Do we need it? Can we afford it? The UK MOD budget is £39.5 billion a year.
Bristol Against Arms Trade campaigns to reduce military spending to zero.
A fantastical proposition? Maybe, but based on the following:
A: The military is at present structured to carry out expeditionary and aggressive projects in foreign lands. The colonisation of places to extract resources has been replaced with the need to preserve corporate interests and install governments which are compliant with our national interest ( cheap labour and resources, corporate friendly).
The military are not defensive and should be renamed the Ministry of Preserving UK Interests Abroad.
B: Attack by another country is 9th in a list of modern security concerns. The top 5 cannot be dealt by an army.
This outdated thinking has contributed to the current shambles with military spending. Each of the services competes for the biggest share of the spending pot, claiming its needs are the most worthy and necessary.
The arms companies use lobbying, providing employment for ex senior military personnel and top politicians who twist the spending in their favour. Defence Reviews tinker at the edges but still the mismangement and waste continues.
Zero Military Expenditure: What is needed is a complete redesign of the MOD to be truely defensive. Starting from zero and a clean sheet. No-one in Whitehall, it seems, can admit that Britain can no longer afford and that a majority of Britons may not even want to aspire to, the kind of military power the country got used to historically.
One particular problem is the Governments reluctance to question the need to replace the Trident fleet of nuclear missile submarines now estimated by the Ministry of Defence to cost £25bn double earlier forecasts, by the time they are built. The figure does not include the price of warheads, the running costs and the bill for leasing Trident missiles from the US.
A major benefit would be that political leaders could not go to war unless concensus was reached with many allies.
Bristol Against Arms Trade 