The UK government is increasingly becoming accused of dragging its feet on adequately preparing the UK armed forces for conflict with Russia, with the latest and most impactful such assertion coming from George Robertson, Baron Robertson of Port Ellen.

The words of Lord Robertson carry particular weight because he is not only a co-author of the Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR) but also served as the UK defence secretary from May 1997 to 11 October 1999 and was no less than the 10th secretary general of NATO from October 1999 to December 2003.

In a speech in Salisbury on 14 April 2026 Lord Robertson stated, “I spent the best part of a year working on the new government’s Strategic Defence Review, and I can tell you now, bluntly, the conclusion of all of that work. We are underprepared. We are under-insured. We are under attack. We are not safe. Bluntly, that is the underlying message that we got.”

Lord Robertson noted that the SDR contains “a detailed blueprint for what needs to be done. It involves a wholesale transformation of how we guarantee homeland defence and simultaneously deter any adversary from even thinking of attacking us. But it needs money to deliver it.”

While the SDR was published on 2 June 2025, the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) that is supposed to underpin it has yet to materialise, despite being initially expected in the autumn of last year.

Lord Robertson warned in his speech that the US/Israeli conflict with Iran “has to be a rude wake-up call to this country. On top of what we’ve already seen in Ukraine, it should remind us in the United Kingdom of our vulnerabilities, and there are many.”

Lord Robertson further warned, “There is a corrosive complacency today in Britain’s political leadership. Lip service is paid to the risks, the threats, the bright red signals of danger, but even the promised national conversation about defence can’t be started. The cold reality of today’s dangerous world is that we cannot defend Britain with an ever-expanding welfare budget.”

Even before the United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February 2026, sending energy prices soaring as Iran responded by choking off shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, the UK government was facing an estimated shortfall in defence funding of GBP 28 billion over the next four years.

In mid-April, however, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned that, with the US-Israeli war with Iran possibly plunging the global economy into recession, the UK would be the hardest hit of the world’s advanced economies. The IMF said the UK’s gross domestic product (GDP) will grow by just 0.8% in 2026: 0.5% down on its last forecast in January 2026 and the biggest downgrade of all the G7 nations.

This outlook would compound the UK’s ‘black hole’ in defence funding even further.

On 14 April a government source told The Times newspaper that UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves had proposed an increase in defence funding of less than GBP 10 billion during her discussions with Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. In his speech that day Lord Robertson had accused “non-military experts in the Treasury” of “vandalism” in relation to plans that would bolster UK defence capabilities.

Lord Robertson’s intervention was backed up by multiple heavyweights in the military/geopolitical debate space in the form of the SDR’s two co-authors. Retired British Army general Richard Barrons, who served as the commander of the UK’s Joint Forces Command from April 2013 until April 2016, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 14 April, “It is a mark of how serious it is that someone who has been a Labour party activist for more than 60 years and was a NATO secretary general has now had to say it in these terms today.

“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,” Barrons warned.

Foreign policy expert Fiona Hill, who formerly served as a US presidential advisor on Russia, told The Guardian newspaper on 14 April that Lord Robertson was “basically just trying to say, ‘We need to have more movement now.’ If you get that sense of urgency then action will follow, but we don’t have the sense of urgency, which is kind of bizarre really given everything that’s happening …. What George is saying, very bluntly, is there is basically a lack of resolute leadership on this because everybody’s worried about votes and, you know, reactions, and all of this on the left and on the right. The political situation, you know, for the [Labour] party, is not good, but as George has been saying, this is a UK Strategic Defence Review and, frankly, if anybody wants to make political points, I would suggest that it’s shame on them. Big time.”

The Labour government is, indeed, preoccupied with UK local elections in May 2026 that are expected to see the Labour Party hemorrhage council seats around the country. Even if UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer manages to remain in post after that, the Labour Party will ultimately head into a general election no later than August 2029 in which, at best, it looks set to become part of a coalition government, given the electoral challenges from the Reform UK and Green parties in addition to the Conservatives.

