Defence

Stuart Anderson Excerpts

Tuesday 24th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Stuart Anderson (South Shropshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Loughborough (Dr Sandher). I do not think that I have heard anyone call for 20% of spending on defence, but I like it. I am not sure how we would maintain the reversal of the two-child cap if 20% of spending went to defence, but he made a very good speech.

I will set out a few key points on what we are looking at, where the world is today, where we have been, and what we must do to deal with the threat. As I have said many times—colleagues are probably getting sick of me saying it—there is a challenge to the world order as we know it. I do not believe that anybody alive has experienced such a significant change. We face the ultimate volatility, like the fall of the Berlin wall or 9/11. Given the current position of the US Government—on Venezuela, in what they said about Greenland, and in the attack on Iran—everything has been thrown in the air.

Many people expect life to fall back to where it was and to continue, but there is a challenge to the world order between China and the US, and there is a commodities race over oil and rare earth metals. How do we get global supply chains working and moving forward? Rare earth metals are not actually rare, but it can take 15 to 17 years to get them out of the ground once they have been found. Most of the electronics that we have on us, including wearables, require such metals. At the moment, about 90% of those resources are controlled and processed by China, and there is a huge push to change that. The US is moving to change it, and our policy seeks to shift around that.

When AI and quantum come together, defence technologies—including drone and autonomous warfare—will take a huge leap forward. If we do not get this stage right, we will be so far behind. The second world war was about who could produce the most tanks, planes and troops at scale, with the right strategy. Now, technology can shift the dial exceptionally quickly. I know that the Minister has spoken about the drone passion, autonomy and things like that. That is the right direction. It is not either/or; there is a whole plethora of things that we need to. The defence investment plan unlocks the next phase of where we can go.

[Sir Bernard Jenkin]

I do not think many people in the House fully appreciate how utterly profound the drone revolution is. It means that in Ukraine, they do not have to mass troops to defend in the way they once did; they can mass drones. If we want to defend NATO, if we want to defend London and Akrotiri, we need to be able to mass very cheap drones in order to get that protection and deterrent capability, so that the option of pushing large numbers of troops over a NATO frontier at some stage is not available to Russia.

[Stuart Anderson]

I thank my hon. Friend for that important point. How warfare is fought is catching people by surprise—we are seeing that played out in the middle east at the moment—and we have to be prepared. We have stood with our head and shoulders high on the world stage, and I want to see us continue to do that.

I want to throw out some numbers. We say that the Great British Army has always been the best army of its size. In 1981, we had 333,000 troops. In 1997, the number went down to 210,000, and it went down to 174,000 in 2010. It is currently about 138,000. With the use of technology, it is not just about mass, although I would always be happy to have a larger military. We need to make sure that we are able to work in a changing environment and that we have the operations to do that. The world as we know it is changing, and we must pick that up very quickly.

[Steve Barclay (North East Cambridgeshire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one way to respond to a crisis and to deliver mass quickly would be to scale up the reserves during this Parliament? Does he find it surprising, as I do, that the relatively small cost—in a £60 billion budget—of scaling up the reserves would help to deliver some of that response?

[Stuart Anderson]

I definitely do. I have had the reserves deployed with me when I have been on operations, and they were a great asset. Scaling up the reserves is vital. We have the article 3 NATO commitment, and we need to ensure that we can fulfil that. It is not just about the reserves staying here and the regulars flying overseas. Integration is key, and I would be keen to see that.

Let us look at how the rearming of the world has changed. After the illegal invasion of Russia into Ukraine, the world sat up. At that stage, defence spending was at 2.1%. I will be clear: as soon as I was elected, with hon. Members from across the House, I called for 3%. I felt that even 3% was not enough during the previous Government, and I said that all the way through. The Defence Committee was united. We did procurement reports right the way through 20 or 30 years of procurement failings. I am not just saying this to make a point now. I still believe that if defence spending is not at least 3% of GDP today, we do not have the ability to put the plan in place on the scale we need.

From 2021 to now, we have gone from 2.1% to 2.4%, but the problem is that the NATO average is currently 2.76%. In that short space of time, we have gone from being roughly the third highest defence spender according to percentage of GDP to being the ninth or 12th, depending on which table we look at. It is good that, as the Government say, we have made the biggest increase since the cold war, but, as my right hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis) said, we need to look at what it was like post war. We are not moving as fast as all the other peer nations. We had a great start, but that has now started to deplete over decades of a peace dividend. We need to take this seriously as an urgent priority and invest on the necessary scale.

The delay on the DIP is having an impact. I know that if Ministers had a choice, they would have the DIP here today. We have to get this right. It has gone past the time when we expected the DIP to be produced. I have spoken to so many in the industry and so many serving personnel who are screaming out for it. I have struggled to find anybody who thinks we have the time for this. I hope the Minister will take away the importance of the DIP being produced—I am positive that he wants it today—to unlock the next phase.

There are many areas where there is consensus in this House on how we should move forward and prepare this country for war. We are losing standing on the world stage because of our current capability, which has seen getting on for 30 years of under-investment. We do not have the ability today to project power on the scale that we did 10, 20 or 30 years ago.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the hon. and gallant Gentleman for what I perceive to be a very constructive speech in which he is generally trying to support the Minister. I promise I will not mention Cheltenham markets to him. He talks about our power. I recently visited Estonia with the Education Committee. Does he agree that part of our power is in how we work with our allies such as Estonia, and that soft power—I am looking at the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis), given his passion for the World Service and BBC Monitoring—is an important part of this country’s overall defence strategy?

[Stuart Anderson]

The hon. Member is right on that. How we work with our partners is important, but we have to invest and have a clear plan to hold our head high on the world stage.

I will finish on this point. We are told that the Department is working at pace on the DIP. I probably know about pace better than anybody in this House. I was proud to be a member of the Royal Green Jackets, which had the fastest pace in the British Army at 140 paces per minute, and the double-off was 180—unmatched by any regiment in the British Army. We need this pace now. We need the defence investment plan to be delivered to unlock the next phase of doing what is best for the British people.