Can the UK afford to defend itself from Russia?
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I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battlelines. It's Friday, the 6th of June 2025. How should Britain defend itself in an era of state-on-state conflict, rapidly changing technologies, American disengagement and Russian and Chinese resurgence? That is the question the British government posed to the authors of the Strategic Defence Review released this week.

It is an ambitious document, 45,000 words long, covering air, sea, land and cyber warfare, national resilience and the very concept of how Britain's government and public should think about war. Its authors call it a root and branch reworking of British defence thinking.

But there is already controversy. The government says it wants to increase defence spending by 2.5% by 2027 and 3% in the 2030s. And that's the budget that the authors of the report were working on. But many of Britain's NATO allies expect it to spend much more than that. Here's what the Americans say.

We are very honored to be joined by Ambassador Matthew Whitaker, the U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO. Let me cut to the core of our message. Five percent.

Peace through strength demands nothing less than it demands it equally from all allies. This is not going to be just a pledge. This is going to be a commitment. Every ally must commit to investing at least 5% of GDP in defense and security starting now. President Trump's leadership has transformed NATO's approach to burden sharing.

A decade ago, 2% GDP benchmark was a distant goal for most allies. Today, thanks to America's unwavering leadership, we're seeing real movement. Since November's election, more than 20 allies have announced defense budget increases, and we anticipate all allies to be at or over 2% this year. Progress is good, but it's not enough.

So is this a think piece or a serious strategy? Is the money as important as the concepts behind the report? To discuss all this, I'm pleased to say we're joined by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, one of the report's authors, a former British Defence Minister and the Secretary General of NATO.

Lord Robertson, welcome to Battlelines. As you know, we've been chasing you for a very long time to get on here, but you've been in, I can't remember what the word is, but effectively kind of cloistered away while you were authoring the Strategic Defense Review. So there's three lead authors. It's you, a former former Labor Defense Minister, former Secretary General of NATO. You had a foreign policy expert, Dr. Fiona Hill, who, of course, in the world that I come from, which is kind of

former Soviet affairs and so on. She's an absolute giant. And she, of course, advised Donald Trump in his first term on Russia and a soldier, General Sir Richard Barons. Why you three? And what did each of you, the politician, the soldier and the foreign policy expert bring to the table?

expertise. We brought knowledge, maybe perception, and a degree of independent thinking that John Healy admired and respected. And I think he wanted to have a fresh view. I said at the very beginning, this is not business as usual. Our adversaries don't believe in business as usual, and therefore what we're doing can't be business as usual. So the three of us, I think,

He believed, brought fresh insight. Richard Barron's is very, very bright, you know, and known as that. Overlooked for Chief of the Defence Staff, but that was David Cameron's judgment at the time. But very, very good and very well thought of. Fiona Hill, as you say, great expert on Vladimir Putin.

on Russian affairs, but also having had the experience of working with Donald Trump, that gave her an edge in terms of what we were doing. And, you know, I'd been in the ministry before and I'd run NATO for four years. So I think he believed and a lot of other people believe that we brought a degree of insight into

And we were able to be radical and bold in a way that an internal inquiry couldn't be. I know I saw a comment by a former Conservative Defence Secretary talking about bringing in the pensioners to do the advice. But we did it with the department, not to the department.

But we had access to all the information, the most sensitive right up to the highly classified. We had access to all of that as well as to the individuals in the department. And we listened, you know, we listened to the outside world. We had 8,000 submissions sent to us. You know, some brief, but some of them very, very long in order to take account of. We listened to the industry. We went out. We talked to people.

We've spent 10 intensive months listening, consulting, researching, and then digesting it down to what we believe are the right recommendations. And some of them, you know, will be quite uncomfortable for the government. Some of them will be difficult to deliver. But I hope when people read it, they'll notice one of the differences between this and other defence reviews. Most of the recommendations have got timelines.

And these timelines have been accepted by the government. Some of them are quite tight. They reflect the urgency of some of the recommendations, but also the importance of them for the future.

