Ministry of Defence
In charge of Britain's armed forces, the nuclear deterrent, and the running argument about whether 2% of GDP is enough.
The Ministry of Defence exists to perform the most fundamental duty of any state: protecting the nation from external threats. Everything else government does ultimately depends on that security being in place. After decades in which the working assumption was that large scale war between major powers had become unlikely, the money is finally rising again. The core defence budget is £61.7 billion in 2025/26, planned to grow by £13.3 billion over five years. Spending is heading to 2.6 percent of GDP by 2027, on the path to NATO's new target of 3.5 percent by 2035. These are the largest sustained increases in military spending since the Cold War. Whether they arrive fast enough to reverse decades of decline is the question that now defines every decision the department makes.
The first problem is that the department has struggled to hold on to its own leadership. Nine Defence Secretaries have served since 2010: Liam Fox, who resigned over the Werritty affair, Philip Hammond, Michael Fallon, who resigned over allegations of inappropriate behaviour, Gavin Williamson, sacked over the Huawei leak, Penny Mordaunt, who lasted 85 days, Ben Wallace, the longest serving since Heseltine, Grant Shapps, John Healey, who resigned in June 2026 warning that the government's defence funding plan could make the country less safe, and Dan Jarvis, appointed on 12 June 2026. Three resigned, one was sacked and one lasted under three months. The department responsible for protecting the nation from external threats has been unable to protect itself from internal political turbulence.
Jarvis at least arrives with more frontline military experience than any Defence Secretary in decades. A former Major in the Parachute Regiment, aide de camp to General Sir Mike Jackson, a company commander in the Special Forces Support Group and a holder of the MBE, he served on deployments across Kosovo, Northern Ireland, Sierra Leone, Iraq and Afghanistan. Few of his recent predecessors had seen combat at all. He inherits a department in crisis.
The armed forces are shrinking. All three branches are below the target sizes set in the 2021 Defence Command Paper, and the regular Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy have each more than halved since 1985. In the last full year the forces were losing 300 more full time personnel each month than they were recruiting. Fewer than one in ten applicants who began the process in 2023 actually joined, and service morale fell to record lows. The government has awarded a £1.3 billion contract to Serco for a new Armed Forces Recruitment Service launching in 2027, replacing the three separate systems each branch ran. Healey told the Defence Select Committee that deep set problems had plagued recruitment and retention for years. His successor must now decide whether the shortfall can be fixed through better recruitment, or whether the armed forces the country says it needs simply cannot be sustained at the required size.
Equipment procurement consumes nearly half the entire budget, around 49 percent. The Strategic Defence Review published under Healey recommended accelerating the shift to a high low mix of high end and lower cost equipment, including autonomous vessels, drones and AI enabled capabilities. The government has committed to a New Hybrid Navy of new warships, support ships and autonomous platforms, and to developing the aircraft carriers into full carrier strike groups. At least £1 billion has been earmarked for digital capabilities, including an integrated Digital Targeting Web and a new CyberEM Command.
The war in Ukraine forced the most urgent reckoning. The government has committed £2.5 billion to rebuild ammunition stockpiles and scale up domestic production, including six new munitions factories and the procurement of up to 7,000 British built long range weapons. Britain provided significant military support to Ukraine, but the conflict exposed how quickly decades of procurement assumptions could be invalidated. Modern high intensity war consumes ammunition at industrial rates, and Britain's defence industrial base had been allowed to contract to the point where surge production was no longer possible. The country needed six new factories because its existing capacity had been run down too far.
Behind all of it sits the question of money. The 10 year defence investment plan that was supposed to accompany the November 2025 Budget was delayed, and Healey resigned over the adequacy of the funding settlement, which suggests the plan still does not match the threat. The gap between what the Strategic Defence Review says Britain needs and what the Treasury is willing to provide is the fracture line that ended Healey's tenure and now defines Jarvis's.
The department can point to genuine strengths. Britain's armed forces remain among the most professional in the world. The nuclear deterrent provides strategic weight that few other nations possess. British special forces are internationally respected. NATO remains the most successful military alliance in history, and Britain plays a central role within it. The spending increases are real, and they represent a significant political commitment at a time when other budgets are under severe strain.
What concerns defence professionals and the public alike is the gap between commitment and capacity. Britain describes itself as a leading military power while its army is smaller than at almost any point in modern history, its recruitment system cannot fill the ranks, its equipment programmes routinely overrun and its most recent Defence Secretary resigned saying the money was not enough. A department spending £61.7 billion a year that cannot recruit enough soldiers, that needed six new factories because its ammunition production had been allowed to collapse, and that has cycled through nine leaders in sixteen years is not a department that has matched its resources to its ambitions. Dan Jarvis has the military credibility to challenge that record. Whether he has the political capital and the Treasury support to change it is the test that now begins.