If the cost of defence is a life worth living, who’s going to fight for their country? Vix Anderton questions the welfare or weapons argument.
John Healey’s resignation as UK Secretary of State for Defence has turned a long-running argument about defence spending into a crisis for the government. Now Andy Burnham seems on course to be prime minister, his stated willingness to cut the welfare bill to help fund defence sharpens the same question from another angle. What, exactly, are we trying to defend?
The obvious answer is the state: borders, territory, strategic assets, military credibility, NATO commitments. The more nuanced answer is the society inside those borders. A country can spend more on missiles, ships and drones while becoming less resilient, less cohesive and less willing to defend itself.
Lord George Robertson, lead author of the government’s Strategic Defence Review, former Labour Secretary of State for Defence, and formerly Secretary General of NATO, has accused the government of “corrosive complacency” on defence. Britain’s welfare budget, he argued, is now five times what we spend on defence. The implication is clear enough: welfare has grown too large, defence too small, and hard choices must now be made.
We need to be asking whether defence spending that weakens social resilience and contributes to climate change makes us safer.
As a former military officer myself, I don’t dismiss the arguments made by senior military figures calling for increased defence spending. Russia’s war in Ukraine, the instability of the Middle East, cyber threats, drone warfare and the erosion of US reliability all make complacency dangerous. My argument is not against defence spending. But as an anthropology and political ecology student, I challenge the narrowing of the debate into a binary choice between weapons and welfare. The question I think we need to be asking is whether defence spending that weakens social resilience and contributes to climate change makes us safer.
NATO’s Article 3 commits members to maintain the capacity to resist “all types of shock”. That is a much broader idea than tanks, carriers, and aircraft. It includes energy systems, food systems, public health, transport, communications, civil protection, local government and social trust. A country in which millions are ill, insecure, alienated or economically discarded is not a resilient country. It may be more heavily armed, but it is not necessarily better defended.
The public debate now treats welfare largely as a burden on national security. But welfare, health care, education, housing support, social care and community infrastructure are not separate from resilience. They are part of the fabric that allows people to absorb shocks and keep functioning when crisis hits. Cut that fabric too far and the country becomes brittle.
A population made poorer, sicker, and more precarious is less able to withstand floods, heatwaves, pandemics, or supply shocks, let alone a military emergency.
That brittleness is already visible. Healthy life expectancy in the UK has fallen to its lowest level since records began, with men in the most deprived areas now living nearly 19 fewer healthy years than those in the wealthiest. This is directly linked to welfare cuts, estimating austerity measures led to around 190,000 excess deaths. These are not soft issues sitting outside the national security debate. A population made poorer, sicker, and more precarious is less able to withstand floods, heatwaves, pandemics, or supply shocks, let alone a military emergency. Without mitigation, heat-related deaths in the UK are projected to rise by around 257% by the 2050s.
There is also the question no government likes to ask: why would people defend a society they feel has abandoned them? Polling suggests that almost half of Britons say there are no circumstances in which they would take up arms for Britain, while fewer than a third say there are circumstances in which they would. By comparison, in Finland, the picture is starkly different. There, willingness to defend the country remains high: nearly four in five support armed defence in the event of attack, and a similar proportion say they would participate in national defence according to their abilities and skills.
There are historical and geopolitical reasons for this, of course. Finland lives beside Russia and has a powerful national memory of invasion and resistance. But it is also arguably a more equal society with stronger civic traditions and a deeper sense that the state is something shared. People are more willing to defend a country when they believe that country also protects and supports them.
The Strategic Defence Review itself names climate change and environmental degradation as a “persistent transnational challenge”.
This is the first tension in the defence debate: not defence versus welfare, but military capability versus the wider social foundations of resilience. The second tension is even more uncomfortable: the relationship between defence and climate change.
The Strategic Defence Review itself names climate change and environmental degradation as a “persistent transnational challenge”. It recognises that they create new geographical realities, competition for resources, instability and more frequent humanitarian disasters. Lt Gen Richard Nugee has gone further, describing climate change as a core national security threat and threat multiplier in the National Emergency Briefing on the climate and nature crisis. Food security, water, infrastructure, energy and extreme weather can all fail together, creating a cascading crisis that we are ill-prepared for.
And yet military activity is itself a significant driver of the climate crisis. The US military is the world’s largest single institutional consumer of hydrocarbons, responsible for 636 million metric tonnes CO₂e between 2010–2019, equivalent to the 47th largest emitting nation. In the UK, the MOD’s real emissions could be more than 11 times what it publicly reports once equipment and supply chains are included. Military emissions have long been systematically underreported internationally, with special treatment under Kyoto and voluntary reporting under Paris.
Climate change is named as a security threat. But high-carbon military systems are part of the machinery driving that threat.
Alongside the horrific human cost, the bombardment of Gaza shows the ecological cost of war with brutal clarity. A recent study estimated total carbon emissions from the conflict at 33.2 million tonnes CO₂e, equivalent to the annual emissions of Jordan. Rebuilding the estimated 156,000 to 200,000 damaged or destroyed structures could generate a further 46.8 to 60 million tonnes, comparable to the annual emissions of over 135 countries. War does not only kill people and destroy places. It accelerates the environmental instability that future security policy then claims to manage.
We face a double bind. Climate change is named as a security threat. But high-carbon military systems are part of the machinery driving that threat. Welfare cuts may release money for defence, but they also weaken the population’s capacity to cope with the shocks climate change will bring. This isn’t strategy. It’s moving costs from one ledger to another and calling it hard-headed realism.
The infrastructure of resilience is not only hardware. It’s nurses, teachers, carers, local authorities, emergency planners, community workers, food producers, repair networks, and trusted institutions. It is people knowing their neighbours, having somewhere safe to live, being healthy enough to help, and believing the society around them is worth protecting.
Rebecca Solnit’s research shows what this looks like in practice. In A Paradise Built in Hell, she shows that in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, people do not become predatory or savage; they become extraordinarily generous, resourceful, and cooperative. What she calls “disaster collectivism” is not exceptional. From the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to Hurricane Katrina, the greatest post-disaster threats come not from looting or social breakdown but from the militarised reaction of elites who fear losing control. Mutual aid is more likely than instant social breakdown.
Real resilience requires a society capable of collective action before, during and after crisis.
That should change how we think about security. Defence may be necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient. A country defended only by the armed forces is already in trouble. Real resilience requires a society capable of collective action before, during and after crisis.
Lt Gen Nugee is correct when he says we face a false choice between climate action and security; they are two sides of the same coin. The same logic applies to defence and welfare. The question, then, is not whether Britain should spend more on defence. It may well need to. The question is whether that spending is embedded in a wider resilience strategy or paid for by weakening the very society it claims to protect.
If the government cuts support from people already struggling, allows public services to decay further, ignores climate risk and pours money into high-carbon military systems without asking what kind of security they produce, it will not be defending Britain in any meaningful sense. It will be defending the shell of the state while hollowing out the society inside it.
What are we really defending? Until that question is answered honestly, the defence debate will remain dangerously incomplete.
