UK Defence Secretary Resigns Over Funding Shortfall as Former Military Chief Warns Plans Leave Britain Unsafe
British Defence Secretary John Healey resigned on Thursday, June 11, after a months-long dispute over a long-delayed Defence Investment Plan, warning that the spending levels he had seen would make the country less safe and could have consequences far beyond Britain’s worst fears. His departure piled further pressure on Prime Minister Keir Starmer ahead of a likely leadership challenge within the Labour Party, and came less than four weeks before a NATO summit in Turkey where Starmer had promised to present a credible defence investment framework.
General Richard Barrons, the former head of the UK’s Joint Forces Command and a co-author of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review that was meant to underpin the investment plan, told Reuters on Friday, June 12, that the funding levels outlined in the plan would not keep Britain safe — and that the prolonged uncertainty had already driven some defence contractors to move operations overseas while others had gone under.
Healey’s Resignation Letter
In the letter he posted on X on Thursday, Healey praised Starmer for recognising the threats facing the UK, but said the Prime Minister and the Treasury had failed to provide adequate funding for the much-delayed Defence Investment Plan.
“The consequences for the UK, and indeed our allies, of getting our Defence Investment Plan wrong — as now seems certain — are of a magnitude far beyond our worst fears,” Healey wrote. “National security and defence of the realm is not an accountant’s job.”
Starmer had pledged the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, aiming to lift it to 3% of national output in the next parliament. Healey said the plan he had seen would increase defence spending to only 2.68% of GDP in 2030, when it will already have reached 2.6% next year — a gap that Healey described as insufficient given the threat environment.
Healey urged that the Defence Investment Plan be published as soon as possible. The document — which will lay out Britain’s procurement priorities and cuts over the next ten years, including whether to proceed with the acquisition of a fleet of F-35A fifth-generation fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons — is expected to be released next week.
Barrons: No Demand, No Factories, No Future
General Richard Barrons, who co-chairs the finance industry lobby group TheCityUK’s Defence and Resilience Group in addition to his defence advisory role, told Reuters the cascading effect of the funding delay on the industrial base has been severe.
“We required the defence investment plan to be out in September last year… Then the gap appeared, and they’ve struggled,” Barrons said, referring to defence contractors who had positioned themselves to win UK contracts.
“They absolutely aren’t going to do what they expected to do, which is to build factories in the UK to service this demand, because the demand isn’t there… What they found is there’s no funding from government. There’s no ‘buy’. There’s no prospect of a ‘buy’.”
Barrons said the hollowing-out of the military has been decades in the making. “They’ve been cutting for 35 years. So there isn’t anything left. It’s not as if they’re starting from a good place. They’re starting from a terrible place,” he said.
On the transatlantic dimension of Britain’s security calculus, Barrons was direct. “That idea that the Americans will save us has been blown out of the water by America’s own defence strategy,” he said. “The cavalry is no longer coming.”
The £28 Billion Shortfall
Media reports indicate that military chiefs warned Starmer of a £28 billion ($38 billion) shortfall in defence funding over the next four years, and that figure is understood to be behind the delay to the investment plan. Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton said on June 5 that Britain was running out of time to modernise its armed forces, citing what he called the most dangerous global security environment since the Cold War.
The Armed Forces Minister also resigned alongside Healey on Thursday, according to Breaking Defense, compounding the political damage to Starmer’s cabinet.
General Sir Roland Walker, Chief of the General Staff, earlier this year called for capital to flow into defence as a sector, warning that the UK defence industry “sees little” investment and that spending too often goes on overseas companies. Walker said he wanted to replicate “Ukrainian levels of lethality” on the battlefield and warned that “what the Ukrainians face today, we may well face tomorrow.”
The ‘1936 Moment’ Warning
The Healey resignation is the loudest institutional expression of a concern that has been building across the British defence establishment for months. In an open letter to Starmer published in The Daily Telegraph, three former defence secretaries, retired senior military chiefs, and former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove warned that Britain faces what they called a “1936 moment” — an analogy to the period when rearmament in the face of a rising threat was still possible but policymakers remained reluctant to act.
“Our actions fall dangerously short of matching this rhetoric and of meeting our treaty obligations,” the letter read. “We are deluding ourselves if we believe Russia and our other adversaries are unaware of this.” The letter called for defence spending to be raised to 5% of GDP — well above the 2.5% target for 2027 and the 3% commitment for the next parliament that Starmer has pledged.
Russia has repeatedly tested British defences through cyberattacks, sabotage, and airspace incursions, Knighton said at a Royal United Services Institute event last week.
Regional and Global Impact
Britain’s NATO allies are watching the political fallout closely. The July 7 NATO summit in Turkey was always going to be a moment of reckoning for European defence spending pledges, with US President Donald Trump expected to attend and press European leaders to reduce their reliance on American military guarantees. Healey’s resignation removes the minister who was managing those commitments and raises immediate questions about whether the Defence Investment Plan can be published in a form credible enough to withstand allied scrutiny before the summit opens.
The Iran war has also changed the terms of the debate. Several European defence ministers have cited the conflict as evidence that high-intensity, large-scale warfare requiring sustained industrial production is no longer a theoretical contingency but an observable reality. Britain’s inability to resolve its own investment plan in that context has drawn notice in Berlin and Warsaw, two capitals where defence budgets have risen sharply.
The UK-Poland security agreement formalised on May 27, which Starmer and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk signed at the Battle of Britain Bunker in Uxbridge, was designed in part to signal mutual security commitment. Poland is spending 4% of GDP on defence. The optics of that contrast have not been lost on the Polish side.
Background
The 2025 Strategic Defence Review, published on June 2, 2025, was led by former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson and overseen by Healey. It was the first such review carried out by a Labour government since 2003, and called for accelerated spending on modern warfare capabilities in response to threats from Russia, nuclear risks, and cyberattacks. The Defence Investment Plan was supposed to translate the review’s recommendations into a funded procurement programme, with an original target publication date of September 2025. Its repeated delays — driven by disagreements between the Ministry of Defence and the Treasury over the size of a multi-year funding increase — have left contractors in a state of extended uncertainty. The UK’s current defence spending sits at approximately 2.3% of GDP, below both the NATO guideline of 2% and Starmer’s near-term 2.5% target.
What Happens Next
Starmer confirmed on June 5 that the Defence Investment Plan will be published before the NATO summit opens on July 7 in Turkey. A replacement for Healey as Defence Secretary must be appointed before that date to provide ministerial ownership of the plan’s publication and presentation to allies. The key procurement decisions in the document — including the F-35A fighter jet acquisition and long-range missile capabilities recommended by the Strategic Defence Review — will determine whether the investment plan is received as substantive or inadequate by NATO partners and the UK defence industry. Whether Barrons’s assessment that the plan as written would not keep Britain safe is revised upward in any final version will only become clear when the document is published.
