Britain is not ready for the next war and is not being honest with itself about what getting ready will cost, the former Armed Forces Minister Al Carns has said, in a series of public interventions the day after he resigned from the Ministry of Defence alongside John Healey over the Defence Investment Plan.
Carns, the MP for Birmingham Selly Oak and a former Royal Marines colonel who is among the most decorated members of the Commons, quit on Thursday as one of two ministers and two parliamentary private secretaries to leave the department over the funding settlement that prompted the Defence Secretary’s resignation.
On Friday he set out his argument in a string of posts on X that ranged well beyond the size of the defence budget.
“Britain spent a decade choosing to be smaller in the world,” Carns wrote. The rules on communications, energy and trade were being rewritten, he said, “By China. By Russia. By countries that take their own security seriously.” Britain needed to be at that table, he argued, and “that’s a choice we must make.” He drew the consequences in blunt terms: “Strong countries get cheap energy. Weak countries pay whatever the strong ones decide.”
In a second post, the former minister set out where he believes the real contest now sits. “The next war won’t be won by armies, navies or air forces alone,” he wrote. “It’ll be won by the country whose 19 year olds can code, whose factories can build drones in weeks not years, and whose grid stays on when someone tries to switch it off.” The fight now, he said, was “Industry. Society. Economy.”
And his verdict on the United Kingdom’s position was unsparing: “We’re not ready. And we’re not being honest about what getting ready will cost.”
A third post pulled the argument back to the household level. “Every war now shows up on your energy bill,” Carns wrote. “Defence isn’t separate from the economy any more. It is the economy.” The countries that invest in it, he added, “get to write the rules. Everyone else lives by them.”
The interventions echo the case made by Healey in his resignation letter, in which the outgoing Defence Secretary told the Prime Minister the settlement behind the Defence Investment Plan was backloaded, would reach just 2.68 per cent of GDP by 2030 against the three per cent headmark he had pressed for, and would force decisions that could make the country less safe.
They also chime with the warning delivered on Thursday evening by General Sir Richard Barrons, co-author of the Strategic Defence Review, who told BBC Newsnight the funding decision was a catastrophe that would force cuts “completely at odds” with the world the government itself describes.
Carns brought a weight of operational credibility to the ministerial team he has now left, having served in Afghanistan and Iraq across a twenty-four-year career in the Royal Marines that included the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross, before entering Parliament in 2024 and taking the Armed Forces portfolio in September of last year. His departure, alongside Healey’s, leaves the Ministry of Defence without the two ministers most closely associated with the case for faster rearmament at the precise moment the government must decide whether to publish, delay or reopen the Defence Investment Plan ahead of next month’s NATO summit in Ankara.
Well I do not disagree with him. Politicians need reality more than they need virtue signalling. We need to reshore industry & give our NEETS a job in it or the military. Building the Severn & Wash barriers would be expensive to start, but then give us cheap reliable energy for the next 150 years.
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I would love to know where this table is and how much it’s going to cost to sit at it. Time to have an honest conversation with the tax payer and tell them why they need to spend so much money on a expeditionary military capable of global deployments instead of lying to them about a threat posed by a country with the second best army in Ukraine.
China and Russia don’t control s**t. American has cut China off from its biggest source of energy for four months with an illegal war and China has been completely powerless to do a thing about it. Russia is a joke.
We could spend tens of billions more and not have a single bit more influence on the USA. The UN has ceased to exists and there is effectively no rules based order and there is nothing the UK can do about it because no one can do anything about it. Even the might USA with a trillion dollar budget has just be humiliated by a tin pit theocracy in the Middle East.
It’s time we start minding our own business, dominate our own North Atlantic region and work on being as self sufficient as possible.
This may come as a shock Jim but I agree with everything you have said here. My one question is about the carriers outside the Atlantic. Otherwise bang on.
Hi Geoff, after what I have seen of the US war against Iran, I have come to the conclusion that carriers are more vital than ever. AirPower is more devastating than ever, especially with a platform as capable as the F35.
However airbases are so vulnerable to saturation attacks by missiles and drones I think the best way to get aircraft close to a front is having them on something that moves.
I could see the QE’s being a vital NATO asset around skandanavia and the Baltic region in the event of a war with Russia and a real asset that could let us strike key Russian assets in the Kola Peninsula if they carried out an attack on the UK.
To be honest I am unsure what to do with the carriers now or how to operate them. Strike carrier? Amphib? Hybrid of the two? My father had the misfortune to visit the Kola Peninsula, specifically Murmansk, three times during WW2 on HMS Starling, as an a/s convoy escort. He hated the place.
Can we hit the Russians though. From the Atlantic, Murmansk is between three and six hundred miles, depending on how far north you are, and the C.R. of an F35 is 500 miles. and would be up against serious Russian intervention. Very little use as an Atlantic escort carrier as in WW2. As an ASW asset? Potentially a sitting duck for a Russian sub or long range missile.
