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The defense secretary has said that £ 16.5 billion is “enough” to modernize the armed forces, but declined to say how much of the new defense funds would be taken from the foreign aid budget.
Ben Wallace also said he “suspected” that the UK would follow the US lead in reducing its number of soldiers in Afghanistan.
On Wednesday, acting US Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said the United States will reduce troop levels in Afghanistan from more than 4,500 to 2,500, and in Iraq from about 3,000 to 2,500.
In interviews on Thursday, Wallace defended Boris Johnson’s announcement of a £ 16.5 billion increase in four years in defense spending at a time when Britain’s public finances have been hit by the Covid pandemic.
Speaking to ITV Good Morning Britain (GMB), Wallace was asked how the government could pay for the defense deal at a time of national health and economic crisis.
He said: ‘Let me put that in perspective – we are getting £ 16.5bn over four years, we have spent £ 200bn on Covid measures, ranging from supporting businesses, supporting people through universal credit, etc.”
Defending the defense budget, he said that “UK adversaries are currently investing record sums of money and, indeed, in some areas they are exceeding our capabilities.”
Speaking to Sky News on Thursday, Wallace said of the £ 16.5 billion: “It is enough, depending on how you suit your ambition. As Secretary of Defense, I have made it very clear that one of the failures of past reviews was that our funding never lived up to our ambition, which is true of most reviews in the last 40 years.
“This means that we can have a proper discussion about what our global ambitions are and how we are going to finance them. This great defense agreement will allow us to solve the problems we have inherited: the black hole that the NAO [National Audit Office] obviously identified, and allow the headspace to modernize our forces. “
But Wallace declined to say how much of the new defense funding would come from the foreign aid budget.
He said the government was not “abandoning the battlefield of international aid,” but said that “decisions on the numbers” would be revealed by the foreign minister next week.
Wallace told GMB that defense spending and foreign aid “are not mutually exclusive.”
He said: “If you spend money on defense and our capabilities – our planners, our engineers – we have a regiment of engineers in Sudan, helping that country, that very poor country, with its infrastructure. They are not mutually exclusive … you may be spending your money differently, but you are still often trying to achieve the same goal. “
Wallace also suggested that the number of British troops in Afghanistan could be reduced if the United States goes ahead with its own reductions in the country.
“The United States just announced the exact number they are going to cut to, but I suspect that if they are reducing it, at some point, we will go down,” he told Sky News.
“We don’t have a massive force compared to them, but we will do whatever it takes to keep people safe and make sure we do everything we can to ensure Afghans are protected as well.”
The UK currently has 1,000 soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, in Kabul, where they take the lead within the Kabul security force. This seven-nation organization provides force protection for the UK and coalition advisers who are working with the UK’s Afghan partners to increase capabilities and capacity in the Afghan national defense and security forces.
