Armed Forces to grow thanks to £52bn spending boost

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Mr Wallace continued: “Without the change, we were heading to below 2 per cent. But on current forecast, that’s roughly a defense budget of £100 billion in 2029-30. We’re currently on £48 billion. So that’s the difference. In eight years, that’s a huge amount.

“What we have to work through is how we get there. In theory, you can do nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, boof, a massive dollop of cash at the end. Cumulatively it wouldn’t cost you very much at all except the last bit where you jump £52 billion. But you can’t really run a defense budget like that. The reality is we will be working with the Treasury to ensure we have a budget that grows to meet the threat and our ambitions.”

The Defense Secretary, who was reappointed this month after backing Ms Truss in the Tory leadership contest in the summer, said: “The reason I supported Liz Truss was that the risks we were prepared to tolerate in the middle of the decade are not risks I want to tolerate anymore in light of Russian aggression.

“There are certain risks we can’t really take anymore. And that’s why I wrote to the Chancellor last March to say, the stuff that we didn’t get in the IR [2021 Integrated Review of defence and security] that we’d asked for, we do need it.”

On Saturday night, the Ministry of Defense revealed that five RAF aircraft joined an exercise in Australia that will see the UK Armed Forces training with Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea and other Indo-Pacific nations, until December.

The planned increase comes after Boris Johnson signed off on a cash increase of £24 billion over the next four years, which Mr Wallace said was “the first time we’d had a proper, sustained genuine up-arrow, not phoney efficiency saving up -arrows, since the Cold War.”

In remarks that appeared to simultaneously praise Kwasi Kwarteng and criticize Rishi Sunak, his predecessor, Mr Wallace added that it was clear that “Kwasi is going to be a great, open Chancellor … He’s not going to shut the door to Number 11 and hide behind it.”

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