Rearmament and Warfighting Readiness

I beg to move, That this House recognises the danger that Russia’s renewed illegal invasion of Ukraine poses to European and British security; further recognises the threat to the international order and the UK posed by China; also recognises the increasing uncertainty surrounding the reliability of the US as an ally within NATO; acknowledges the current shortfalls in the UK’s ability to deploy a credible fighting force; further acknowledges that this lack of military capability is resulting in the coercion of Britain and its interests in the international sphere; and calls on the Government to begin a programme of rapid rearmament to strengthen the defence of the UK and its allies. The key word of the motion on the Order Paper today is “rapid”—rapid rearmament, not eventual rearmament or rearmament with an asterisk. The reason it is the key word is that the clock is not ours to choose. Three weeks ago, before the defence investment plan came out, the Prime Minister said: “it is our intelligence assessment, and the assessment of other countries in NATO, that there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030.” The deadline is not contested. Intelligence confirms it, NATO proclaims it—they are speaking of this in Ankara today—and our Government accept it. We must be ready by 2030. That is why the defence investment plan is so maddening. I have read it from cover to cover—I am that kind of guy—and I cannot wrap my head around it. It fails the test of its own threat assessment. It does not go far enough, and what it does do, it does too slowly. Large parts of it are also unfunded. It is too little, too late, and there is not enough cash. It is worth considering how this plan came into being. Lord Robertson, the lead author of the strategic defence review, wanted to have the DIP—that is, the money bit—as an annexe to the SDR. That is really good practice when making strategy: set out a vision, which is the SDR, and then set out the resources, which are the DIP. If a Government do not have the resources to deliver their vision, they need either to downgrade the vision somewhat or to increase their resources. The decoupling of the two documents by a year, with the vision coming a year ago in the SDR, and the money and resources just recently in the DIP, is the greatest failure of statecraft committed by this Labour Government in the two years they have been in office. First, allow me to speak about the money in some detail. Quite well ventilated in the media is the £4.7 billion that quite blatantly must be found in the next Budget, in the autumn. Although the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) has said that he intends to fund defence seriously, he has not specifically said that he will find those sums in that Budget. As the Government repeatedly tell us, defence of the realm is the most important duty of any Government. So why is £5 billion of that sacred duty in the in-tray of the next Chancellor—a person unknown at this point? Secondly, I would like to talk about these efficiency savings—£10.7 billion of them. Speaking in this Chamber, the Chair of the Public Accounts Committee, the hon. Member for North Cotswolds (Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown), called this the oldest accounting trick in the book. If we dig just one layer below, we can see the detail: £2.4 billion of that £10.7 billion is what the Ministry of Defence calls “high maturity initiatives”. I find that it is always worth really looking into what the MOD says, because the remaining £8.4 billion of that nearly £11 billion of efficiency savings is what the MOD calls “plans at lower maturity”. Lower-maturity plans, Madam Deputy Speaker, is MOD-speak for “we have not worked out how to deliver those savings yet.” Thirdly, and most egregiously, is a theme that I will keep returning to: the fact that this is a DIP of two halves. The first period is from now until 2030, which is covered by the current spending review, subject to the caveats that I laid out earlier. However, the second part, which covers 2030 to 2035, has to be confirmed in the forthcoming spending review. If the future Chancellor or Prime Minister do not agree to those sums going into the next spending review—due, one assumes, in the spring of 2027—the DIP will then not exist. It will just be an unfunded piece of paper.

The hon. Gentleman is making an excellent speech. The first four years—the near-term investment period—covers the period until the next election. The second half—the longer-term investment period—covers the next five years, all the way up to 2035. However, the DIP is a 10-year plan, so it should in fact go beyond 2035, and beyond two elections’ time, to 2036, which it clearly does not, because the number “2036” does not appear once in the defence investment plan.