Let me just read a bit through this elevator pitch that you've put in front of me. I'll skim it if that's okay. A truly transformational review designed to bolster the Terrence Conventional and Nuclear by rebuilding warfighting readiness, a combination of homeland resilience, a new integrated force, and putting NATO first to make Britain...

safer and more influential, ruthlessly examining every aspect of defense, challenges business as usual in the more complex world, proposing a new partnership with industry, a new national arm director, all of this, boosting reserves, invigorating training, confronting existing cultures and capturing innovations coming out of the experience of Ukraine. Before we get into the very, very meat, very, very quickly, you were last defense secretary, 1997 to 1999, you authored the 1998 review,

the world has changed dramatically. So just give me a very quick sense of what you thought with the, how the world has changed when

when you three were looking at this question, this task put before you by the government, what is the landscape? Some of it might be quite obvious. We know about the war in Ukraine, the challenges that you think Britain needed to respond to. Well, first of all, let me just take a picture of 1998. It's not all that long ago, especially for your listeners. We had 10,000 troops committed to Northern Ireland in 1998.

either in the province or ready to go there. NATO had just signed the NATO-Russia Founding Act with Boris Yeltsin, so we had good relationships we established at that time. China was in the shadows, wasn't really a big player at all, and we thought globalization was a great idea. That world is gone. That was business as usual, and that world has changed dramatically. We now have great power competition.

playing out in front of our eyes, the rise of China, China strategically and economically. We've got the rise of Iran and its malignant effect. We've got North Korea now part and parcel of the quartet that is cooperating in Ukraine. We have geostrategic shifts taking place all the time in terms of industry, commerce,

The volatility of events in the world is unprecedented, probably, in history. Combine that with the velocity of change, you know, the very fact that we're doing this podcast and that anybody is listening to it illustrates the way in which news has changed. You combine these two, the volatility and the velocity of change, and you get huge new vulnerabilities.

You know, what happens if the lights go out in this studio, in this building here today? Do we know how to get out of it? A few weeks ago, the whole of Spain and Portugal lost power. Two modern European countries lost power. Nobody seems to know why.

They lost power and paralysis was the result. A transformer blows up at Heathrow Airport and Heathrow Airport has to close down for 24 hours. We've got a situation where something like 90% of the data that we are using in this country and in Europe as a whole comes in undersea cables.

77% of UK's gas imports come from Norway in one pipeline. So the vulnerabilities from cyber and from the grey zone, disinformation, targeted assassinations, electoral interference, all of these things, that is part and parcel of today's world.

So you've got on one hand, you've got the one side of the coin is the grey zone and the declaration of war by Putin on us at the moment. And you've got the future of

problems that come from this rising global competition between great powers, which will affect us in the future. So this report, our report, our study has not just been about what is needed at the present moment to deal with the problems we have at the moment. It's designed to help my grandchildren and their children in the future and the problems that they are going to face.

Let's get into the meat of it. So there's a very long report, 62 recommendations, I think around 45,000 words. I have not read it all in detail. I've skimmed it fairly thoroughly, but it's going to take a while for people to get through it. I think it's fair to say-

But I think that'll drag them in to reading the whole report, which is very readable as well. He said modestly. He says modestly. Who brought the flourish, the authorial flourish? Which one of you is a better writer? Well, I'm not able to tell you who the writer was, the pen holder was, but she was brilliant. Absolutely outstanding as well. So digested.

digested it all. That makes things very clear. All right. Well, look, it's very ambitious. There's lots in it. There's talk about stopping the size of the army being reduced. There's talk about

The nuclear deterrent has talked about NATO first. All of this has talked about industry. There's a cultural shift in there. It's very, very ambitious. The problem with all this, and I know this is not the first time this bowl has been bowled at you because you mentioned it on the way up, really, is about how much it's going to cost. I know you write in the report this was costed to 2.5%.

