The last few years have seen Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Both invading forces stand accused of war crimes, and the costs in terms of human lives and spending have been enormous. While neither conflict is settling in a fashion which is equitable for the invaded parties, it does seem like both conflicts are coming to a close. Strange, then, that the British political and media class – specifically the BBC – have chosen this moment to tell us that now is the time to increase our ‘defence’ spending:
"The Conservatives had 14 years, they hollowed out our defence forces"
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson will not give a date for defence spending to rise to 2.5% GDP but says the government "recognise the need to spend more on defence"
#BBCLauraK https://t.co/ZcJLQoPjqe pic.twitter.com/ekBylGT9A4— BBC Politics (@BBCPolitics) February 23, 2025
In other words, defence contractors have gotten used to the extra income they made from arming Ukraine and Israel, and they don’t want the gravy train to end.
The BBC bubble
On Sunday 23 February, Laura Kuenssberg interviewed Labour Party education secretary Bridget Phillipson. The fact that Kuenssberg questioned Phillipson on defence spending and the armed forces rather than education tells you a lot about the ideology of the psychopaths at our national broadcaster. It’s important to understand, though, that while some described this exchange as a ‘grilling’, what’s far more disturbing is how closely aligned the BBC and Labour are:
Brigitte Phillipson very impressive on Sky & BBC, holding her cool under some fair grilling on the one channel & some really quite aggressive stuff on the other. She stood up really well to provocation in both cases. Can't remember Kuenssberg going after Tories with that gusto.
— @johnandi#FBPE#GTTO#LetsTryUBI#FollowBackFriday (@johnandi) February 23, 2025
In a clip the BBC felt worthy of sharing, Kuenssberg said:
And many of, people who work in this world, many of your political rivals, other people even like the boss of NATO, would say it’s also urgent that countries like Britain right now commit to spend more money, potentially a lot more money on defence.
Wow – shocking that the head of NATO – an organisation which exists solely to encircle Russia with an ever-growing web of expensive military bases – would want more money. Here’s what NATO boss Mark Rutte had to say in December 2024:
Russia is preparing for long-term confrontation, with Ukraine and with us. We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years… It is time to shift to a wartime mindset, and turbocharge our defence production and defence spending.
As of 2024, Russia had about 1.3 million active soldiers, about 2 millions reserve forces, and 250,000 paramilitary units. Statista shows how this compared to Ukraine:
Recent statistics reported by the BBC estimate that:
the true number of Russian military deaths could range from 146,194 to 211,169. If one adds estimated losses from DPR and LPR forces, the total number of Russian-aligned fatalities may range from 167,194 to 234,669.
This means Russia has probably lost something like 10% of its ‘Russian-aligned’ fighting forces. And that’s not to mention the financial cost, with Reuters reporting US claims in February 2024 that:
Russia has probably spent up to $211 billion in equipping, deploying and maintaining its troops for operations in Ukraine and Moscow has lost more than $10 billion in canceled or postponed arms sales
It’s worth noting that despite the above, recent reports show that Russia’s economy has been more resilient than some analysts initially predicted. It’s also worth noting that these human and financial costs are the result of Russia engaging a singular enemy. Now let’s have a look at NATO.
The NATO forces
Spread across its 32 member countries, NATO has around twice as many military personnel as Russia. Importantly, it also has more than five times as many aircraft.
Now let’s look back at what NATO boss Mark Rutte had to say:
We are not ready for what is coming our way in four to five years
We aren’t?
Because it looks like we’re more than ready. Unless you know something we don’t, like perhaps every Russian soldier will gain the ability to split into two like amoeba.
But forgetting all that, there’s also the glowing-green megaton elephant in the room that nobody seems to be talking about.
Nuclear NATO
Is everyone forgetting what the word ‘deterrent’ means in ‘nuclear deterrent’? Because our understanding is that we have a nuclear deterrent to deter other nuclear powers from going to war with us. And we know we’re not imagining that, because this is what the UK government has to say:
The purpose of nuclear deterrence is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression. Potential aggressors know that the costs of attacking the UK, or our NATO allies, could far outweigh any benefit they could hope to achieve. This deters states from using their nuclear weapons against us or carrying out the most extreme threats to our national security.