This actually speaks to the delay. Had the DIP come out when it was meant to, in 2025, it would have been a 10-year plan, because it would have gone from 2025 to 2035. However, the Government were unable to get their ducks in a row and the DIP was delayed by a year. If we had waited for them to rejig the plan to go up until 2036, I think we might have waited until 2040 for the plan. This is a DIP of two halves, and the really worrying bit is that most of the investment is in the second half, which is unfunded. Let me give the House some examples. In the air domain there is £27.8 billion before 2030, and £70 billion after—unfunded. In the maritime domain there is £18 billion before 2030, and £32 billion after—unfunded. In the land domain there is £19.2 billion before, and £36 billion after—unfunded. For weapons and munitions there is £11.1 billion before, and £20 billion after—unfunded. It beggars belief. Why bother publishing a plan when, by my calculations, almost two thirds of the investments that the Government seek to make are in the second half, which is unfunded? One of the reasons that we have pulled this plan together is to give certainty to industry, so that they know how to invest.

My concern is that the only British company offering to build an advanced jet trainer replacement for the Red Arrows Hawk jet, AERALIS, has gone into receivership because of the delay in the DIP, which means it will not assemble those lovely British jets in my constituency.

I think we have all heard stories of firms such as the one in the hon. Gentleman’s constituency, whether in our own constituencies or in the conversations we have as Members of Parliament who are interested in defence. It has been catastrophic for British industry, and rushing out an unfunded DIP, which is effectively what this is, has not helped. It has meant that some small capital investments, one third of the total pot for the next four years, can be made by firms. However, for anything that stretches beyond 2030, nobody can be sure enough to make that investment.

The hon. Gentleman is making a very accurate critique. Is he aware that the Treasury Committee, led by the redoubtable hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Dame Meg Hillier), was looking at defence funding at lunch time today, and that in that hearing, barely an hour ago, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury admitted under persistent questioning that the Government have done no work on how to get to 3.5% of GDP on defence?

All I will say is that the defence of the realm is the most serious issue for any Government.

The hon. Gentleman is very kind to give way again, as he is right in the middle of unpicking the DIP thread by thread. Does he agree that we need to look at the manifest, substantial disappointment that we and everyone in uniform see in the DIP now that it has been announced, and try to reconcile that with how delayed it was? What does he think the Government were doing, given that there are so many black holes and missing spaces in the DIP? What does he think they were debating over the 11 months that the DIP was delayed?

The original sin is divorcing the strategic defence review from the DIP—divorcing the vision from the resources. For the past year, the Department has been arguing first with itself about whether it can downgrade some of the things in the strategic defence review—there are a couple of instances where that has happened, which I will come on to—and then with the Treasury to get more money to fill the gap. Effectively, it wrote a vision that was far too grand for the money that was ever going to be available. Let me turn from the money to the metal and have a look at some of the capabilities. I could give a very long speech on military analysis about which capabilities should be in or out, but I will not do that. I think it would test—[Interruption.] I know that right hon. and hon. Members would like me to do that; perhaps I will set up a Substack or something. Let us look at the Royal Navy—the senior service. At the turn of this century—as someone born in 1982, I still feel weird saying that—the UK had 20 frigates. By the end of this year, we will have five. Pre-DIP, they were scheduled to go out of service in 2035. In a little-noticed line in the DIP, we are bringing forward that date. All five frigates, which have well exceeded their service date, are going in 2033. Their replacements, the Type 26s and the Type 23s, will come into service—you guessed it—in 2030-35. We therefore have old ships retiring on a fixed schedule and new ships coming in on an unfunded one. My back-of-a-fag-packet maths—probably the same quality of analysis goes into the MOD under this Government—shows that we will have three frigates in 2030, the year, according to our intelligence assessments, of maximum Russian threat against NATO. We need a frigate to protect our cables, another to get the carrier group out to sea, and another for our deterrent. According to the rule of three—for every three ships, we have only one at sea at any one time—that is nine frigates. If anything kicks off in the middle east or anywhere else, there is no contingency plan. We can see straightaway that there is a huge gap—the frigate gap, as many call it—and the DIP has made it much worse. The picture with our current Type 45 destroyers and their replacements is not much better. Our Type 45s primarily provide air defence. One was parked in the Thames estuary to defend the Olympics in 2012 because we do not have any other air defence. They go out of service from 2035. Their replacements are supposed to be crewed common combat vessels such as mother ships. Various autonomous ships, which provide missiles, sensors or underwater and above-water support, are meant to be arranged around them. A whole fleet of different ships is therefore meant to replace the destroyers and some other elements of our Navy. That is the hybrid Navy that was much touted last week in the media coverage of the DIP. I am totally in favour of moving towards autonomy as fast as we can. However, it is worth saying that the maritime domain, particularly the High North, is the most difficult in which to do autonomy. I have spent a lot of time at sea and I can tell hon. Members that everything breaks all the time. There is a reason why the maritime domain is the last to be autonomised. We started with air because that is predictable and quite easy to do, although the aircraft still do not fly in bad weather. We then moved to the ground stuff for picking up casualties and dropping off ammunition. However, the new ships—the common combat vessels—are simply PowerPoints at the moment, yet we expect to move from PowerPoints to power projection on the high seas in nine years with not just one class, but several classes of ships that have to work together. That seems quite risky to me. If we take what is happening to the frigate fleet and what is happening to the destroyer fleet together, it is fair to say that the DIP spells the end of the Royal Navy as we know it.