of GDP by 2027 and 3% when conditions allow the next parliament. Those are the parameters you were given, if I'm correct. The problem is, and I know you are not in the government and you're not the chancellor, is about whether or not that is enough money. And frankly, you'll have seen a lot of the commentary, a lot of people saying, look, Keir Starmer is still saying that's an ambition. It's not a fact that you're going to get to 3%. The question is,

is this really properly costed and the second question is that okay you've costed everything is that enough that's the benchmark that we were working to uh you know we weren't sort of told here's a blank sheet of paper if you had an infinite amount of money you know what would you do with it that that wasn't the task that we had you know it might have been you could have been and then it would have

we'd have produced yet another think tank report that would have stayed on the shelf. So we were told basically what the parameters were and the benchmark was 2.5% the year after next and the 3%. So we've costed it, it's costed, you know, ruthlessly been costed. I can tell you meeting after meeting after meeting was all designed to do that. But in answer to the direct question about the government, you

Just let me quote what the defense secretary said in the House of Commons on Monday. He was asked a question by Ian Duncan Smith. There's a good Daily Telegraph man. And John Healy said, I say to the right honorable gentleman, do not take it from me at the dispatch box. Take it from the prime minister when he said we will spend what is needed to deliver this review.

He's made a commitment to the House. He's made that commitment today. The vision of this Strategic Defence Review now becomes the mission of this government to deliver. That's the commitment, that's the promise by the First Lord of the Treasury, by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. So, you know, the three of us are going to be sitting there like crows on the branch of a tree.

watching carefully as to how the recommendations are implemented and when they are. So, you know, they've created a bit of a rod for their own back by having independent reviewers. But at the same time, it galvanizes. And I know that John Healy is absolutely determined to deliver what's in this report. I mean, you don't think that he's asked for money and he's been defeated by the chancellor. No.

No, he asked for money and he got the money. A lot of other departments in the lead up to the spending review are looking jealously. He got an extra five billion pounds this year. He's got a commitment of the two and a half percent of GNP the year after next. And the commitment to the three percent, which is necessary to deliver the review in the next parliament. They keep saying it's an ambition, not a commitment.

Well, but I've read to you what the Defence Secretary said to the House of Commons. These are the precise words that he said. He said another one here. We've committed the funds. We've built them into the terms of reference and will allow this strategic defence review to be delivered over the next 10 years and beyond. I mean, there's just things when I'm reading it and it makes me wonder whether...

whether you were sure the money's there or not. And I'll just give you an example and see your response. So when we're talking about submarines, I think it's recommendation number 35. It doesn't tell us how many SSN submarines we need. It says the government must make clear how many they're going to build. So rather than offering a recommendation, it's telling us that the government has to make clear how many they're going to be, and that will provide the clarity for how much. And the government

then, you know, this week talks about, announces we're going to build up to 12 new attack submarines. Up to, I'm reliably informed by a man who has worked closely in government and used that word himself many times, generally can be translated as we have no intention of building that number, but we would like you to think so. Why isn't there a firm number in there about how many we need? Well, there is a defence investment plan that will come

later in the year that will arise out of our recommendations. So you will notice that although there are some of these recommendations, you would talk about submarines and ships and the rest of it. That was not really part of our terms of reference. But, you know, as I say, if you look at the guts of this report, there are a huge number of recommendations about the way in which we deliver defense.

If you look at the delivery of submarines, for example, we're not terribly good at delivering them. We have in the past. But in the report, there are recommendations about how we deal with our procurement issues in a really serious and different way in order to make sure that the ambition to get that number of submarines will actually be delivered as well. So that the reform of the system is as important as the output of

that is actually projected. But the defense investment plan that will come later, and it's not part of our job, that's for the government itself to do, is to decide how many planes, how many ships, how many submarines are actually going to be part of Britain. All we said was what was needed

in order to be able to deal with the challenges. That's not part of your job to say how many subs we need with the money we've got? Well, we talk about the principles that are involved in it. But I go back to what we were saying before the program. It was suggested at the beginning, the objective of our report should be to stop the Daily Telegraph judging Britain's defense by the number of people in the army.

And I think we've done that. The army is, I think, down to, I mean, it's meant to be at 73,000 at the moment, which I believe is the smallest it's been since the Napoleonic Wars. You say the total number of soldiers must grow to 100,000. There can be no more cuts to the size. You say the total number of soldiers, and we're just talking about the land force here, the army, not the Air Force Navy, should be 100,000, including reservists. And

And you talk about some point in the future when costs allow increasing the size of the reserve by 20% and maybe a very small increase in the number of regulars. And this bothers me. And the reason, you know, okay, I work for the Daily Telegraph and I'm judging you on the size of the army. But the reason it bothers me is because I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine. And one of the lessons of Ukraine is...