More generally, however, in UK politics defence and military spending has rarely ever been a vote-winning subject on which to campaign, with a few exceptions being times when the country was, in fact, at war.

While the UK government has been a strong supporter of Ukraine against Russia’s 2022 invasion of that country, both materially and financially, the 2016 Brexit referendum that led to the UK leaving the European Union (which a January 2026 Statista poll found 58% of UK citizens now regret) has somewhat compounded the ‘island mentality’ among the general UK populace in recent years. That said, the Trump Administration’s disparaging relations with the UK government and Europe more widely have revealed a strategic necessity for Europe’s NATO allies to rely increasingly on each other rather than the United States.

At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague the alliance’s partner nations made a commitment to investing 5% of gross domestic product (GDP) annually on core defence requirements and defence- and security-related spending by 2035.

While the UK is believed to have met the stipulated NATO target of spending at least 2% of GDP on defence in 2025, reaching an estimated spend of 2.4%, it should come as no surprise that, of the top 10 NATO spenders in terms of percentage of GDP, six countries – Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Norway and Finland – share a border with Russia.

As Lord Robertson noted, the events of the US/Israeli conflict with Iran should have provided “a rude wake-up call” to the UK. A notable such event, for example, occurred on 19/20 March 2026, when Iran launched two intermediate-range ballistic missiles at the UK base on Diego Garcia in the central Indian Ocean. Although the attack was unsuccessful, with one of the missiles failing mid-flight and the other being downed by an interceptor fired from a US warship, the anticipated range of those missiles in targeting Diego Garcia – around 3,800-4,000 km – is a similar distance from northwest Iran to London.

While the defence of European countries from ballistic missiles would always be a collective NATO effort – employing, for example, the Aegis Ashore ballistic missile defence batteries in Poland and Romania – the UK’s national missile defence capabilities are very thin on the ground. Beyond the Sea Viper air-defence systems on the Royal Navy’s Type 45 destroyers, the British Army is believed to have just seven Land Ceptor medium-range surface-to-air missile launchers in service, with another six ordered in August 2025. These systems would only be able to provide area air defence cover for deployed formations, rather than forming a national air defence layer.

Moreover, the UK response to the US/Israeli conflict with Iran – for example the need to defend the air base RAF Akrotiri on Cyprus – has exposed the weakened state of the Royal Navy’s surface fleet, as Warsight has already reported.

More generally, while the UK Ministry of Defence has long since identified the need to reform and make more efficient its procurement processes, this again has proved to be just the kind of lip service without follow-up action that Lord Robertson has taken the UK government to task over. Compared to countries like Finland, existing as it does directly next to Russia, the UK generally appears to deliver ‘less bang for its buck’ with regard to any given procurement, while some programmes – most recently that for the Ajax family of tracked armoured vehicles – are liable to becoming mired in complications and disfunction.

Thus, when such realities are added to the UK MoD’s GBP 28 billion budgetary ‘black hole’, it is difficult to see how UK defence capability shortfalls will be remedied over the short to medium term – even if more money can be found.

Meanwhile, in the wake of Lord Robertson’s speech, on 15 April Warsight approached the UK MoD to enquire as to when the DIP might eventually see the light of day, to which an MoD spokesperson replied as follows: “We are delivering on the Strategic Defence Review, which Lord Robertson helped to write, to meet the threats we face. It is backed by the biggest sustained investment in our armed forces since the Cold War, with over GBP 270 billion being invested across this Parliament.

“We are finalising our Defence Investment Plan that we will publish as soon as possible, putting the best kit and technology into the hands of our forces, rebuilding British industry to make defence an engine for growth and doubling down on our own commitment to NATO.”

The spokesperson further noted that at the February 2026 Munich Security Conference Prime Minister Starmer stated that “To meet the wider threat, it is clear that we are going to have to spend more faster.”

Tine will tell if this declaration can be converted into reality.