When a former NATO secretary general warns that Britain is “underprepared, underinsured, under attack” and “not safe,” it is more than a routine shot in the Westminster blame game. Lord George Robertson’s recent intervention goes to the heart of the United Kingdom’s war‑fighting credibility in an era of state‑on‑state confrontation. His message is stark: the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) he led has diagnosed the problem, but the gap between paper commitments and hard capability leaves Britain’s national security “in peril.”
Robertson’s language and his accusation of “corrosive complacency” in Britain’s political leadership is best understood when mapped against three concrete areas: the munitions and industrial base, the structure and readiness of the armed forces, and the political economy of defence in a welfare‑maximising state.
Munitions and the Industrial Base: “Underinsured” for Major War
The most immediate content of Robertson’s warning sits in the stockpiles and factories rather than in strategy documents. Multiple open‑source assessments now concede that the UK’s existing ammunition reserves would sustain only a short period of high‑intensity combat measured in days, not months against a peer adversary. This is the practical meaning of being “underinsured”: Britain has bought some sophisticated platforms, but not enough of the rounds, spares and explosive fillings that turn them into sustained combat power.
The 2025 SDR, commissioned by Keir Starmer and led by Robertson, effectively admits this shortfall. It calls for an “always on” munitions production base, larger war stocks and a step change in the tempo at which industry can replenish what the armed forces fire or lose in combat. Government announcements following the review, including plans for at least six new weapons and explosives manufacturing sites, a £1.5 billion long‑range weapons programme and a target of up to 7,000 long‑range missiles. underline how far behind the baseline the UK actually was.
Robertson’s criticism is not that nothing is being done, but that the timing curve is wrong. The factories will take years to build, workforce skills must be regenerated, and export‑led business models must be rebalanced toward assured domestic supply in wartime. In the meantime, a more dangerous Russia, a volatile Middle East and intensifying pressure on NATO’s flanks are not waiting for British industrial projects to mature.
Read this way, “underprepared and underinsured” is less rhetorical flourish than shorthand for a hard reality: the rate at which the UK can generate and regenerate munitions still reflects a post‑Cold War, low‑intensity pattern of operations. The SDR points toward an industrial mobilisation footing; Robertson’s warning is that the country is trying to traverse that distance with peacetime budgets and political timelines.
Force Structure and Readiness: Mass, Depth and Endurance
Robertson’s second theme is the structure and readiness of the forces themselves. The SDR’s promise of an army “ten times more lethal” is revealing: it implies a starting point in which today’s force, while professional, lacks the mass, integrated fires and air defence to endure a sustained peer conflict. For three decades, British land power has been optimised for niche expeditionary operations – Iraq, Afghanistan – rather than for the brutal arithmetic of an extended high‑intensity campaign.
The review’s answer is to re‑engineer the army around long‑range fires, AI‑enabled targeting, integrated ground‑based air defence and land‑based uncrewed systems. That is conceptually sound, and it matches lessons drawn from Ukraine. But the transformation requires not only new equipment, it demands more robust war stocks, training cycles, and the human resource policies to recruit and retain a force capable of absorbing battle damage and rotating units in combat.
Robertson’s description of Britain as “underprepared” captures the current gap between that future construct and today’s force. Artillery and rocket forces remain limited in depth. Ground‑based air defence is still a patchwork, especially for deployed formations. The ability to sustain major land operations beyond the first weeks is constrained by munitions, maintenance capacity and the sheer availability of trained formations.
At sea, the logic is similar. The Royal Navy is expected to secure the North Atlantic, contribute to carrier strike and presence operations further afield, and underpin the nuclear deterrent, all with a surface fleet and submarine arm far smaller than at the end of the Cold War. The SDR’s proposed “hybrid Navy,” combining a limited number of high‑end platforms with autonomous systems, Aukus SSN‑AUKUS boats and an expanded undersea and mine‑countermeasures network, is an attempt to square that circle.
Yet Robertson’s charge is that capability on paper is not capability in being. Until additional hulls are launched, submarines deliver on schedule, crews are manned and retained, and the support infrastructure is modernised, the UK will remain thinly stretched in a crisis. The same applies to the RAF’s ability to maintain high sortie rates and sustain complex operations once attrition and maintenance bite, a function not just of aircraft numbers, but of spares, technicians, weapons and hardened operating bases.
Beneath all this sit infrastructure and logistics. The SDR’s planned Defence Infrastructure Recapitalisation Plan is an explicit admission that depots, ports, airfields and barracks have been run down over decades. Programmes such as efforts to accelerate ammunition flows from depot to front line show the system beginning to shift toward a war‑fighting footing, but they remain in early stages. For Robertson, this is part of being “underprepared”: the back‑end that makes surge and sustainment possible is not yet sized for the worst‑case scenario.