People talk a lot about drones and the evolution of technology and so on. The other lesson is that mass really matters because when this kind of warfare starts, you will start taking casualties and a lot of casualties. And I'll be frank with you. I,

I don't really know how a British army that small would be able to regenerate after the first few weeks of combat in that kind of intense environment. So I'm really interested in whether those numbers you came up with for the army, is that a reflection of just how expensive it is to get regular soldiers to feed them, to clothe them, to maintain them? Should it ideally be more? Well, we...

We make recommendations about the reserves because they're important and they've been less important in the past. That's a fact of life. The professionals have never particularly liked or wanted the reserves. We've got to change that cultural opinion as well. So there's the strategic reserve. That is the people who have been in the armed forces and who are trained and who have a

a lasting commitment and then a voluntary reserve beyond that as well. And that's got to be built up slowly, but it's expensive to do. But that's how you get the mass without necessarily increasing the number of full-time people. The army and the other services are finding it difficult to recruit, but we've actually got serious recommendations in the report about how that can be changed.

you know, with a whole variety of new means, the gap years, the limited services, the entry points. All of these things are here, laid out, because we wanted...

to discover why people wouldn't join the armed forces and how that could be changed. And I think we've been able to find a way through that. That's important. But are you really satisfied that 73,000 regulars is enough if we are about to enter, as you talked about, peer-on-peer intensive warfare? At the moment, the government has inherited a situation where it's even less than the 73,000 there. And that's got to be resolved immediately.

And it's got to be changed. And we've got to reinvigorate the whole concept of the reserves and what they do and how they're trained and properly equipped in order to create that degree of mass. But we're in a different world now. The Ukrainians are now finding what we've seen in the last seven days from the Ukrainians. The blowing up the Kersh Bridge the other night, the drone attack on the Stavros

strategic bombers of the Russian Federation. It's ingenuity. That's all true. And of course, you know, Britain's rightfully, I think, not being an expert, but I think probably rightfully proud of our special forces and probably our ability, I would think, to do things like that. But while all that's going on, they're about approaching a million Ukrainians in uniform, a huge numbers of people holding the trenches up and down the line, taking a lot of casualties and having to be replaced.

And that's why I'm asking about the size of the army. The army's lethality is what matters. It's the effectiveness of our forces that actually matter at the end of the day. Ukraine is not... It's an example, but it's not a template. The next war will be a very different war. People say that...

and even strategists are busy fighting the last war. In some ways, Ukraine is the last war. The next war is going to be a very, very different set of circumstances that we have to deal with. And therefore, what we're proposing in each of the chapters in here is

are armed forces that will be relevant to the future, which can be augmented, they can be accelerated, depending on circumstances and depending on how much the public is willing to spend on defence. After the break, if the British people want to be safe, what sacrifices will they be asked to make?

But

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Welcome back. You're listening to Battlelines. My name's Roland Oliphant and I'm speaking to Lord Robertson, one of the three authors of the government's new Strategic Defence Review.

Let me ask you once more about money. You know, you want to talk about other things, but I think it's important. So this, we have the government's repetition of its 2.5% by 2027, 3% when conditions allow in the next parliament as an ambition. The prime minister made very clear it's an ambition. I'm not promising anything he says because I'm not going to get the fantasy politics.

nonetheless, a lot of criticism about that. And then we, and not just us, by the way, this is in The Guardian as well. NATO sources briefing us, briefing our colleagues at The Guardian and other media, that actually UK is going to be pushed and required to spend 3.5% instead at the NATO summit later this month. Mark Rutter, the Secretary General, says he wants 5%. And that's all part of his plan to basically keep Donald Trump and NATO on side. So I suppose that, again, I come back to that question of,

You're independent. You're not part of the government. You don't have to defend them. Is that current commitment enough, or should they raise it? Trade-offs have to take place. What we can say is what we think is necessary. We were given terms of reference, and these terms of reference are there. If the British people as a whole decide they want to spend more money on defence and less money on other things, then they will make that decision.

