Underlying Principles:

Any sovereign state needs to have a sufficiently sized standing army and military resources to be able to provide a credible defence, fair contributions to coordinated international action, emergency domestic support and a deterrence to potential aggressors.

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For an independent island state like the UK, this requires naval, ground and air forces, each with specialist divisions, as well suitable and sufficient long and short range munitions.

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The nature of modern warfare also requires remote fighting and defence capabilities, such as drones and cyber specialists, and planning for potentially disruptive international conflicts and events linked to climate change and overpopulation.

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Management of allocated public spend must be carefully controlled to find the right balance between satisfying these needs and over-spending, since the military is an area where additional budget will always be sought to improve capability.

 

On this basis, a fixed annual budget (linked to inflation for five years, then reviewed) should be allocated for the ongoing running of the forces (e.g. salaries, property & equipment maintenance, capex, travel/fuel/mobilisation), and an additional discretionary budget should be maintained for one off projects and interventions.

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The discretionary budget will be set each year based on expectations over the coming 12 months; any unspent discretionary budget can be rolled over each year until the end of each five year review period, when it is reclaimed; any overspend would need to be approved by MPs.