The Defence Investment Plan isn't enough – but Burnham should make do and mend
Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis visiting HMS Prince of Wales in July 2026 (PA Images/Alamy)
6 min read
The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) finally arrived months late, with a £4.7bn funding hole and leaning on heroic efficiency savings to make the numbers add up.
The cost of delays and Whitehall fights is an underpowered plan that struggles to rise to the threats the UK faces and the actions of our allies. Along the way, a defence secretary and his minister resigned and a premiership collapsed.
The temptation for the next government will be to start again. That would be a mistake. So, too, would pretending the plan is adequate. The right response would be to treat the DIP as an imperfect starting point that requires fixing – and fast.
To do that, Andy Burnham’s team should understand the three reasons the DIP falls short.
First, the timing of the money does not match the threat. While the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) recognises the threat is here now, the DIP schedules the bulk of the response for the 2030s. Russia is not waiting for our spending profiles to mature. It has spent years mapping the undersea cables and pipelines that power the UK. Russian handlers are said to have ordered the attacks on properties linked to Keir Starmer. Russian hackers are thought to be behind the devastating cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover that stopped production, damaged supply chains and hit GDP. While Whitehall was deliberating, Russia has been acting.
Second, the DIP lets the UK’s allies down. Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Canada heard Starmer’s calls to invest in hard power, and are rearming at pace. Despite the UK urging middle powers to act, it then produced a plan that defers hard choices. The future of the hybrid fleet, for example, depends on magical thinking on efficiency savings and unspecified reforms to defence procurement. Britain needs to be able to defend itself and to be an ally others can rely on. On the current spending profile, it risks being neither.
Third, there is no clear funding path: not for the commitments in the DIP itself, and not for the climb to 3.5 per cent of GDP by 2035 that the UK signed up to at Nato. It may suit the likely Burnham government to not have its hands tied. But an undefined funding gap is precisely the inheritance Rachel Reeves complained about when she walked into the Treasury. Passing it on is not a plan; it is a grievance in waiting.
Still, Britain cannot afford months of yet more Whitehall drafting and debating while Russia threatens and our allies rearm. Deferral is how defence gets dearer, and it only buys regret. The plan exists, giving industry something to invest against. The task is to close the gap between the plan we have and the plan the threat requires. That gap isn’t just about money – it’s about responding to the threat in a way that strengthens our security and our sovereignty. Here’s how to fix the DIP this side of Christmas.
One, commission a rapid update of the SDR rather than reopening it. The United States refreshes its national security assessments every year; the UK treats its reviews as tablets of stone until events smash them. A short, sharp update led by the National Security Adviser reporting in 90 days should set out how the threat has evolved in the past year: the tempo of Russian aggression, the urgency in protecting the North Sea and the North Atlantic, and the shifting geopolitics of the Middle East.
Next, use that assessment as the rationale for accelerating DIP funding into autonomous and sovereign capability. The DIP’s spending profile is a hockey stick: modest now, generous later. The threat demands the reverse, with the uplift concentrated in the next two to three years.
Front-loading means building highly automated factories now to replenish munitions stocks. It means buying and fielding autonomous systems now, not piloting them indefinitely, for example, with drones being deployed in the North Sea and the Channel, including cheap ones for mass and capable ones for surveillance, persistence and reach. And it means an industrial base that can produce them in weeks rather than years, with enough trained operators, electronic warfare specialists, AI engineers and data analysts to sustain a war fought at Ukraine’s tempo.
The right response would be to treat the DIP as an imperfect starting point that requires fixing – and fast
The new PM can put defence at the heart of reindustrialisation with three actions in the first 50 days. In week one, he should stand up a tiger team in No 10, staffed jointly with the national armaments director and the Treasury, owning both the requirement and the DIP’s budget for autonomous and uncrewed systems, and letting contracts in weeks rather than years. By day 30, he should convene the American primes in Downing Street and ask what they need from government to invest in IP, jobs and supply chains in the UK and not just in the US. And by day 50, he should free five well-performing contracts from the Treasury’s annual funding tranches and ask industry what multi-year predictability would buy in long-term investment, kit availability and whole-life costs; annualised funding is one of the quiet killers of British defence value for money.
There is another task, and it falls on politicians, not the Whitehall machinery. The DIP’s funding gap is really a consent gap: no political leader has yet made a sustained public case about the threats the UK faces and what investing in our national security would mean for other budgets.
Front-loading the money means visible trade-offs in the next two or three years, exactly when voters are focused on more day-to-day concerns and politics turns its attention to the next general election. But the case is there to be made. The threat is not hypothetical; it is aimed at the cables that carry the country’s internet and the pipelines that heat its homes and power its factories. Defence of the realm can be explained on any doorstep in the country. It just requires political leaders willing to fight for that case.
None of this requires a new strategy document. The diagnosis in the SDR remains sound. The failure has been organising priorities and politics around it. That is what made John Healey’s job as defence secretary impossible, and it is what the DIP, as published, still does not resolve.
The plan on the table is late and full of holes. It is also the only plan Britain has, and the threat does not lessen while we perfect our homework. The last government’s mistake was refusing to choose between the security, political and fiscal imperatives pulling defence apart. The next government’s first test is simpler: take the imperfect plan it inherits and bend it to the threat: fix the DIP, don’t bin it.
Jeegar Kakkad is partner and head of defence and industries at Stonehaven
