Defence spending needs a reboot

I think we should introduce a zero-based budgeting approach to defence spending, where every line item has to be justified from scratch each year. This is needed because it's clear that our current approach to defence spending is inefficient and wasteful, with too much money being thrown at outdated programmes and projects that don't deliver what we need. We've got a military that's struggling to keep up with modern threats, and it's because we're still funding things that were relevant 20 years ago.

We've got to get smarter about how we spend our defence budget, and that means being ruthless about cutting out waste and inefficiency. That means looking at every programme and project, and asking whether it's really delivering value for money. If it's not, then we should be cutting it, no matter how much it's been invested so far.