rose—

rose—

I will give way to the former Minister.

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that, from sail to ironclad, ironclad to dreadnought, dreadnought to highly capable frigate, we need to make the next generational leap? If we find ourselves caught in programmes that deliver last year’s capability, we will remove any wriggle room or space to make that jump into autonomy and automation.

I agree with everything that the hon. Member has just said, and I thank him. However, all I am highlighting is that, on past performance, going from PowerPoints to ships at sea in nine years with several classes of ship seems extremely risky. Moreover, the DIP sets aside only £1.3 billion in the first funded period to set up those ships. The remainder of the investment falls beyond 2030. I want to move to autonomy because it is the right thing to do, but that seems like an incredibly risky bet.

Will my hon. Friend give way?

I will make some progress because I am having eyes made at me by Madam Deputy Speaker. The DIP commits £8.6 billion to the global combat air programme, which is the sixth-generation fighter jet that we are building with Italy and Japan. Realistically, we will get the jets in service sometime after 2040. They are manned fighter jets. I ask hon. Members to cast their minds forward to beyond Putin’s death—he will probably be buried by that point—and ask themselves whether, in 2040, humans will be flying fighter jets. I think the answer is no. The Minister is a former pilot, so he will always argue for humans in fighter jets, but I will present my argument. When we dig into GCAP, we find that it is a crewed rather than an uncrewed system because that is what our Japanese partners wanted.

Will the hon. Member give way?

I am afraid that I will not because I want to make progress. We are privileging a good diplomatic relationship, which would weather the storm of our pulling out of GCAP, over military capability. We must consider whether we want manned fighter jets in 2040 or a Royal Navy right now. Do we want frigates and destroyers in the next four years? Do we want to transition effectively, in a funded way, to a hybrid Navy, or manned fighter jets in 2040? The same story is repeated wherever we look: deep precision strike missiles are due in the early 2030s; nuclear-enabled F-35As are due in the early 2030s; putting 76,000 soldiers in the British Army to reverse the Tory cuts is an investment through to 2035. [Interruption.] I know that hon. Members were waiting for that—I had to get one little elbow in the ribs. Time and again, the capability that the threat demands by 2030 is scheduled for after 2030, funded by a spending review that has not happened and has been signed off by no one. That leaves one final question: does the current Prime Minister believe his own threat assessment? If he does and he is not funding it—not putting his money, or our money, where his mouth is—that is highly negligent. Perhaps he does not believe his own intelligence chiefs’ assessments and those of his partners. In that case, he should tell us. I fear that future generations will look back at this Labour Government’s approach to defence with their heads in their hands.

