By Pierre Tran

Paris – Britain and Germany have pledged to boost military spending in response to Russia’s bloody advance on Ukraine and uncertainty about U.S. defense efforts in Europe, sparking questions on how those funds will be found and what the rearmament drives will yield.

Those two allied nations have highly distinct public attitudes to arms manufacture and the military, and both the British and German political leaders need to win support for the pursuit of weapons, and more combat capable forces.

Talks for a ceasefire between a fairly junior team from Moscow and a delegation from Kyiv opened May 16 in Istanbul, with President Vladimir Putin notably staying away. The absence of the latter fuelled Western doubts on the good faith of the Russian leader, while heightening a perceived military threat from Moscow.

In which country does a company sell buttery biscuits with commemorative packaging featuring a second world war fighter plane?

A Marks & Spencer box of shortbread biscuit proudly bears a picture of the Spitfire in tribute to the 80th anniversary of the May 8 Victory in Europe Day (VE Day). In the U.K., there is a special place for the Supermarine Spitfire, Britain’s iconic second world war fighter.

Those calling in at the Spitfire visitor center at Hangar 42, Blackpool airport, northeast England, can sit in the cockpit of a Spitfire Mk IX for a fee of £10 ($13). There is also a Hawker Hurricane and Messerschmitt Me109 on display, but the center is named after the Spitfire, which has pride of place.

Much depends on whether that national nostalgia for the air combat star of the 1940 Battle of Britain can be transmuted into support for a switch in public spending to boost the services.

Prime minister Keir Starmer has said the U.K. will speed up an increase in the defense budget to an annual 2.5 pct to 2027, and 3.0 pct in a second term after 2029 – assuming re-election. That compares to the present military spending of 2.3 pct of gross domestic product.

Starmer made those commitments a couple of days before he met President Donald Trump Feb. 27 in the White House, leading London’s drive to strengthen ties and persuade Washington to cut tariffs on British-built goods such as Jaguar, Mini, and Rolls-Royce cars, and steel and aluminium.

The U.K. will fund much of the military budget increase to 2.7 pct with a switch of funds earmarked for foreign aid, which will fall to 0.3 pct from 0.5 pct of GDP.

Lower support for overseas projects means less government funding for the BBC World Service, which supporters such as Martin Bell, ex-parliamentarian and former BBC war reporter, see as Britain’s soft power counterweight to disinformation from China and Russia.

The U.K. government is also diverting spending for the disabled and winter fuel payments for the elderly, which has drawn fierce criticism from Labour parliamentarians.

Starmer is leader of the center-left Labour party, which came to power almost a year ago with a surprise majority of 174 parliamentary seats. That tidal wave of support for Labour may have been seen as electoral punishment of the Conservative party, but the May 1 elections for local councils served a drubbing to both Labour and Conservatives, ushering in councillors from the Reform U.K. party.

The latter is a far-right, anti-immigration party led by Nigel Farage, a parliamentarian who campaigned for Brexit and is a keen Trump supporter.

Starmer’s pursuit of public support could be seen with his VE Day speech, announcing a £563 mln contract for Rolls-Royce to service engines on the RAF’s 130-strong fleet of Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets.

That keynote speech at the London Defence conference included a clear shift and rebranding in U.K. policy. Starmer spoke of “a defence dividend – that will be felt in the pockets of working people and the prosperity of the country.”

Starmer underlined the perceived threat of Russian advance on Ukraine and the pursuit of rearmament, emphasising employment and economic growth. The U.K. leader spoke of the U.S. as an “indispensable ally,” but he made it clear that came second to a higher priority: “Make no mistake – I will always act in our national interest for workers, businesses and families…”

National security came first, he said, while the second concern was “to create jobs, wealth and opportunity in every corner of our country.”

Assuming the British Exchequer will find and release the promised funds, analysts say it is not clear the forces will receive more weapons promptly as there are other military needs calling for a higher place in the budgetary queue.

“The first challenge they have is there are more priorities than there is actually money to spend,” said Matthew Saville, director of military sciences at the Royal United Service Institute, the BBC reported May 9.

