On 30 June the government published its Defence Investment Plan with figures for costs and funding. This revealed a planned overspend of £4.7bn. The plan itself, £125bn on infrastructure, machinery and equipment, and another £47.7bn for operational spending, rests on optimistic cost cutting. The £4.7bn missing will be a minimum hole to fill only if the Ministry of Defence (MoD) can manage to find £10.7bn in massive ‘efficiency savings’ by the end of the 2029-30 financial year. The ruling class has turned to new Prime Minister Andy Burnham to sort it out.
Well before the Plan was published, Labour had announced ASGARD, the Army’s advanced digital targeting and sensor-to-weapon network alongside the 2024 October budget. On 20 July 2025 Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Roly Walker, boasted that a digital Recce-Strike system ‘sits at the heart of our Forward Land Forces in Estonia’. By January 2026, the July 2025 tender invitations had been converted into four-year contracts for a network of 26 companies in a ‘Defence Commercial Framework’. The Plan itself bluntly states its aim is to ‘invest in capabilities fit for the next war’.
The new investment makes numerical comparisons of weaponry with past systems completely misleading. Labour’s focus on remote technology is to wage war without calling on too many working class recruits. There is nothing new about this: the British army had used US Reaper drones in Afghanistan from 2007, and British Reaper drones were also deployed for operations in the Middle East, including for surveillance missions over Syria in 2014.
Military PR statements now refer to remote surveillance, ‘uncrewed’ systems in a hybrid military system, all of course with ‘sovereign’ technology. As drones proliferate – Ukraine aims to produce ten million this year – and technology improves, AI will take on more of the work. The message is clear, the crisis of inadequate capital accumulation leaves war, and the violent redivision of the world, as the ever closer option to resolve imperialism’s predicament, and these wars aim to leave political control in the hands of the most successful ruling classes. The struggle against militarism at home is again becoming a central issue for socialists. In Germany the youth protests against planned conscription already show this.