I impose an immediate six-minute time limit.

Everyone in this debate will rightly speak about defence spending, procurement and ammunition, and those things all absolutely matter, but I want to ask a broader question: what does warfighting readiness actually mean in 2026? For too long, we have measured military strength by the number of ships afloat, aircraft we fly or tanks we field, and those capabilities will remain essential, but recent conflicts have reminded us that wars are rarely won by militaries alone; wars are won by nations. They are won by industries that can out-produce an adversary, economies that can absorb shocks, and societies resilient enough to sustain conflict over time. I have seen this at first hand in Ukraine. Time and again, I have met individuals whose courage is beyond question, but courage alone is not enough. Success depends on whether ammunition arrives when it is needed, whether new technology can be adapted in weeks rather than years, and whether industry can keep pace with the demands of the battlefield. The side that learns, adapts and regenerates fastest gains the advantage, and that should challenge how we think about readiness. Warfighting readiness is no longer simply the responsibility of the Ministry of Defence. It is an industrial strategy, an energy strategy and a technological strategy. Ultimately, it is a national resilience strategy. If our energy networks are vulnerable, if our communications can be disrupted, if our supply chains depend on hostile states, if our British industry cannot rapidly increase production when conflict begins, our armed forces will inherit those weaknesses from day one of any crisis. That is why resilience must sit at the heart of our national security. We often talk about stockpiles, and rightly so, but I think the more important question is not how many missiles are sitting in a warehouse today; it is how many missiles British industry can produce every month after six months of sustained conflict. Modern warfare consumes munitions at a pace that few of us can comprehend or imagine, but Ukraine is teaching us lessons: 7,000 to 10,000 drones flying a day; 12,000 artillery rounds fired a day; and 1 million drones, in some cases, produced over two months.

I recently met a number of small and medium-sized enterprises and start-up companies that want to produce drones and autonomous systems and to integrate AI more, but they are concerned about the pace of change in the MOD. Does my hon. and gallant Friend believe that the MOD needs to start pacing up and getting on with the job of working with these companies to provide us with the sort of protection we need?

I could not agree more with my hon. Friend. Data is the new gunpowder. AI is absolutely critical in defence, and we should use all of our technological advantage to move faster and further than ever before. We should be bold and jump to the next generation of systems, and not wait for anyone else to lead—we should lead ourselves. The lesson from my perspective is clear: stockpiles matter, but the ability to regenerate them matters even more. That is why I welcome the Government’s commitment to rebuild munition stockpiles, expand domestic production capacity and invest in British defence industry. Those are investments not just in military capability, but in national resilience. The same is true for technology. Ukraine has demonstrated that innovation cycles measured in months can outperform procurement cycles measured in decades. Drones, autonomous systems, software and artificial intelligence are changing warfare at an extraordinary speed, and it will only ever get faster. Readiness, therefore, means building a procurement system that can adapt just as quickly, giving innovative British companies a route into defence and ensuring that our armed forces can evolve as rapidly as the threats they face. We have at present over 10,000 people in Defence Equipment and Support—that is, 10,000 people doing procurement. I am not saying that it is inefficient, but I am saying that bureaucracy sometimes gets in the way of speed.

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech. Does he agree that embedding that culture of innovation and iteration in the MOD is critical to ensuring that we can move as quickly as possible?

I completely agree with my hon. Friend. This is about cultural change as much as adopting technology. If we were to adopt even the very simplest AI models now in how we do procurement, and move on to the next generation, we would find that the system speeds up, efficiencies are made and the right kit gets into the right hands far quicker than it does now. Ultimately, rearmament is not about preparing for war because we expect it; it is about ensuring that war never happens in the first place. The purpose of rearmament is deterrence, and deterrence rests on three foundations: capable armed forces, political resolve and the industrial capacity to sustain both. If any one of those is missing, deterrence becomes far less credible when faced with an autocratic nation with huge industrial resilience. As we discuss rearmament today, let us think beyond platforms, procurement and spending lines. The defining lesson of modern conflict is that warfighting readiness is not simply a military condition; it is a national condition.

