U.K. to hike military spending
Prime minister responding to ‘threats’ from Russia, China
LONDON — U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak pledged Monday to increase military funding by 5 billion pounds ($6 billion) over the next two years in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the “epoch-defining challenge” posed by China.
The increase, part of a major update to U.K. foreign and defense policy, is less than military officials wanted. Sunak said the U.K. would increase military spending to 2.5 percent of gross domestic product “in the longer term,” but didn’t set a date. Britain currently spends just over 2 percent of GDP on defense, and military chiefs want it to rise to 3 percent.
The extra money will be used, in part, to replenish Britain’s ammunition stocks, depleted from supplying Ukraine in its defense against Russia. Some will also go towards a U.k.-u.s.-australia deal to build nuclear-powered submarines.
“The world has become more volatile, the threats to our security have increased,” Sunak told the BBC during a visit to the U.S. “It’s important that we protect ourselves against those.”
Britain last produced a defense, security and foreign policy framework, known as the Integrated Review, in 2021.
The government ordered an update in response to an increasingly volatile world. The new report, released Monday, said “there is a growing prospect that the international security environment will further deteriorate in the coming years, with state threats increasing and diversifying in Europe and beyond.”
Moscow’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine upended European security order, and the review said Russia poses “the most acute threat to the U.K.’S security.”
The U.K. is also increasingly concerned about what the government calls “the epoch-defining challenge presented by the Chinese Communist Party’s increasingly concerning military, financial and diplomatic activity.”
The defense review said that “wherever the Chinese Communist Party’s actions and stated intent threaten the U.K.’S interests, we will take swift and robust action to protect them.”
U.K. intelligence agencies have expressed growing concern about China’s military might, covert activities and economic muscle.
The review doesn’t brand China itself a threat to the U.K., and Sunak has stressed the need for economic ties with China, to the annoyance of more hawkish members of the governing Conservative Party.
“We are sliding towards a new
Cold War,” said Conservative lawmaker Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the House of Commons Defense Committee. “Threats are increasing, but here we are staying on a peacetime budget.”