At the moment, they don't. We had a general election campaign last year where defense wasn't really mentioned at all. We had a conservative party leadership campaign where defense wasn't mentioned or an issue. So people in the country have to examine the threats that exist at the moment and the threats that will be there in the future and make a decision about what they have. So what we see in the report is

and it's endorsed by the Prime Minister, is that we need to have a national conversation among the British people about your defence and security. How safe do people want to be? And what are they willing to pay in order to be properly safe? Now, I characterise it as an insurance policy. The defence budget is the premium that we pay for the defence of the country. If the country wants to

to be safe and to make sure future generations are safe, given the climate that there is outside there, they'll have to be willing to pay more for it. So it's a long-winded way of saying we've got to cut up the cake in a different way. Or you increase the size of the cake. I know you're not in government now. When you last did a defence review in 1998, which, by the way, cut the size of the

of the armed forces, I believe. We had 20,000 troops committed to Northern Ireland. How difficult is this really for the government? And I'm talking about dividing up that cake. When you were last in government, it was boom, it was cool Britannia. There was a lot more money around. Our adversaries were, I think our GDP was bigger than China and India combined.

something like that. We are now in a world post-financial crisis, post-COVID, post-war in Ukraine, where huge amounts have been borrowed to deal with each of those crises. The tax burden is already, I think, if it's not already, I believe that the language is on course to be the heaviest since the Second World War.

cuts have already been made to things like overseas aid. I suppose the big question is just how constrained is the government in what it can do? I mean, I know you're not a minister now, but it doesn't look from the outside. It looks pretty difficult. There are things that you might want to do in defence, which are simply unaffordable. In 1998, when I did the review, we promised at the beginning it would be foreign policy-led.

And at the end of the process, the then-Chancellor of East Shekhar said he was going to take a chunk of money out of our budget. And I have to say that I went with...

to my junior ministers to see Tony Blair to say that, you know, if it happened, we would resign. That we'd given a pledge to the armed forces and to the country that it would be foreign policy led. And if arbitrary money was going to be taken out of it, I, you know, we couldn't, we couldn't stay in the government. So the budget, the budget remained unaffected. The budget that we'd laid out there was,

But, you know, we don't live in a world where there is an infinite amount of money available. But it's a question of priorities. You talk about this big conversation that has to be had. Is the blunt, unvarnished nature of that conversation, look, if you want to be safe...

You're going to have to make some sacrifices. I mean, life is not going to be what you expected it to be because we're going to have to make cuts elsewhere. Is that basically what you think the British public have to accept now? We're promoting growth in this and defence expenditure is a way of gaining growth. Then that makes the pie bigger and the choice is less difficult to make. But that's not where we are now.

So you're basically saying the British public is going to have to accept that the cuts are going to have to come. Either you're going to be paying more tax or other services are going to have to be reduced in some way in order to pay for our defense in this new world. The German government managed to overcome a constitutional block on borrowing, a constitutional block which the Allies left them with after the war in order to borrow specifically for defense.

the European Union now.

has got a defense budget and it's got a commissioner for defense. The new world requires new thinking. Business as usual doesn't apply to the people who are attacking us and it can't apply in normal budgetary terms as well. I wanted to get into this question of culture. This is from Dom Nichols, our defense roving chief Ukraine man.

So he's in Ukraine and he was asking, look, you said this review would be genuinely transformative. And he said that that worried him partly because he's reminded of the old Maxim of culture eats strategy for breakfast. So the review calls for greater resilience in society and industry. You say the government should mount a campaign to explain the threats Britain faces to the public and a defense readiness bill that would allow the government to mobilize reserves and industry in times of crisis.

Do you really believe that this or subsequent governments would put real and sustained effort into explaining adequately the threats we face and the eye-watering costs of dealing with them, given the parlous state of our defences today, plus the changes that would be demanded from society? Because we are talking about big changes to society. We are. And they're not as big as the changes that will be affected if the lights go out.

And the data centers go down. And we're confronted with this sort of calamity that we saw in Spain and Portugal just a few weeks ago. So these are the costs that we have. The prime minister made it clear on Monday that we're paying the price in household items today for Russia's invasion of Ukraine, driving up the cost of living.

