Defence spending is one thing, but does Gen Z have the will to fight?
It’s not just our diminished armed forces that leave Britain vulnerable to Putin, it’s a generation raised on the idea that Britain isn’t worth fighting for, says James Price
In his “Politics and the English Language” George Orwell warned against using tired, old metaphors, as they reflected tired, old thinking. But the poor frog in a pan of water, not realising the temperature is rising until it is too late to escape, is such a powerful one that I am going to use it anyway.
In this rendition, the frog is good old Blighty, unaware of the risks to our security that look close to reaching boiling point and with armed forces so diminished as to leave us all but defenceless.
Buoyed by fantasy ideas of an ever more peaceful world, the British state (at the behest of the Treasury) has allowed itself to finance only the threats that it thinks it can afford, rather than the threats it actually faces.
And just as we are waking up to the need to re-arm, and some are realising this means we need to re-industrialise, few have yet realised that domestic social issues will hamstring our ability to re-recruit soldiers, sailors and airmen.
Woke cultural decay has had an undoubted negative effect on our sense of patriotism. Why would anyone sign up to fight for a country you had been told was irredeemably racist and uniquely terrible in all of history?
And the trend towards weakness doesn’t help; young people who feel that they are too ‘anxious’ to make a phone call are hardly likely to willingly pick up a rifle.
As the country has become more diverse, fewer people feel that Britain is “their home”, worth fighting and dying for. This is borne out in various statistics, where certain groups are underrepresented in the current British Army, let alone future recruitment drives.
Added to that are the recent small boat crossings, which have brought tens of thousands of fighting-age males to these shores. They are almost all men, with no love for this country. Caught hanging around primary schools and worse, they are already causing the sorts of social strife that would make many feel the need to stay home to protect their families from rising crime.
Domestic issue have undermined our capabilities
And for once I haven’t even mentioned Labour’s dreadful handling of the economy, which will impact our ability to pay for more defence. But in a perfect storm of factors inhibiting a recruitment drive for the armed forces, there is hope.
A brilliant recent paper by the Centre for Social Justice highlights how many young men are failing in life, often due to economic inactivity and lack of purpose. The forces could represent a brilliant escape route for these young men, giving them skills and imbuing them with something to believe in.
Why does this matter? Russia currently spends more than 40 per cent of its GDP on defence, to our two per cent. We have around 75,000 men-at-arms, to Russia’s many millions of active servicemen and reserves. It is also mobilising 30,000 men every month, meaning that it has recruited almost as many men from the start of 2025 to the moment you are reading this, as Britain has troops overall.
Whilst there has for a while now been a continent separating us from the Russians, Keir Starmer’s noble but hazardous pledge to help police any ceasefire in Ukraine, suddenly pushes Putin’s wicked forces very much closer to us. I cannot think about the brave men and women of our armed forces without feeling a mix of pride in them, and slight shame that I have myself never signed up.
But with our current parlous finances, increasingly unsafe homeland, and deeply reduced capabilities, I worry greatly about Britain’s ability to project force in such a dangerous place very effectively.
So we must re-arm, reindustrialise, and re-recruit. But crucial to that is fixing our economy, restoring a sense of pride in our country, and remembering why Britain is worth fighting for.
James Price is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute