- NAD chief: no money to fix the Defence Investment Plan—delays will fund priorities
- DIP is months late and squeezed from 10 years to ~5 amid rising threats and costs
- Likely outcome: cuts/slips to major programmes (Type 26, F-35, Boxer/Challenger 3/Ajax)
Fresh from the signal from the UK’s seniormost military officer that defence cuts were on their way, a leading Ministry of Defence (MoD) official has said that the country lacks the funds to fix all of the issues contained within the yet-to-be-published Defence Investment Plan (DIP).
Providing evidence to the UK House of Lords’ Defence Committee on 17 June, which followed the previous day’s session with Chief of the Defence Staff Air Marshal Richard Knighton, the head of the recently formed National Armaments Directorate, Rupert Pearce, admitted that the DIP’s frame of reference had changed.
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The DIP was due to be published nine months ago, but continued delays over funding has left the timeline it originally intended – a decade-long recapitalisation – now having to be done in five years or less.
“[There is] enormous intensity at the front end of the plan,” said Pearce. “You can’t fix it because you don’t have the money to fix it, [so] what do you flex, what do you move, what do you delay?”
In order to deliver new capabilities into service by 2030, a notional timeframe in which Russia could be in a position to attack Nato, programmes would have to start “now or next year”, he added.
The former Secretary of Defence John Healey resigned last week following reports that the settlement of the DIP would involve £10bn ($13.4bn) in new funding, spread over a decade-long timeframe. The UK Ministry of Defence had a £28bn black hole in funding just to complete its current programmes.
Pearce’s comments to the House of Lords’ Defence Committee give further credence to the idea that military cuts are coming to the UK, with current programmes being delivered likely to be delayed, cut back, or curtailed outright.
This could mean the Royal Navy receiving Type 26 later than planned in order to focus on the builds for Norway, reducing the F-35 fighter purchase to just the 48 now delivered, and cutting the number Boxer, Challenger 3, or Ajax armoured vehicles on order.
Pearce also outlined unknown costs that have accrued since the writing of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, which the DIP was supposed to finance, including “pretty aggressive inflation”, increased costs over military salaries, and rises in the cost of raw materials and fuels.
In addition, the global “threat pattern” had become “more significant”, Pearce said.
“We thought we had ten years to come to fruition; now we think we may have five,” he warned.
An expert’s perspective: UK defence and the DIP
Analysis by the Heligan Group into the fallout of the unpublished DIP, stated the resignation of Healey, along with UK Armed Forces Minister Al Carns and Pamela Nash, Parliamentary Private Secretary for the Secretary of State, “exposes the cost of strategic posture without strategic spending”, according to Adam Irwin, managing partner.
As stated by the Heligan Group’s analysis, the DIP profile rises to 2.68% of GDP by 2030 against a Treasury ask of £18bn, settled at approximately £12bn. External reports suggest the funding could be as low as £10bn.
Healey’s last attempted compromise – a £15bn settlement partly funded by cross-departmental budget reductions – was rejected, the Heligan Group analysed.
Citing examples of the 2023-33 Equipment Plan being assessed to be short of £16.9bn in funding, and others since, Irwin said that such issues were “not presentation”, but rather evidence that the defence pound is being spent under serial unaffordability conditions.
“The DIP does not contain enough new resources to break the pattern inside the readiness window,” Irwin suggested.
For his part, Pearce conceded that ongoing delays to the DIP had seen the UK defence trade space to “narrow appreciably” over the past few months.
“I really hope we can get the DIP out before Ankara,” he added, referencing the Nato Summit in July.