The cost of a war is infinitely greater than that. We stopped paying for the Second World War in the 1980s. That was the sacrifice that was made at the time when we were paying off the national debt right up until then. So, you know, you have to put, you know, on one side the cost of not doing things along with the cost of doing things as well. And therefore, you know, I think...

politicians have got to make the case. That's part of the reason why I'm doing the Daily Telco podcast. It's just we're trying to get over the message, and we will. The reviewers and others will be going out to various parts of the country to make that argument.

about what the risks are, what the problems are, and what is going to necessarily need to be done in order to mitigate them. Because the impression I'm getting is that sacrifices are going to have to be made, and someone's going to have to level with the British people and say, look, whether it's more taxes...

whether it's something else. And I was wondering if we get more specific. So let me give you an example. And I know we are not Russia. And when I put this to people, they say, oh, you shouldn't compare to Britain to Russia. You should compare Russia to NATO. But nonetheless, Russia is thought that it's thought that this month, Russia is going to suffer its millionth casualty. That's killed, wounded, and so on, not just killed in the war in Ukraine sometime this month. And I'm not suggesting that the British army would ever fight in the same way that the Russian army, but nonetheless,

That is absolutely an extraordinary level of attrition for any war fought by any major power since 1945. On the other hand, up to 1945, it's fairly reasonable in the context of the number of casualties we got. Do you think this country needs to get used to the idea that it is going to take casualties and people are going to die? And I know that's a pretty blunt and unpleasant question, but

But I'm asking it because I spent a lot of time in Ukraine. I saw a lot of people die. And the prospect is if the war that you're talking about ends up happening, this peer-on-peer conflict...

How would the British public respond if, you know, hypersonic missiles, cruiser missiles, I don't know, slam into Catterick or another barracks? Hundreds of people are dead in one night and things like that. Are these the kinds of things that this country should be talking about? In the review, I'm talking about how to avoid it. Deterrence is the question. You know, we all go to our beds at night.

safe because of Article 5 of the NATO Treaty. That if anybody attacks a NATO country, the 32 countries in NATO, they know that

It will be seen as an attack on all of the countries. So almost a billion people are covered by that particular guarantee. That's what deterrence is about. So what we're recommending here are a whole series of things that need to be done in order to build up our war readiness, in order to avoid having the conflict in the first place.

You know, there are people who will still argue that if Ukraine had not given up its nuclear weapons in 1994 in return for the paper assurances of the Budapest memorandum, that Russia would never have dared to have crossed the border. I don't know. You can't prove that or disprove that. All I know is that NATO...

And the Article 5 guarantee is a deterrent to any aggressor who thinks that they can take on these 32 countries. So all of the missiles, all of the submarines, all of the planes that we are proposing and that are part of the build-up to war readiness are designed not to be used.

They are designed to make sure that nobody fires the cruise missiles. But the only way that's going to work is if people think you're credible and you're prepared to use them. Absolutely. And we have to be. I was defense secretary, and therefore I had a role in the key chain with the nuclear deterrent. And although I started my political career at the age of 15 demonstrating against the arrival of American nuclear submarines, I had absolutely no doubt in my mind that if it came to the bit

I knew what needed to be done. You knew what needed to be done because you were a Secretary General or a Defence Secretary. What about the rest of the British public? What I'm getting at is do you think we are really a society that could handle this crisis if it comes? Well, we'll need to make sure that that is the case and remind people about what it is. And I think that's the job of the media. It's the job of politicians.

And we need to raise awareness of the issue. And that's why we say there needs to be this national conversation. What is it you want? What is the insurance premium?

that will keep you and your family safe in the future. Can I ask you quickly about NATO? Because you talked about that and the report is very much about NATO first and Britain's got to make itself NATO first. This review was meant to come out in February, I believe, and Donald Trump arrived and the Americans were saying all kinds of things about commitments to European security and how Ukraine is a European problem and all of this. And it had to be delayed. I believe you had to... You had to

rewrite things or insert things in response to that. How did the review change in response to Donald Trump's arrival in the White House? The report didn't have to change a lot because we're still very close to the Americans and we have an intimate relationship with them, especially in defense and security terms. And that hasn't changed since the president came.

