We remain excellent at spectacle. Trooping the Colour, state funerals, royal processions — they are executed with precision, dignity, and emotional resonance. They remind the world that Britain once stood for continuity, discipline, and proportion.
But behind the spectacle, the substance has been hollowed out.
Lord Dannatt recently described our aircraft carriers as “wretched.” That word, coming from a former Chief of the General Staff, is not hyperbole. It is a signal — a quiet alarm — that something has gone badly wrong. These carriers, once hailed as symbols of global reach, cannot be deployed into active war zones. We lack the escort ships to protect them. Only one can be fully operational at a time. They are prestige platforms without the power to project.
I always suspected they were a vanity project — more about sustaining defence industry jobs than meeting strategic needs. And now, as the world shifts rapidly, it is clear: we should have invested in capability where it is needed — in the European theatre, in the Baltic, in the Arctic.
We still have excellent formations: the Royal Marines, the Parachute Regiment, the SAS. But they are small in number. And war, for all its technological evolution, is still about scale and mass. Precision cannot replace presence. Elite units cannot substitute for readiness.
Lord Dannatt called for defence spending to rise to 3% of GDP. It’s a noble goal. But as the present crisis deepens — with global trade under strain, supply chains disrupted, and critical resources like aluminium, ammonia, helium, and energy spiking in price — it will be hard to achieve. Governments of every colour have contributed to the cutbacks. The hollowing has been bipartisan.
We are in a fast-moving world. And our military is struggling to catch up.
The tragedy is not just that we are underprepared. It is that we are still performing the rituals of power — the marching, the salutes, the ceremonies — while the foundations quietly erode.
Prestige without power. Symbol without substance. Spectacle without strategy.
It is time to speak plainly. Not to despair, but to diagnose. Not to mourn, but to reorient.
Because if we still value the traditions we perform, we must restore the capabilities they once represented.