The hon. and gallant Gentleman is in a unique position to advise the House on his assessment of the DIP as published. Can he give us his view on whether the quantity of funds provided and the certainty of the period over which they will be provided are sufficient to achieve the kind of industrial step change that he is advocating in his excellent speech?

I have been clear, since several weeks ago, that I was not content with the funding for the DIP or the transformational nature of it. I have been really encouraged in the last couple of weeks by the speed at which it is moving. We need to move more, and I think the spending review in due course will round that off. My perspective is that we must not underestimate the level of change that is required. This is systemic within the Department and within the single services, and it has to move a quantum leap forward—no pun intended—if we are going to deliver the change that is required. If Britain wants armed forces that are capable of fighting and winning, we must build a country that can endure, adapt and sustain them. In modern conflict, as Ukraine has taught us, the line between the military and civilian worlds has all but disappeared. That is what true readiness looks like, and that is the challenge before us.

It is an honour to succeed the hon. and gallant Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) in this debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) who opened the debate—a very timely debate it is, too. I particularly commend the point that the former Minister for the Armed Forces, the hon. and gallant Member for Birmingham Selly Oak, made about this being a whole-of-nation approach, because we are preparing for war. We might actually be at war in some senses, because Russia is knowingly saying that it is conducting a war against NATO, and we are certainly subject to a hybrid war against our national infrastructure—hacking our hospitals, closing down Jaguar Land Rover and harassing our shipping. This is a very low level of war, but we have certainly been under attack from the way that Russia rations gas to western Europe as a weapon. Turning energy into a weapon, turning food into a weapon—Russia is doing the lot, and the writing is on the wall. The Government still have not woken up to the fact that the head of NATO, and even the Prime Minister at Munich, has said that we have to be ready to fight a war—a shooting, kinetic war—against Russia by 2030. There is no sign in the implementation of policy that the Government understand the urgency of that. There are plenty of people in Government who get the urgency of this, and I met some of them with Lord Robertson earlier this week to be briefed on national resilience, but there is a deep reluctance in the Government to recognise that to mobilise for war is not about the armed forces and a few branches of Government. Armies may fight battles, but nations fight wars. If the whole nation is not galvanised to do what is necessary, to be ready for what is going to happen, and to make the sacrifices and suffer the pain of diverting resources to less popular things than the popular things that Governments tend to spend their money on, we are not ready for war.

The hon. Member is making a good and strong point. Does he agree that, frankly, it boils down to the fact that the Government must be much blunter with the British people about the nature of the threat we face?

Yes, and I think the Government have plans for that, but they keep pulling back because it is a difficult thing to talk about. The spin doctors and spads will tell their political masters, “Oh no, don’t talk about that—the polling says it is terrible.” I am afraid that we have to confront the polling. We have to confront the population with the ugly truth: this country is at far greater risk than it has ever been since the height of the cold war.

On the point about communicating with the public, there is a way to do it. I visited Norway recently, and it has communicated with its population incredibly well, to the extent that it has this concept of total defence and civil preparedness, where everybody in the entire nation recognises that they have a role to play. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that we can learn a lot from some of our friends and allies?

