Britain’s military power is waning, thinktank warns David Cameron

Report says arms spending has fallen behind Saudi Arabia’s, challenging PM’s claim that UK remains in fourth place

Britain’s role as one of the world’s leading military powers is under threat, an authoritative thinktank warns in a report that directly challenges claims by the prime minister, David Cameron.

The UK has fallen behind Saudi Arabia and is now fifth in the arms expenditure league table, says the latest annual Military Balance survey, published by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).

Responding to US criticism of cuts in military spending, Cameron has repeatedly insisted that Britain still had the fourth biggest defence budget.

“We have the fourth largest defence budget anywhere in the world. We are a first-class player in terms of defence and, as long as I am prime minister, that is the way it will stay,” Cameron said last month after the former US defence secretary Robert Gates said cuts meant Britain’s armed forces were no longer able to stand by the US as a “full partner”.

The IISS survey makes it clear that while military spending is falling in the UK and throughout the west, it is rising fast elsewhere, notably in Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region. Greater defence spending will lead to a relative shift towards Asia and away from Europe in a new balance of military power, the report suggests.

The US remains by far the world’s biggest spender on weapons, with a defence budget last year amounting to over $600bn (£370bn), followed by China ($112.2bn), Russia ($68.2bn), Saudi Arabia (an estimated $59.6bn) and the UK ($57.0bn).

Saudi Arabia is also one of Britain’s biggest arms markets. It is the buyer, notably, of Typhoon jets.

Total European defence spending in real terms has fallen by an average of 2.5% a year since 2010, says the IISS report. However, Asian defence spending is 11.6% higher in 2013 than in 2010, with China, Japan and South Korea accounting for most of the increases.

“The rapid pace of capability development and the potential for accidental conflict and escalation in Asia will continue to be a matter of concern,” the report said, referring to growing tensions between China and its neighbours, notably Japan, in the East China Sea.

However, the IISS defence, economics and maritime security experts Giri Rajendran and Christian Le Mière adopted a sanguine approach towards China, stressing that it had a long way to go before catching up with the US.

Chinese defence spending would not reach US levels until the mid 2030s, they said, and it would take much longer before China had anything comparable to the military capabilities the US now possessed.

Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, spent more, in terms of the share of gross domestic product, on defence (13.8%) than any other country. It was followed by Oman (11.7%), Saudi Arabia (8%) and Iraq (7.2%).

The IISS also pointed to the increased use of drones, which it said was accompanied by legal and ethical questions, including whether attacks could be justified as self-defence and whether they constituted a proportional response to …read more