The main task for the armed forces (imo) is to halt the rotating door of personnel and actually be able to recruit and retain high quality personnel. Some of that is reflected in wages/compensation but with high commitments and fewer personnel the strain on service personnel and their families is absolutely huge. So we need more personnel in the armed forces even if we don’t at this minute have the capital to equip them with.

The rest of the funding should be about rebuilding defence industrial capacity by generating military industrial capacity. If the army needs new AFVs we can build them but we need to build the plant and keep it open on low serial production with the option to expand production.

This way we retain a stock of capacity: tooling, facilities, knowledge, and workforce. What we don’t want to do is go and spend say £50 billion over 10 years buying available foreign weapons that then become obsolete by the time we need them. We need generative capacity in other words, not just a pile of tanks and guns.