In this paper entitled “Understanding the UK’s Transition to Warfighting Readiness” that I am just about to explain briefly to the House, we refer to Norway’s concept. Norway’s total war concept is being embedded in its national life and embedded across Government policy through all branches of Government. For example, we refer in the report to the need to galvanise our universities to be ready for war, so that research and development programmes are directed towards suitable and useful capability, creating sovereign national capability and protecting those research programmes from foreign infiltration. I love having foreign students in our universities—it is good for the economy and for our universities—but we cannot have Chinese nationals at the heart of chip manufacture and design, robotics or AI systems. We have to protect our national technology from being spied on by people sent to this country to go to our universities in order to collect that information, steal it and give it to our enemies. The context of the document, which is almost old hat even though it is only a few months old, is the changing geopolitical situation, the withdrawal of America from European security, the collapse of the rules-based international order, the failure of democratic governance models to rise to the challenge, the unpreparedness of most western democracies to be ready to confront the hybrid warfare that we already face, and our lack of adaptability. I commend the point made by the former Armed Forces Minister: there is no point in ordering a whole lot of kit that will be out of date as soon as we get to the next war. If the next war starts in the Balkans, the Baltic states or Poland, it will be about drones. The Government are moving some way on that, but we are so slow. The Ukrainians were way ahead of us in helping to protect the Gulf states while we were still sending multimillion-pound aircraft that cost £25 million an hour to fly to shoot down a drone that cost £150,000. We must adapt our industry to produce cheap, numerous capability so that we have the scale to deal with that. We need that whole-of-society mobilisation. We need much more adaptable governance.

On that point, will the hon. Member give way?

We need resilient financial systems. We need sovereign defence capabilities and sovereign critical national infrastructure. I am glad that we have stopped handing over so much of our CNI to foreign owners, but an immediate, radical transformation is required. This document is 19,000 words drafted for me and for my friend the hon. Member for Widnes and Halewood (Derek Twigg), who serves on the Defence Committee and is a renowned expert on defence in the House, by Chris Donnelly, who used to be a Soviet expert at NATO, worked in the Ministry of Defence and finished up teaching at Shrivenham. He is a wise defence guru. If hon. Members want to know how much really needs to be changed, they should just read through these 19,000 words of analysis and recommendations. There is a huge task, but to carry it through we need to carry the people. The SDR promised a national conversation—where is that national conversation?

On that point, will the hon. Member give way?

There is a national conversation about who will be the next Prime Minister or whether there will be a by-election in Clacton, but there is no such national conversation about the existential threats to our freedom and democracy. It is democracy across the western world that is failing this challenge. The autocracies are winning at the moment. We are facing circumstances where Russia may well be struggling in the Ukraine war, but that makes it more unpredictable. What will Putin do as he feels that his political support is slipping away and Russia’s vulnerability is increasing now that there are petrol queues in Moscow and explosions in Russian cities? There is a growing awareness—it has even been said in the last 24 hours by a serious propagandist for Mr Putin—that this is no longer a special military operation; it is a war. The circumstances are changing as we speak, and I am afraid that a lack of urgency is being shown by the whole House, apart from, say, the Defence Committee and the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. This is how we get into wars—by being unprepared for them. We need to change our whole concept of deterrence from the old concept that somehow just having a nuclear weapon keeps us safe. No, we must have a much more flexible ability to respond to changing circumstances. What will happen when the Russians move into a Russian-speaking town in one of the Balkan states? What will we do as our soldiers start being killed? Will we start letting off nuclear weapons or will we have analogous, appropriate, flexible military capability to be able to respond and escalate at pace? Our inability to escalate is the greatest danger at the moment.

I thank the hon. Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) for securing the debate. I was proud to join him, the hon. Member for Spelthorne (Lincoln Jopp) and Field Marshal Lord Richards of Herstmonceux in creating the all-party parliamentary group on rearmament. We are discussing a topic that we all agree on: the threat that faces the country and the necessity for us to rearm. I had hoped that the tone of the debate would have been slightly less political. I feel like we have had a little bit of amnesia as to how we have got to where we are. I do not intend to focus on that too much, but I am sure that others will make the point about the decline in the size of the Army over the past 14 years, the decline in the size of the Air Force, and about the frigate fleet—we talk about the frigate gap—and what happened to frigate and destroyer construction. We should remember that the threat has not just arrived. There was not a meaningful increase in defence spending after the annexation of Crimea, and there was not a meaningful increase after Putin violated Minsk I or Minsk II. Indeed, there was not a significant increase in defence spending after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. That context is really important.