China controls roughly 60% of global mine production and over 90% of all processing and refining of rare earth metals. Without access to those, technology-wise your society goes back to the 1950s, including your military.
And yet of all the nations imposing fuel rationing or price-hikes, etc, China isn’t amongst them. China hasn’t done anything about the US blockade of Iranian oil because it doesn’t need to.
The UK is an island and ‘our business’ has always been the sea and the freedom to navigate and trade. Both for imports and exports.
We’ve also never thought that we don’t need allies, especially those located in theatre around the world. Britain’s greatest military strength has always been the ability to recruit allies and keep them on board. (Something Trump’s America desperately needs to work on.)
Hi Spock, not really no, the biggest chunk of “rare earths” we use today is from recycling of rare earths. The UK uses very little rare earths and what we do use is normally imported in finished products
Chinas curbs are an inconvenience but one that’s is easily got around (see Belgium exports to the USA) and won’t last long. Once china throws its weight around in RE everyone else started to reopen old mines and facilities. The RE market is tiny, they are not particularly rare or expensive minerals to obtain just inconvenient to refine.
The UK and USA controls global finance, without that your economy goes back to the 1750’s. But as soon as we start throwing our weight around and cutting people off then the world adapts and moves on.
I read your bit about the UK being an island and our sea trade always being important, it’s a bit of a cliche statement at this point. The reality is that most of our sea based trade crosses on ferries from Calais, almost all our exports are either digital or fly on aircraft out of Heathrow.
It’s another statement endlessly propagated by the military and the press but the reality is that sea based trade is no more or less important to the UK than every country in the world. The way to maintain sea based trade is via stability and the rule of law, as America is finding out in Hormuz navies are largely useless now for keeping open choke points.
Our best course of action is to be as self sufficient as possible which means lots of solar panels in Kent and as many wind turbines in the North Sea as possible. Not importing gas from Qatar or coal from Brazil.
Doh, the problem is the rare earths in the imported products we need 🤦🏻♂️
Most stealth coatings use Chinese rare-earth elements, the F35 over 400kg of the stuff in total.
You waffle on about exports, completely ignoring the UK needs imports to survive. Perhaps you missed the entire WW2 Battle of the Atlantic and food-rationing?
We don’t import coal from Brazil.
Jim you know as well as I do that Russia’s army is not the threat to the UK’s standing nor our populace. Almost none of the forces they have used in Ukraine are the ones that could be used against us, and their SSN and undersea warfare fleets are still going strong as the only major point of investment in their Navy.
Your point to Spock about not being dependent on the sea isn’t true. According to the government 16,000 HGVs combined enter the UK through Dover and the Channel Tunnel each day. Felixtowe alone handles 11,000 containers daily, the combined Ports of London take 15,000, Southampton takes 2,000 and Humber Ports take 2,500. That doesn’t account at all for LNG, which all comes by sea, oil, quarry materials or the many smaller container ports. Even solid goods like cars and refrigerated goods are infeasible to transport overland due to their bulk or geographical distance. The idea of most of our physical exports leaving by air travel is laughable.
I completely agree we need self-sufficiency. That can take the form of missile defences on key ports, infrastructure and military sites; it could be a shift towards a combination of the more efficient renewables and nuclear power, both of which we should not depend on others for; it means producing as much of our own food as possible and retaining productive farmland in the SE as much as possible. But it doesn’t have to be the limit of our ambitions.
The UK retains the same geographical advantages it has had since the 15th century and those it has worked to add on ever since, and should exploit them to gain influence. We control sea access to Europe; a powerful navy maintains stability in the Atlantic and increases the dependence of continental nations on our goodwill. We have influence over the sea access through Suez, through Gibraltar, through the Drake Passage and between the North and South Atlantic; given investment in air power we have the ability to severely limit the capacity our opponents to move covertly and shift forces to act against our interests. We have a network of bases across the globe linked by air bridges and sea routes; with strong long range strike forces there are very few places on Earth from which it is possible to threaten the UK without the risk of retribution.
Just like everyone else we can’t force a strait open by brute force or go toe to toe with the PLAN but if we play our cards right we can shape the world to our favour much more than we do at the moment.
Wow that was way too many semicolons I need to stop doing that.
Nah, the semicolon is much underused.
‘The rules on communications, energy and trade were being rewritten, he said, “By China. By Russia. By countries that take their own security seriously.” Britain needed to be at that table, he argued, and “that’s a choice we must make.” He drew the consequences in blunt terms: ‘Strong countries get cheap energy. Weak countries pay whatever the strong ones decide.’
And nowhere within the world’s ‘strong’ countries will you see ‘net zero’ policies.
The alarmist worst case climate scenario RCP8.5 (upon which Britain’s ‘net zero’ policy is based), generated by deeply flawed climate models, has now been jettisoned as ‘implausible’.
