World
Is War Coming? What Evidence Says About Britain's Rearmament
— 6 mins read
Westminster has moved from arguing about whether Britain should rearm to arguing about how fast.
On 7 May, a drone detonated at an oil storage facility at Rēzekne, in eastern Latvia. It was not the first. Between March and May, drones crossed repeatedly into Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Finland, one of them striking the chimney of an Estonian power station. There were air alerts, airport closures and school evacuations. Latvia's defence minister resigned. The Siliņa government fell.
The drones were Ukrainian. Russian electronic warfare had pushed them off course during strikes on the Primorsk oil terminal, a reading accepted by the Finnish prime minister, by Ukraine's foreign ministry and by the Centre for Eastern Studies. Russian responsibility was real, and it was indirect. The public reaction ran a long way ahead of the attribution, and a government collapsed in the space between them.
Hold on to that space, because Britain is now having an argument that moves at the same speed.
Andy Burnham has been in Downing Street for eight weeks and for most of them he has been told he is not spending enough on defence. The Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times and The Sun have all pressed for an official war budget. Tobias Ellwood, the former defence minister, told the i that Britain is repeating the slow rearmament of the late 1930s and remains dangerously exposed. Wes Streeting, who took the defence brief in July after John Healey resigned over funding, still declines to put a date on three per cent of GDP.
The question has quietly changed shape. It is no longer whether Britain rearms, but how quickly and what gets cut to pay for it. The assumption underneath that shift, that a war with Russia is coming, is doing an enormous amount of work while attracting very little examination.
The question has quietly changed shape. It is no longer whether Britain rearms, but how quickly and what gets cut to pay for it.
Parts of it do not survive contact with the numbers. The Center for Strategic and International Studies puts Russian battlefield casualties at roughly 1.4 million since February 2022, of whom as many as 450,000 are dead. Military spending has been squeezed rather than expanded, with SIPRI recording a planned reduction in the 2026 budget. European NATO members outspend Russia by about three to one. Four years in, Russia has still not taken the eastern quarter of its neighbour. That is a real limit on what it could do to NATO in a conventional war.
The three-to-one figure only holds if Russia is counted alone, and Russia is not fighting alone. China spent an estimated $314 billion on its military in 2024, which puts the two together past European NATO's $454 billion before Iran or North Korea are counted at all. Around 11,000 North Korean troops were stationed in Kursk at the start of this year, and Seoul's intelligence service reckons Pyongyang has taken some 6,000 casualties there while coming away with battlefield experience and technical upgrades from Moscow. Western officials say the war could not continue without Chinese dual-use components and critical minerals feeding Russian drone production, with bilateral trade running at $253 billion in 2024 against $152 billion in 2021. None of this amounts to a four-way alliance, and Beijing has no obligation to fight for anybody. It does mean that the comparison offering reassurance is the wrong comparison, and that a war in Europe would not be fought against a single exhausted state with a shrinking budget.
It also says very little about what Russia might try below the threshold of open war. The Associated Press has tracked 145 cases of sabotage and disruption across Europe that officials blame on Russia and its proxies. Its jamming scrambles GPS across the Baltic, which is how those drones ended up over Latvia in the first place. A country that cannot mount a successful conventional offensive can still cut a crucial cable, burn a warehouse, and unnerve four governments in a fortnight. Once you reach a certain level of power and capability, even if you remain inferior to other nations, ill intentions can still give you the capacity to reshape the world for the worse.
Once you reach a certain level of power and capability, even if you remain inferior to other nations, ill intentions can still give you the capacity to reshape the world for the worse.
Western agencies are not treating that as hypothetical. In August, American intelligence assessed that Putin could authorise provocative actions on NATO territory, with the aim of testing the alliance's unity and Washington's willingness to respond rather than starting a general war. An explosive-laden drone was found at Leipzig airport. Drones have crossed into Romania, and a Russian missile into Poland. Mark Rutte has warned that Russia could use military force against a NATO member within five years. The New START treaty expired in February, leaving both strategic nuclear arsenals unconstrained for the first time in decades, and nothing that has happened in Ukraine has touched those.
Nor should Russian losses be read as reassurance. Attrition has cost Russia an army and produced another that has spent four years learning modern war under fire. A settlement in Ukraine would not retire that force. It would free it.
So the sceptical case is not that Britain is safe. It is that the threat actually operating, hybrid and deniable and cheap, is not the threat the budget is being sold against, and that the gap between the two is where a great deal of money is about to go.
The money is already moving. Keir Starmer announced a defence budget of nearly £300 billion over four years in his final weeks as prime minister. The Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that meeting the core NATO target costs around £500 per person per year. BAE Systems has reported a record order backlog. None of that is a conspiracy. It is an industry doing what industries do when the political weather turns their way, and it is a reason to read the threat assessment carefully rather than take it on trust.
There are honest arguments for rearmament, and they deserve better than the ones being made. American attention is moving elsewhere, while eighty-five per cent of British arms imports still come from the United States. Industrial capacity takes a decade to build and cannot be summoned at short notice. Those are insurance arguments. Insurance is a respectable thing to buy.
They are also different arguments from the one on offer. Bettina Renz, who has studied how the West overestimated Russian military capability before 2022, has shown how such assessments become political, and how worst-case scenarios crowd out nuanced ones. Within days of the papers demanding a war budget, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner were in Moscow and then Kyiv with an American proposal to end the fighting.
Britain may well need to spend more, and the case for it is stronger than the rhetoric being used to sell it. The public is entitled to be told why, in assessments it can check rather than dates from the 1930s.