The hon. Member is right on the funding—I will mention that later—but one important thing that did happen after 2014 was under what was then called Operation Orbital. We began training Ukrainian soldiers on Salisbury plain, because they knew what was coming—and, I think, perhaps so did we. We will talk about the money in a minute, but the training of Ukrainian troops in Britain did start fairly shortly after 2014.

I agree with the right hon. Member, but I am not sure whether his point is relevant to the one I was making about the broad context of defence procurement. There has been great cross-party consensus on what we are doing with Ukraine, and we should ensure that that continues. I also want to comment on the defence nuclear enterprise. Under the DIP, we will be spending £45 billion over the forthcoming period on the incredibly important nuclear deterrent. It is right that we do that, but that amounts to 25% of the defence budget. The right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) is in his place. The other week, I was reading his arguments at the time of the coalition Government, urging them to press ahead with the renewal of Trident, which they did not do. That cost us many years and has cost us many billions of pounds that we could be spending today on conventional forces. It means that we have tired Trident submarines heading out to sea beyond when they should be doing so, and we have crews on extended patrols of 150, 200 or 250 days. That is the cost of the decisions made at that time. I want to talk a little about ensuring that we do not fall into Russia’s trap. Of course, there is a significant threat from Russia, which is both conventional and hybrid—

Will the hon. Member give way?

The hon. Gentleman did not give many interventions to Labour Members. If it is relevant, I will be happy to take it.

I happen to agree with the hon. Member about the failure of the coalition Government to make progress with the deterrent, but there were many of us complaining about that at the time, including my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). Indeed, as shadow Defence Secretary in the early 2000s, I was complaining about the cuts in defence spending that were then being made as we went to war in Iraq and as we went to war in Afghanistan. I very much welcome the hon. Member’s bipartisan approach, but rather than pretending to be bipartisan, and making oblique references to what happened under previous Governments, he should be bipartisan, and then we would all get on much better.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his advice. If he gives me time, he may find that comes later in my speech. We should not allow Russia to make us talk ourselves into a place of weakness. As the then Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff put it to the Defence Committee, “If the British Army was asked to fight tonight, it would fight tonight.” Our readiness is not where we would want it to be, but that is not the same as saying that Britain is defenceless. I am not trying to be complacent; I am just making the point that we have excellent armed services and excellent people in uniform, and we should not talk as if those things do not exist. What we are saying is that we need more. In Ukraine, we have watched a country that is considerably smaller than our own, with far fewer resources, resist Russian aggression with extraordinary determination. We have to remember that Russia’s greatest weapon these days tends to be psychological. It wants us to believe that it cannot be beaten, that resistance is useless and that despite four years of attritional warfare and 1.4 million casualties, it somehow remains an unstoppable European military power that could overwhelm Britain and her allies, but it is not.

My hon. Friend is making an excellent, well thought-out speech. He talks about the weapons that Russia is using. Will he also reflect on how we need to be alive to its use of disinformation on social media and the internet as weapons? We need to be alive to that. I look across to the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), who I talk to regularly about the importance of the BBC World Service. Does my hon. Friend appreciate that that service is vital to the defence of this country as well?

