact I found that the single party dominated nations of Tajikistan, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Ivory Coast, Cambodia, and Kazakhstan all spent a smaller portion of their wealth on the military than Britain in their last official data while under undemocratic rule. Now I’m not naïve enough to believe the figures coming out of those nations are completely accurate, but what it does show is the clouded view we are presented with when told about power hungry regimes all over the world, while the fact that our own defence spending is at least as high as theirs is conveniently swept under the carpet.

As much as I feel such spending is excessive, I would be the last person to advocate that the UK turns its back on all things military. British arms manufacturers are world leaders (one of a diminishing number of industries where this is the case) and given the geographical, social and political nature of the country, defence spending should be slightly higher than many European nations. Also, I completely advocate the ‘support our troops’ campaign; if you have citizens whose career is the military, then you have an unbreakable commitment to provide them with any equipment necessary for survival. My main beef about our military spending, other than media coverage about it, is the seemingly useless endeavours defence money is sometimes pumped into.

One of my good friends at uni, signed up to join the UOTC (University Officer Training Corps) in his first week on campus. He has no intention of joining the army as a full time career, and might not even stay in the country after finishing his degree. He, like myself, grew up in South Africa and so was exposed to constant physical activities and army-like discipline at school. This guy loves doing all UOTC activities (drills, camping, etc) and would do them for free. But he doesn’t do them for free; instead he gets all travel, equipment, and food expenses paid on top of a small salary (a two day camping trip nets him £38). Assume that, with expenses and the salary of the officer training him, one of his weekend trips costs the army £60. Now assume 100 people from his company attend, and that they go on these trips three times a semester. That’s a total of 36 grand for the academic year, to fund just one company in one city. Considering many of the people my friend does this with will never see a British army uniform again, and the ones that do are training as reservists as opposed to frontline soldiers, it does pose the question of whether there should be so much spent on troops we plan to keep at home.

The final issue I have with military spending is the political stigma associated with lowering it. The change of government after the last election would theoretically have been the perfect time to lower the defence budget. In came a government promising widespread cuts across all sectors and inquiries into the Afghan and Iraq wars. Yet, while almost every economic and social sector is making do with less, defence spending increased from £38 to £40 billion in the year the Conservatives took power. Seemingly, there is less political kickback from decreasing education, social welfare, health, and transport than there is from reining in defence; and that is a notion I will not buy into when I fail to see exactly who is staging an invasion.

Visit Greg’s blog at: http://gregorylandon.blogspot.com/