That’s weird, because over the past few years there have been many instances of British military bigwigs telling us that war with Russia is possible, such as general Roly Walker in 2024:
So what’s going on here?
Is the British military going rogue, and announcing to Russia and the rest of the world that we will forego using our nuclear deterrent for no apparent gain?
Or are military bigwigs like Mark Rutte and Roly Walker simply exaggerating the threats we face to secure more funding?
We’d lean towards the latter, because exaggerating the threats we face to secure more funding is literally the job of every military boss – at least it is under the Western neoliberal order, anyway.
This isn’t a new phenomenon; it’s simply one which persists, because there is zero pushback from journalists or politicians. It’s a topic Lewis Page covered in his 2006 book Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs, with an Independent review noting at the time:
The high offices of the police, the medical profession and the universities have fallen under ever more scrutiny and suspicion in recent years, but the media has largely ignored the Ministry of Defence. If the former naval officer Lewis Page has his way, all this is set to change.
The formal naval officer did not have his way unfortunately, and military bigwigs are still able to spew nonsense unchecked in the establishment safe space that is the British media.
Labour responds to the BBC
In the Kuenssberg interview, this is how Phillipson responded:
the defence secretary has also been clear that alongside increased spending, there has to be better spending. There is far too much waste, poor procurement, and bad decisions that are being made. So alongside extra investment, there has to be that programme of reform that John Healy, the defence secretary, has set out.
So Labour’s plan is to increase military spending while cutting down on military waste. It’s hard to see how they’ll achieve this given that most military spending is waste by design, whether it be preparing for a land war with Russia we’ll never have or this long, long list of failed projects published by Declassified.
Another important thing to remember is that we don’t simply exaggerate the threats we face; we also create new ones, and then we waste more money ‘countering’ them.
The axis of defence spending opportunities
In 2022, NPR published a piece giving some context to the shifting relationship between NATO and Russia. It reported in the piece:
The question: Should NATO, the mutual defense pact formed in the wake of World War II that has long served to represent Western interests and counter Russia’s influence in Europe, expand eastward?
NATO’s founding articles declare that any European country that is able to meet the alliance’s criteria for membership can join. This includes Ukraine. The U.S. and its allies in Europe have repeatedly said they are committed to that “open-door” policy.
But in the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO’s eastward march represents decades of broken promises from the West to Moscow.
“You promised us in the 1990s that [NATO] would not move an inch to the East. You cheated us shamelessly,” Putin said at a news conference in December.
The article carried a map showing the members who joined before 1992 and those who joined after:
What’s the relevance of 1992?
1992 was a year after the Soviet Union ended, and the beginning of the new relationship between the US and the Russian Federation. Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s then-leader, was described at the time as a Western “stooge who followed IMF and World Bank advice”. How easy it would have been for the West to treat Russia as just another victim of neoliberal extraction policies; instead, NATO continued to expand eastward as if the Cold War never ended, and this made the rise of a figure like Vladimir Putin more and more likely.
This isn’t to say Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was justified; it is to say that it wasn’t unexpected. Hostility, it turns out, breeds further hostility. There are many such cases, with examples from recent history including ISIS rising from the ashes of the Iraq war, and Iranian politicians taking a more hardline stance after the US branded them part of the Axis of Evil. Few in the West know that Iranian politicians and citizens responded sympathetically to American losses following 9/11, and of course they wouldn’t, because that narrative wouldn’t support further defence spending.
The military industrial complex, Labour, and the BBC
In his 1961 farewell address, US president Dwight Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial complex”. As he described it, this was a system in which the arms industry and political sphere became so entwined that they pursued war solely for their mutual enrichment. Sadly, this is the world we all now inhabit. It’s why president Joe Biden and his NATO allies turned down peace talks with Russia; it’s also why this same group refused to use their influence to stop Israel committing a genocide.
The total acceptance of military-industrial complex dogma is beyond apparent in the interview between Kuenssberg and Phillipson. Ignore the fact that our military ambitions only seem to make the world more dangerous – war is profit, and profit is the only thing that matters in the neoliberal world order:
Cutting disability benefits here, to spend on bombs to make people disabled in other countries, is depraved#Kuenssberg#bbclaurak
— ClarenceTheCrossEyedLion (@crhealy72) February 23, 2025
Featured image via the BBC
