Speaking to the BBC’s Today programme, General Sir Richard Barrons – another of the SDR report’s authors – agreed with Lord Robertson that “there’s an enormous gap between where we have to be to keep the country safe in the world we now live in and where we actually are”.
Sir Richard said in future the organisation will see “a European Nato doing much more and the US doing much less”.
“The US cavalry is not coming to bail us out now,” he added, as he warned that the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force were “too small and too undernourished”.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the re-election of US President Donald Trump, the UK, along with other Nato countries, has come under pressure to boost its defence spending.
Trump’s campaigning resulted in an agreement by Nato leaders to ramp up defence spending to 5% of their countries’ economic output by 2035, which the US president called a “big win for Europe and… Western civilisation”.
The commitment to raise defence spending over 10 years involves at least 3.5% of each member state’s GDP on core defence expenditure by 2035, plus up to 1.5% on a broadly defined series of investments loosely connected to security infrastructure.
Despite this agreement, the US president has threatened to withdraw US support for Nato after he wrote the organisation “WASN’T THERE WHEN WE NEEDED THEM”.
The head of the British military, Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton, told the BBC last month that he rejected accusations that the UK had been ill-prepared for the current conflict in the Middle East, which began on 28 February with a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran.
But he said it was “probably the most dangerous time of the last 30 years”.
There were questions as to why a Royal Navy destroyer was not deployed to the region sooner since the US military build-up in the region had been going on for months.
Sir Keir has repeatedly ruled out direct UK military involvement in the conflict.
Refusing to join Trump’s military blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the prime minister told the BBC: “My decision has been very clearly that whatever the pressure – and there’s been some considerable pressure – we’re not getting dragged into the war”.
“That’s not in our national interest, because I’m not going to act unless there’s a clear, lawful basis and a clear thought-through plan.”
On Tuesday, Sir Keir will chair the first meeting of the Middle East Response Committee – a group set up to replace the ad-hoc emergency Cobra meetings that had been held to discuss the war in Iran.
The committee will look at the diplomatic side as well as the economic fallout from the conflict.
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