Building The Warfare State

Whereas every other Department of State or its associated lobby is reviled for “always demanding more money”, Jonny Ball tweets:

I find this “defence as an engine for growth” stuff v tiresome. THERE ARE FEW THINGS LESS EFFECTIVE TO SPEND MONEY ON IF YOU WANT ECONOMIC MULTIPLIERS/LONG-TERM PRODUCTIVITY GAINS ETC.

Capital expenditure on: transport infrastructure + energy grid/generation + housebuilding + digital infrastructure/connectivity + investment in skills training are absolutely foundational for future growth.

We’re talking about depriving these areas of £££ so that we can give more contracts to Raytheon BAE for shitty equipment that doesn’t work/is unsuited to modern warfare. We’re fretting over our ability to protect bases in Bahrain, defend the UAE from attack (for some reason) & send frigates to Cyprus, when we can’t build infrastructure outside of London, can’t stop daily dinghies arriving on the Kent coastline, & we’ve effectively legalised petty criminality, we’ve seen 0 real wage/productivity growth in ~20yrs.

I’m all for targeted defence-industrial investment that’s GENUINELY leveraged to NATIONAL production/regional manufacturing jobs/NATIONAL resilience etc.:

👉Shift £££ from maintaining foreign bases/overseas deployments to domestic supply chains in post-industrial areas, making drone equipment, conventional weapons etc.

👉Supporting R&D in advanced materials, AI systems, microchips, satellite/space technologies etc with dual military/civilian uses

👉Boost cyber defences, national cyber resilience & attack capabilities

👉Drive to energy independence via nuclear, O&G, AND renewable investment; drive to food security

I’m not, however, prepared to forgo much-needed investment in civilian infrastructure & the public realm in order to placate the Sensible Realists™️who insist the most pressing issue facing the country is the fact that we can’t punctually deploy the Royal Navy to the Gulf, or that we’re “losing our influence” on the “world stage”, or that we, a rich island NATO member in the Eastern Atlantic, apparently can’t defend ourselves from a country 1500 miles away that’s unable to hold territory in a poor, corrupt, Russian-speaking, Russian Orthodox region of a non-NATO neighbour, full of people who used to vote for pro-Kremlin oligarchs. 

It’s insane, frankly.

And Tom Blackburn writes:

This week’s resignations of defence secretary John Healey and armed forces minister Al Carns have been lauded in the media and among the Westminster establishment as great acts of principle. In reality, they represent a calculated political intervention ahead of the Labour leadership contest expected later this summer; the aim is to narrow the range of acceptable debate before it even begins, and to ensure that Starmer’s successor — most likely Andy Burnham — commits to substantially higher military spending.

Healey’s resignation letter was rapturously received by the press, unsurprisingly given that it champions increased military spending at the cost of substantial public spending cuts elsewhere; warfare over welfare, in other words. His willingness to act as a catspaw for arms manufacturing interests and the security establishment has long been evident, hence the lavish praise for Healey and the inflated attempts to portray Carns (who apparently fancies himself a Labour leadership candidate) as a political heavyweight.

There is little reason to believe that Healey’s successor, Dan Jarvis, will be much different. The names and faces change, but the demands from on high for increased military expenditure continue to grow. Healey, we should remember, is conveniently slinking out of office with unanswered questions about his role in authorising RAF surveillance flights over Gaza in the midst of Israel’s genocide. This has, it goes without saying, attracted far less attention than the Westminster drama surrounding his resignation.

The government’s Defence Investment Plan proposes to hike military spending by 2.68 percent by 2030, while Healey wants a 3 percent increase. There is, as James Schneider has pointed out, remarkably little detail on what the extra money would actually be used for, the capabilities currently lacking that it would address, and the specific threats that would be countered by the additional expenditure.

Blowhards dutifully trooped onto TV this week to issue overwrought warnings of Russian troops marching down Whitehall if school breakfast clubs weren’t cut tout de suite. But Russia remains embroiled in an attritional war in Ukraine after more than four years. The notion that its forces are poised to suddenly sweep westward through Europe obviously defies logic, but even so, it is rarely subjected to serious scrutiny. In any case, Schneider notes, European NATO states’ military expenditure already vastly outweighs that of Russia, by a margin of $559 billion to $190 billion last year.

Advocates of increased arms spending sometimes take a different, less demented tack, presenting increased defence spending as an example of military Keynesianism and investment in industrial jobs and skills in areas where these are in short supply after decades of deindustrialisation. Some trade unions, particularly Unite and GMB, have adopted this rhetoric. But any benefits would be concentrated narrowly in a few locations, and their impact would, for most people, be greatly outweighed by the additional cuts to hospitals, schools, and social security that would follow.

Also largely absent from the debate, if it can be described as such, is any real analysis of the priorities driving military strategy and procurement. It is inconvenient to admit the obvious in public: namely that these are largely determined in Washington DC, and that much of the additional spending will flow into the coffers of American arms manufacturers while further cementing Britain’s status as an obedient vassal state to the US. Indeed, UK governments have for decades geared their armed forces more towards supporting US-led ‘expeditionary operations’ — read: wars of aggression — than towards defence in any meaningful sense.

To give Healey and Carns their due, their intervention is having the intended effect. Already, Andy Burnham has come out to insist that he is ‘not squeamish’ about taking the axe to benefits while promising to increase the military budget further. What remains entirely absent is an honest account of who will lose out as a result — welfare recipients are commonly portrayed as a monolithic parasitic mass — and what that means for those already struggling to make ends meet amid rising unemployment, much of it driven by the same US tech monopolies that stand to benefit from increased UK military spending.

The British public is being railroaded into swallowing ever-higher arms expenditure without being offered any clear answers about what it will pay for, why it is needed, or what it is intended to achieve — or, more to the point, what domestic sacrifices will be required to pay for it. This lack of clarity is, of course, not accidental; the obfuscation is entirely deliberate. Nor, in the absence of any anti-imperialist or anti-militarist candidate, can the forthcoming Labour leadership contest — now surely an inevitability — be expected to enlighten us.