“I think the first thing that they’ll be looking at is actually to fill out some of the gaps that there are in defense and improve the foundations,” he said. That meant spending on training and recruitment, infrastructure, and accommodation, rather than kit such as tanks and aircraft.

The importance of recruitment could be seen with Serco, a service provider, saying Feb. 6 it had won a £1 billion, seven-year contract to recruit personnel for the British Army, Royal Air Force, Royal Navy, and Strategic Command. There is an option for a three-year extension, bringing the value to £1.5 billion if that were exercised.

The U.K. and the 27 European Union member states are due to meet in London May 19 for a summit, which includes an agreement on defense and security. Britain hopes it will win access to the E.U. ‘s planned €150 bln loan facility for military spending, under the European ReArm project.

Germany Seeks Larger Role

Meanwhile in Berlin, the newly elected chancellor, Friedrich Merz, succeeded in March in winning Bundestag parliamentary support for higher German military spending, which required relaxing strict fiscal rules on debt written in the constitution.

Merz, leader of the conservative Christian Democrat party, even left open May 9 the possibility of the European Union raising loans to spend on EU military programs.

Germany has been guided by deep distrust of debt, having learnt lessons of hyperinflation and the loss of value of the German mark in the 1920s, which partly led to the rise of Nazism.

Alongside fiscal lessons of a conflicted past which led to the 1933 election of the far right, there has been a strain of pacifism in German society after the second world war.

An institutional pacifism could be seen with a readiness to send not much more than helmets to help Ukrainian forces in the weeks after the Russian assault in 2022.

Berlin has in the past deployed troops mainly for training and support missions, not combat.

Germany was among the first of Western allies to send troops to Afghanistan, initially its special forces under the U.S.-led Enduring Freedom anti-guerrilla operation. That was followed by what the Heinrich Boll Foundation, a German think tank, described as a “cautious peacekeeping mission” with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), under protection of a 2001 UN security council mandate.

The early German deployment to Kabul came before Taliban irregular fighters made clear a deadly determination to seize control, which led to a hasty U.S. evacuation, followed by its allies, in 2021.

Germany also deployed troops to Niger in 2023 as part of a E.U. military training program, after initially sending troops in 2018 to train Niger’s special forces. Those German troops  pulled out of a Niamey air base in August last year.

Berlin withdrew troops based in Mali in 2023, after a decade of deployment there in support of the UN MINUSMA peacekeeping mission.

The Bundeswehr armed forces needs some 5,000 recruits to meet the 15,000-strong target for its voluntary military service, public broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported Dec. 4 2025.

There are more than 182,000 in active service, but the forces need pilots, computer  specialists, electrical engineers and other skilled personnel, but there are few job applicants, DW reported, pointing to strong demand in the labor market for such skilled staff.

Even if the recruitment drive did attract new personnel, DW reported there was shortage of training and barracks. “Operational readiness” stood to suffer if the duty roster for a tank commander were reset to train recruits, rather than deploy to the Nato eastern flank.

It remains to be seen whether that training will arm the German forces with a martial spirit fit for fighting a war.

German Industry Rises

Meanwhile, German industry has prospered from the arms drive, both at home and abroad.

Rheinmetall has said it planned to convert two factories building car parts to “hybrid” plants capable of making protection and military parts. The plants will report to the company’s weapon and ammunition division, Reuters reported.

Thyssenkrupp Marine Systems said May 7 it had won a contract with Singapore to supply two more Type 218SG submarines, bringing the Singapore Navy’s fleet of Invincible-class boats to six. That order will boost TKMS’s order book, presently worth some €16 billion.

Meanwhile, the share price of European companies with core aeronautic businesses, including Dassault Aviation, Safran, and Thales, plunged May 12, even as stock markets rose on signs of less tension between Washington and Beijing in a tariff war launched by  Trump.

That drop in stock prices may have been in response to the U.S. Commerce Department saying May 9 it had opened a national security inquiry in the import of commercial aircraft, jet engines, and parts, which may lead to higher tariffs on European-built kit.