My hon. Friend makes the point well. Indeed, in a recent interview my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Selly Oak (Al Carns) talked about how the recent attacks on Iran had destroyed a huge propaganda apparatus, which had contributed to 3% of total nationalist propaganda for Scottish separation from the United Kingdom. It is an important point. Following on from that, my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Selly Oak made the important point about strength being a foundation of deterrence. We are trying to deter war, not just by having capable armed forces but by having industrial capacity, well-stocked armouries, cutting-edge technology and a properly funded plan—because the stronger we are, the less likely conflict becomes. Every capability we field, every production line we expand and every drone we manufacture add to our deterrence, and that is incredibly important. At the beginning of the debate we talked about the credibility of getting to where we need to be. To be straightforward, it is my belief that we need to reach 3% of GDP by 2030. That is the minimum needed for us to show that we are committed to our plans and to our NATO allies in having the capabilities that we need. In fairness to the Government, they have made significant progress and we will be at 2.7% in 2027-28, which is the highest defence spend in three decades. The defence budget will also be 27% higher in real terms than it was at the start of the Parliament. Those are significant commitments that need to be recognised, but unfortunately, I am worried that they do not meet the strategic moment that we are at. The pace at which Russia might reconstitute, the lessons that are emerging from Ukraine over technology, the threats in the far east to our allies and our interests, and the demands placed upon us by NATO to meet certain targets mean that we have to move faster than the Government currently say. A spending review published in 2027 could, in theory, postpone most of the increase until the final year of the period. That would technically fulfil the commitment, but it would not reflect the urgency of the moment. There is a significant difference between spending 2.8% in 2028, 2.9% in 2029 and 3% in 2030, and remaining broadly flat and trying to make a leap—if we can prove that we can do that—at the end of that spending period. The Government deserve credit for changing the direction of travel from what it was in the past, but events have accelerated and so we need to accelerate our rearmament beyond those plans. There is no shortage of priorities, and the DIP was a significant document, as colleagues have described. I share their concerns about some of the autonomy in the Royal Navy. It is unlikely that we will have the new ships designed, tested and deployed within 10 years, and there will have to be service life extensions for the Type 45s. I worry about the lack or absence of—

The hon. Member is making a very important speech. I agree that there should be a life extension plan for the Type 45, but we know that there is not one. It is not costed, it is not in the DIP, and the plan is to take them out of service over several years from 2035. Does he agree that the common combat vessel would be better suited, in terms of putting that capability within the Type 31s that are being built, and that, indeed, that is what will likely happen?

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point and, eventually, we will have to look at the Type 31 hull as a possibility. Maybe the Minister will comment on contingency plans if continuous capability sustainment does not develop as it should. On the lack of commitments around ballistic missile defence, we are now an outlier in Europe in terms of air defences. Many countries in Europe—Spain, Germany, France, and so on—have Patriot or SAMP/T—

Order. I call Ian Roome.

I thank my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Tunbridge Wells (Mike Martin) for securing this debate. There are moments in politics when delay is not just a mistake, but a danger. This is one of those moments. The truth is that the world has become more dangerous much faster than Britain has become ready. The strategic defence review mattered because it stripped away comforting illusions. From the end of the cold war, we enjoyed a peace dividend that offered more security and more money for public services, but war has returned to Europe. Hostile states challenge us daily with cyber-attacks and sabotage, flouting international law and the liberal rules-based order. The absolute supremacy of the western alliance is no longer absolute. The SDR set out the right ambition: a more integrated force, a more digital force and a more resilient Britain, ready to learn lessons from Ukraine and the middle east. The defence investment plan accepts that analysis, but next comes the hard part: not only recognising the problem but solving it. Does the plan move quickly enough to make Britain safer? I fear it does not. We lost nearly a year waiting for the defence investment plan to be published. Months of hesitation when industry held its breath, investments stalled, contracts went unsigned and momentum was lost. The SDR talks of mobilising “rapidly in the event of a crisis”. If only that sense of urgency were reflected in government. Capability delayed is capability denied. The pace matters as much as the decision. The review rightly placed at the heart of Britain’s future military capability the digital targeting web—the system that links sensors, commanders and weapons into one integrated force that can identify a threat and destroy it. The defence investment plan commits money for our armed forces to do more, but too much of that funding is still on the other side of 2030. The Prime Minister has said that NATO could face an attack from Russia before 2030. Yesterday, Lord Robertson and General Sir Richard Barrons pointed out to the Defence Committee that many of the capabilities deemed urgently needed in the SDR are only due to arrive at the end of a nine-year investment cycle. An example is air and missile defence, where the scale of the £790 million investment falls short of what was planned and arrives years down the line.