Time for Britain to rejoin the strong.
Discarding ‘net zero’ policies offers a pain free way of getting back there.
Monro never posts about anything except his fossil-fuel disinformation… 🤦🏻♂️
‘Pity the sorrows of the poor blind,
For they can but little comfort find;
As they walk along the street,
They know not where to put their feet.
They are deprived of that earthly joy
Of seeing either man, woman, or boy;
Sad and lonely through the world they go,
Not knowing a friend from a foe:
Nor the difference betwixt day and night,
For the want of their eyesight;’
McGonagall
Are you joking, China is doing more for net zero than the rest of the world combined. It’s the reason their country hasn’t been crippled by the US Iran war.
James, old boy, I actually think it may be you that is the joker here:
‘A major change in the way that China measures its core climate goal has effectively halved the growth in the country’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the past five years.
The revised measure of “carbon intensity”, the amount of CO2 per unit of economic output, implies that China’s emissions have only gone up by 7% from 2020-2025.
This is just half of the 14% rise indicated by previous official statistics.
On paper, the revision creates a gap of 700m tonnes of CO2 (MtCO2) per year, equivalent to the total emissions of Germany or South Korea.’
Carbon Brief May 2026
‘China began construction on 94.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired power capacity in 2024, the highest level since 2015. The construction boom extended into 2025, when roughly 78 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity were commissioned, also marking largest annual increase in a decade.
The trend continues this year, as the country added another 24 gigawatts of coal power in the first quarter…
The arguments to say we need this because of what’s happening with the U.S. attacking Iran, those arguments…they keep using them because many political leaders don’t think that renewables are cheaper than fossil energy.’
I have seen so many morons on this site and on twitter try and defend the DIP or say we should give the scumbag Labour party a chance when it comes to defence.
The fact Carn and Healey have both resigned tells me everyone who called out Starmer and his party that is dominated by far left backbenchers and its socialist membership, are going to be 100% justified in their views when the DIP finally drops.
Who knows maybe they will finally modify this joke of a plan at the last minute 🤷♂️
Have you seen the latest on prison reform as well? People only to serve 30% in custody now, applied retrospectively, there will be hundreds if not thousands of dangerous scum bags dumped on the streets in a rushed frenzy of cell emptying. This government don’t take any sort of defence or public protection seriously. The priority is saving money to give out handouts to lazy scroungers and foreigners. I defended them early on, giving them the benefit of the doubt that time is needed to turn things around, the evidence though shows they are doing the bloody opposite of that!
I have ‘t seen a single comment on here defending the DiP
How many warnings do the chancellor and PM need before they do anything? (I include the useless tories in this too – all talk no action). I’d like to see where the UK sits in the NATO league tables for % GDP spend just on conventional capabilities (excluding Afghan resettlement, Nuclear, pensions, 61000 civil servants).
NATO’s rules for defence spending includes military pensions.
Thanks for clarifying Spock. Though pensions add nothing to any military capability so it’s a nonsense to include. Still be good to know conventional spend benchmarks
So will Carbs run for Labour leader, or will he drop out if he’s promised the post of Defence Secretary? 🤔
Labour Party doesn’t work like that mate, there is no one to make any promises too.
The members will vote on the next leader. If Burnham wins his by election it will be him. Burnham has no allies in the current cabinet or in much of the PLP and he won’t need any support from anyone in the PLP as he will have a massive mandate from the members, huge majority in the commons and a sliver of popularity with the public.
Labour leaders especially with big majorities are almost impossible or get rid of. That’s why Corbyn stayed so long and it’s what no one can get rid of Starmar except Starmar.
Seems you spent a millisecond thinking about that.
It’s perfectly possible for Burnham to promise Carns that he’ll get Defence if he’s elected leader. In fact, I’d bet money that Burnham is making such promises to buy-off possible opponents in the leadership race. Burnham will be confident that he’ll win in any race with just him and Starmer.
We’d be better off with him as Chancellor
A defence friendly chancellor would be good, but it’s actually the PM who holds the title of “First Lord of the Treasury”…
Earth to you Brits: You are irrelevant on the world stage and nothing any British government can do within the next decade will make you relevant again. Live in your bubble of pretensions. As happens to empires, they, like old soldiers, just fade away.
Not all empires. The one which has been globally predominant for the last 75 years is collapsing spectacularly rather than simply fading.
Chip Zizzzzzzle!! We lasted longer than you as top dog Big Buford Boy. Come back here when you have some REAL HISTORY…..
‘One day when George III was insane he heard that the Americans never had afternoon tea. This made him very obstinate and he invited them all to a compulsory tea-party at Boston: the Americans, however, started pouring the tea into Boston harbour and went on pouring things into Boston harbour until they were quite Independent, thus causing the United States’
The entire country was a terrible accident over afternoon tea…
Vatnik 💩