Defence spending should go to five per cent of gross domestic product immediately, the country should be prepared for a wider European war and planning should assume Britain may have to fight without the United States, according to a security academic at the University of Leicester.
Dr Simon Bennett, director of the Civil Safety and Security Unit in the university’s School of Business and author of a 2025 book on security lessons from the war in Ukraine, set out the argument in comments issued through the university press office.
Bennett said: “Given these facts, we must prepare ourselves to fight alone. Like Keir Starmer, Prime Minister Andy Burnham is in denial about Trump. The American president is a lost cause. Better to focus finite energies and budgets first, on supporting Ukraine, and secondly, on preparing this country for a wider European war. Defence spending must be increased to 5% of Gross Domestic Product immediately and, as suggested by former Secretary of State for Defence Lord Hutton of Furness in the 17 October edition of The i Paper, the British public must be told the truth about Russia’s hybrid warfare campaign.”
On the range of threats he believes the country is exposed to, Bennett said: “The United Kingdom faces a spectrum of threats. The country has suffered two Kremlin-initiated chemical warfare attacks, in London in 2006 (Polonium) and in Salisbury in 2018 (Novichok). The Council on Strategic Risks recently highlighted the UK’s vulnerability to biological weapons. Prime Minister Burnham, it is time to focus on what really matters – giving Ukraine the weapons it needs and securing a vulnerable United Kingdom. Do not prostrate yourself before Trump, as your predecessor did. As Volodymyr Zelensky and Mark Carney have shown, the only way to deal with Trump is to stand up to him.”
Bennett is asking for far more than the government has signed up to. Ministers have committed to NATO’s target of three and a half per cent of gross domestic product on core defence by 2035, with a further one and a half per cent on defence-related resilience and infrastructure making up the alliance’s headline five per cent figure. Bennett is calling for core defence spending itself to reach five per cent now, a distinction ministers have had to set out repeatedly.
Lord Hutton of Furness, whose intervention Bennett cites, was Secretary of State for Defence from 2008 to 2009. His argument that the public must be told the truth about Russian hybrid warfare runs close to what ministers have themselves begun saying. Wes Streeting told the Defence Committee this month that hybrid activity of this kind amounts to state backed terrorism, and Louise Sandher-Jones confirmed in a written answer last week that “we know Russia is conducting a campaign of hybrid attacks and sabotage across Europe.”
Ministers have also confirmed that government messaging on defence and security will build ahead of Exercise ALBISTON SHADOW and NATO’s crisis management exercise in spring 2027, and the Cabinet Office launched its Be Ready campaign this month asking households to prepare to look after themselves for three days.
The two chemical incidents Bennett refers to are the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 in London in 2006, which a public inquiry found was probably approved by the Russian president, and the Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury in 2018, which killed Dawn Sturgess and which Britain attributed to the GRU. The Council on Strategic Risks is a Washington-based institute publishing on biological, climate and nuclear security.
Bennett’s case rests on his reading of the American president, whom he describes as a Russophile and, in his words and expressly as his opinion, a traitor to the West’s liberal-democratic values. He said he predicted in March 2025 that Trump would ally the United States with Russia through accords and treaties, and took criticism for saying so at the time.
All logical and sensible but I can’t see us responding to such urgency fast enough if at all. But the more the message is pushed the better. And at least Europe generally is realising we cannot rely on either America or tech bros like Musk and urgently developing alternatives. This guy is even telling the US Govt (who provides 80% of his profits, arguably indirectly most of the rest indeed) that he won’t be able to launch their military space assets for much longer as he is discontinuing the Falcon 9, while Starship, even if he finally sorts it, can’t handle most of those military hardware. Imagine what he would say to us in light of that and what he has equally done to Ukraine. These guys are forming their own political and economic superpower (indeed competing ones) independent of Govts.
Giving Ukraine all we’ve now got, all Europe has now got, won’t stop Putin. Only the US can. Even us spending 5% of GDP, or 50%, in the next couple of years won’t improve that.
I’m not being defeatist, but I don’t have the answer. Sure as hell Bennett doesn’t either.
PS: Trump will be gone in two years time.
Of course Europe can.stop Russia but it will not.
It is Europe’s purchase of Russian oil that has sustained the Russian war effort.
If this country’s leaders really think we can hide behind Ukraine, then Poland and Germany, they have not been keeping up…
Plus ca change…
Giving Ukraine everything Europe has would absolutely change the face of the conflict.
Europe and canada spending 3% on core defence well is sufficient to deal with Russia. Key is ‘well’.
There is a difference between Russian attacks in Britain and attacks on Britain. Both incidents targeted Russian dissidents and might have been prevented by more effective border controls. Neither constituted a real casus belli.
Doubling the defence budget wouldn’t deliver anything new for years. The best course is to speed up existing contracts to get ships and boats to sea and complete the reequipment of the army.
I’m all for spending 5% of GDP on defence immediately by cutting funding to places like the Civil Safety and Security Unit in the university’s School of Business at Leicester.
The problem with these vacuum arguments is they never seem to state what we need to spend the money on straight away to deal with Russia. Again for the upteenth time we don’t have a boarder with Russia. The only solo conventional war the UK can fight with Russia is a naval and air war. Even our current diminished Air Force and navy can deal with the very diminished Russian navy and airforce today. So why do we need to double the budget overnight.
It takes ten years to produce a new fighter jet or frigate. If you immediately doubled the budget what would you spend it on? It’s litterllaly not Britains job or NATO commitment to provide a large army to defend Eastern Europe. That’s literally the job of Poland, Germany and Finland that all have either large or rapidly growing army’s.
People at the Treasury are not daft, they see right through nonsense straw man arguments like this instantly which is why they are reluctant to give the MoD massive overnight budget increases knowing full well it will spaff the cash up the wall.
The Army keeps screaming at us that we are about to go to war yet they are reducing the active reserve force and reservist call ups are less than ten percent per annum of the forces event though we already have the smallest proportion of reservists of any major military on planet earth. If someone can tell me how we are about to go to war yet we are cutting reservist while spending £6 billion on a handful of armoured recce vehicles, £1.4 billion on jut 14 chinooks and £5 billion on a small number of APC’s I would love to know.
The fact is a core budget of 3% of GDP is more than sufficient to deliver the security the UK needs and make a meaningful contribution to ENATO security in the high north and provide two rapidly deployable divisions.
There is neither the need or will for the UK to rebuild the BAOR to fight an imaginary enemy and building a large standing army again in Europe probably reduces our security overall as it gives others the excuse to do nothing.
The MoD doesn’t need more money it needs to stop wasting what it gets which is a vast sum of cash (£74 billion)
NATO excluding USA has a gdp that is 11 x that of Russia. Even the JEF nations have a combined GDP thar is 3 x that of Russia. Getting MOD to spend well, cut waste, lean processes and managment is required to meet need and balance the tressury books.
Russia today is spending 6% of GDP on defence after 4 years of open conflict. JEF spending 3% well is suffient to deter.