In relation to NATO, there's an element of rhetoric about what is being said at the present moment, which is contradicted by the people who

articulate on behalf of the Trump administration. They say that they simply want the imbalance that exists in NATO at the moment between the non-US countries, Canada and the Europeans and the United States of America, and that something has to be done about that. And a combination of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin and the closeness of the threat has driven up

European defence budgets quite dramatically over the period of time. But the structure that we have created here and the reforms within the system as it stands at the moment... What you said about NATO first and so on, that's not partly a response to American disengagement from NATO and therefore the need to strengthen that alliance. No, NATO first was in the manifesto of the

the Labour Party when it came to power. It's NATO first, but not NATO alone because we've got wider responsibilities. But in terms of NATO first, it's actually you're trying to build in our military into NATO in a much more intimate way than it was before. A lot of it was kid-ology. A lot of it was to do with pretending that you were compatible with it. But it's got to do now with making sure that we are actually NATO compatible and

and that we are capable of leading in NATO. And we do lead- Can we, I'm sorry to come back to this, but can we be capable of leading in NATO if the Poles, the Estonians, the Latvians, the Lithuanians, the Finns, and so on are already heading towards 5% of GDP on defense?

And we won't even commit to the 3.5. When I was in the MOD and when I was in NATO, I was always making the point. I remember going to NATO headquarters on my first day in October 1999, saying I have three priorities. Priority one is capabilities. Priority two is capabilities. Priority three is capabilities.

NATO is as strong as the capabilities that it actually has to its hand. And it's what you do with the money that you're spending. And Britain has the position of Deputy Secure at the moment because we have got a record of achievement, a record of doing things that clearly...

gives us leadership within the Alliance as a whole. You said...

earlier, and I've heard this before, actually, from your co-author, Richard Barron, has made this point in a briefing earlier this week, that Ukraine is a template, but it's not the template. You can't simply take it. I'm quite interested in how much you looked at the experience of the Ukraine war when drafting this review, how it influenced you, in what ways it does inform us, but perhaps also, in what ways is it inappropriate as a

as a template for us to study. Well, we have...

gone out of our way to capture the lessons of Ukraine, the agility of the Ukrainians, the use of technology that is going to have to be built into whatever we do in the future. But air power has not been part and parcel of the Ukraine war or the defense of Ukraine, but it would be in any wider conflict. And therefore, you've got to distinguish between what we learn that they're doing and

Learn from the things that they are not doing. Learn from what the Russians started off with, you know, the kydology of intelligence that they had, that their belief was

in the invincibility of their armed forces with the top-down organization which crumbled within days of the invasion. Learning all of these lessons, but also moving forward, looking to 2035 and the kind of challenges that we're going to face at that time and how we build war readiness in this country in order that we build sufficient deterrence

that an adversary is simply not going to do to us what the Russians have done to Ukraine. When you're doing this, when you're sitting there going, oh, 2035, whatever, okay, I really want to know what are the horizons we're working on, specifically in terms of Russian reconstitution, because we've had a lot of stuff out there. We had the head of the German army, I think, saying, you know, we've got to be ready in two or three years for a war between Russia and NATO. Other people have said, oh, no, it will take a decade and so on.

What was the window that you were working on in terms of the window in which we think that Russian threat, that reconstituted Russian threat, is likely to appear? The decade is what we were working to. That was our view about what we needed to do. But that can be accelerated. So be ready for an all-NATO war in 10 years? For a peer adversary, yes.

attacking the United Kingdom. We're talking about, you know, that it would probably require the existing potential adversaries to reconstitute by that time. But it can be earlier. And therefore, you know, the model that we've created, the model that we're promoting at the moment can be accelerated, you know, depending on circumstances. George Robertson, thanks for joining us on Battle Lines.

That's all for us this week. We'll be back on Monday. Until then, that was Battlelines. Goodbye. Battlelines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Roland Oliphant and Venetia Rainey. If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battlelines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it helps others to find the show.

To stay on top of all our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter, or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can also get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Peter Shevlin and the executive producer is Louisa Wells.

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