Political Economy and “Corrosive Complacency”
The third strand of Robertson’s critique is political, and it is aimed directly at the current leadership. He accuses Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves of “corrosive complacency,” arguing that they talk about “war‑fighting readiness” while allowing the Treasury and wider fiscal framework to “vandalise” the resources required to deliver it. His line that “we cannot safeguard Britain with an ever‑expanding welfare budget” is deliberately provocative, but it poses a real strategic question: in a more dangerous world, what must be traded to rebuild the hard instruments of power?
On one level, the government can point to having commissioned the SDR, accepted its 62 recommendations and set out an upward trajectory for defence spending, including a path toward 2.5 per cent of GDP. That is not trivial. It marks a rhetorical and strategic shift away from the post‑Iraq, post‑Afghanistan pattern of viewing defence as a discretionary spend.
Robertson’s contention is that this is not yet matched by urgency in implementation. In his view, the combination of slow budget uplifts, back‑loaded procurement profiles and a political instinct to defer hard trade‑offs leaves the UK “not safe” in the decisive 2020s, even if it might be better prepared in the 2030s. The charge of complacency is not that politicians deny the existence of threats; it is that they assume those threats will conform to the tempo of British budgeting and planning cycles.
That critique will resonate within parts of the armed forces and industrial base. Many officers and executives see the SDR as analytically sound but worry that, without front‑loaded funding and political cover for disruptive change, it will join a long list of British defence reviews that promised transformation and delivered incrementalism. Robertson, no longer constrained by office, is in effect giving public voice to those private concerns.
An Inflection Point, Not Just a Row
Seen in this light, Robertson’s intervention is more than a dispute within the Labour family. It exposes the central tension in British defence policy: the recognition that the world has re‑entered an era of systemic confrontation, and the reluctance to acknowledge what that means for national priorities. The SDR provides a conceptual pathway out of that dilemma; the munitions, force structure and infrastructure gaps define the distance still to be travelled.
Whether Starmer’s government treats Robertson’s warning as an irritant or as a catalyst will help determine whether Britain remains “underprepared and underinsured” as the decade unfolds – or whether the country finally matches its rhetoric on war‑fighting readiness with the hard, unglamorous investments that true security requires.
Bibliography
BBC News. “Former Nato Chief to Say UK’s National Security ‘in Peril’.” BBC News, April 13, 2026. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cje4n5ppgw7o.
British Government. The Strategic Defence Review 2025: Making Britain Safer – Secure at Home, Strong Abroad. London: HM Government, 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-strategic-defence-review-2025-making-britain-safer-secure-at-home-strong-abroad.
Centre for British Progress. Fixing UK Defence Procurement. London: Centre for British Progress, December 1, 2025. https://britishprogress.org/reports/fixing-uk-defence-procurement.
“Starmer Accused of ‘Corrosive Complacency’ on UK Defence by Former Nato Chief.” Financial Times, April 13, 2026. https://www.ft.com/content/88b1f17a-28d1-4706-b1ee-cbe6a1278496.
“Money’s Powerful, but It Can’t Buy Instant Capacity: Building a Truly Strong Defence Industrial Base.” Forces News, April 21, 2026. https://www.forcesnews.com/opinion/money-powerful-it-cant-buy-instant-capacity-building-truly-strong-defence-industrial-base.
“Former Defence Secretaries Back Ex-Nato Chief’s Warning That PM’s Complacency on Defence Puts UK at Risk.” The Independent, April 14, 2026. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/iran-war-nato-george-robertson-defence-spending-starmer-b2957091.html.
“Former NATO Chief Accuses UK’s Starmer of Inadequately Funding Defence.” Reuters, April 13, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/former-nato-chief-targets-pm-starmer-warning-uks-security-peril-2026-04-14/.
“Challenges in British Munitions Supply.” UK Defence Journal, November 23, 2024. https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/challenges-in-british-munitions-supply/.
“UK Defence Industry Lacking Direction as Funding Plan Delayed.” UK Defence Journal, March 29, 2026. https://ukdefencejournal.org.uk/uk-defence-industry-lacking-direction-as-funding-plan-delayed/.
“Lord Robertson: Can Britain Be Defended?” Experience Salisbury, April 13, 2026. https://www.experiencesalisbury.co.uk/whats-on/2026/april/lord-robertson-can-britain-be-defended/.