A bigger defence budget is prompting fantasies about new kit – what we need is more soldiers

The defence secretary, John Healey, looked confident, relaxed and assured when he gave a short speech at the Institute for Government last week. In retrospect, it seems highly likely he already knew that he had won the battle for increased defence spending. A week later, the prime minister confirmed not only that defence spending would reach the totemic 2.5 per cent of GDP level earlier than planned (2026-27), but it would then head towards 3 per cent by 2033. Each and every year for the next few years, at least an extra £3bn will go to defence spending, taking the core budget from £54bn to around £66bn in under a decade.

What is absolutely certain: if you are in the Ministry of Defence (MoD) main building or any of the Service headquarters, seeing a commitment to £3bn-plus extra each year can only be seen as “good news” – it’s a far nicer place to be in than looking at battered and exhausted accounts, constantly scrabbling around for cash.

But there needs to be some careful thought about what this extra money is, what it can be used for, and what it will do as regards the shape and capabilities of the services, and UK defence as a whole.

In the immediate aftermath of the defence budget increase, there has been an online boom in people “pre-spending” the extra cash, seeing pet programmes as now being funded. If only life were that simple.

There is no defence cash-and-carry warehouse where you can load up pallets of ships, fighters, or tanks, pay for them and walk off.

If you were to sign a contract for more Typhoon fighters (luckily, there is a “hot” supply chain, as Germany, Italy, and Spain all ordered extra aircraft over the past 18 months) tomorrow, you wouldn’t get delivery for around 28 months – that’s just what it takes to source all of the bits and pieces, before assembly. With some extra funding, you might bring this down to around two years. Frigates? At a “war economy” pace, from order to delivery is 36-40 months. Tanks and other complex armoured, actually, could be delivered in around two years.

The point is simple: even with this extra money being devoted to defence, anyone expecting to see anything dramatically different in a year’s time to what they look like today is going to be disappointed. Eliminating the capability gaps in all of the services, the holes, and the chasms will be the work of many years, even if everything is to be done at the fastest possible speed.

There is concern that the extra money might have to go to fill a range of “black holes” across the various MoD budgets. The National Audit Office (NAO) has reported that there is a gap between aspirations and cash of at least £14bn in the equipment budget, and privately, NAO insiders feel that it is a far bigger gap than that. The MoD infrastructure is, in many areas, still crumbling, and there are billions in unfunded work needed to sort this out.

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If you want to get a physical definition of “silence”, ask the MoD about the likely black hole in the nuclear enterprise… But to repeat the wider point: the MoD will be in a better position to sort things out with the extra cash than it would be without it.

So, is the picture for the MoD, even with this extra money, actually quite a gloomy one? Well, there are things that the ministry could deal with on an extremely rapid basis, ones which would also see earlier resolution. Ammunition and missile stocks are all totally unsuitable for the possibility of fighting a high-end war – various reports have (correctly) put the UK’s ammo bunkers as capable of supporting a war for a week, maybe two, but not more than that. It ought to be incredibly easy to go to the largest UK ammo/missile suppliers (MBDA, BAE Systems, Thales), and get them to move to all-out production of their products, with prices that would fall from long production runs. In fact, it is still astounding that this has not occurred over the past two or three years anyway.

Money for more exercises, more training, putting more pilots through the training programme so that they reach squadrons in less than the four-five years that it takes today. All of these areas could benefit from more – and better focused – spending. These areas might not be as sexy as a new submarine, but they are vital, and many of the UK’s defence capability holes are not just the equipment ones – they are all the things that underpin equipment, like training, infrastructure and spare parts.

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The biggest unknown question about this increased spend is this: will Healey be allowed to increase the personnel size of any of the services? The past 25 years have seen the services all heading in one direction: down. It is really obvious that the smaller service size is a limiting factor to what they can do for UK defence, so might a slight increase in size be on the cards. The Treasury hates this, viscerally, with the pensions and social costs further down the line. But the case for more personnel ought to be easy to make.

Having won the overall battle on defence spending, has Healey got the wind in his (political) sails to win the next battle, this time over the size of the services? This will be one to watch.

A rule of thumb though: the average capitation rate for a serviceperson is £70,000 (pay, national insurance, pensions contributions, some day-to-day costs), so an extra 10,000 soldiers for the army will cost a basic £750m per year – and there might need to be extra barracks, quarters and the like, all with extra costs.

Actually, winning the battle over higher defence spending might have been the easy part for Healey – absorbing and spending the extra money well is going to be as great a challenge, if not an even larger one.