LONDON — Britain and its Western allies are moving too slowly when it comes to adopting new military technologies, a member of the U.K. government’s high-profile defense review team has warned.
The strategic defense review, a major independent assessment of the biggest threats facing the U.K., placed a heavy emphasis on the need for Britain to be “battle-ready” through investment in advanced capabilities, munitions and long-range weapons.
While ministers accepted all of its recommendations, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer refused to set a timeline for spending 3 percent of the country’s GDP on defense, which experts have argued will be the minimum necessary for delivering the review in its entirety.
Grace Cassy, an investor in security startups and a former adviser to ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, was one of six outside experts chosen to help steer the SDR.
She told POLITICO that the war in Ukraine had played a central part in how the reviewers looked at new battlefield tech.
Both sides have adapted rapidly to deploy drones, sensors and jamming systems — Kyiv starting from a point of weaker conventional capability, and Moscow constrained in what it can acquire because of international sanctions.
“There is a battle to maintain an advantage that’s often quite short-lived,” she said. “The cycles of innovation are incredibly short.”
She added this was particularly true of drones, where contested frequencies could mean that “you can fly it in one day, but maybe a week later you can’t.”
“The SDR makes clear we’ve got a way to go before we could be ready to fight that way,” she warned.
In particular Cassy cited sluggish procurement processes holding back the U.K. alongside an ingrained aversion to risk and an over-reliance on a handful of major defense suppliers.
The SDR recommended a three-month deadline for bringing the latest tech into use, in a bid to keep up with the pace of modern warfare.
Cassy, co-founder of CyLon Ventures, said the lesson was imperative across the alliance, stressing: “If we went up to 5 percent [spending on defense] tomorrow, but we’re still in our old habits, we wouldn’t be prepared for the future.”
“We within NATO — not just the U.K. but every other NATO member state — needs to change in order to spend any of that new money better.”
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte has called for all member countries to commit more money to their own defense, cautioning last week that Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years.
But Cassy said other types of attack in the “gray zone” — such as cyber attacks and threats to critical national infrastructure — were even more immediate.
“We are already engaged daily in a struggle below that conventional threshold of war, which really does require us to invest properly in our wider defenses.”
The post NATO allies ‘not prepared’ for war, top UK defense adviser warns appeared first on Politico.
