The arms trade is shunned by investors who view it like gambling or pornography, the head of the Army has said.
General Sir Roland Walker, Chief of the General Staff, has called for increased funding for the UK defence industry to enable the Army to become a more lethal force amid the growing threat from Russia.
The former SAS officer said he wanted to replicate “Ukrainian levels of lethality” on the battlefield and warned that “what the Ukrainians face today, we may well face tomorrow”.
At an armoured vehicles conference on Wednesday, Gen Sir Roland claimed the UK defence industry “sees little” investment and that “too often that spend goes on overseas companies”.
“We must have capital flowing into defence as a sector,” he said. “We as a sector, as a collective, can play our part in advocating for the moral case of defence investment.
“Environmental and social governance standards view defence investments in the same company as adult entertainment, tobacco and gambling.
“Indeed, according to a Barclays report, of the top 10 sectors finding themselves excluded from sustainable funds, four are defence related – weapons, small arms, military contracting and nuclear power.
“This is not the result of any deliberate decision or regulation, but it is an incremental and an implied interpretation by those who score these funds as a result of their perception of wider societal acceptance.
“In my view, sustainability is as much a question of national security as it is environmental or social preservation.”
He added that “investing in defence and working and contributing to it, is not only profitable, it’s ethical”.
Gen Sir Roland, an Afghan war hero who survived a Taliban assassination attempt, replaced General Sir Patrick Sanders as the Army chief last year.
He has pledged to rapidly modernise the Army – which was cut to its smallest size since the Napoleonic era under the Tories – to double its ability to kill the enemy by 2027 and triple it by the end of the decade.
However, his latest comments, which he made at the International Armoured Vehicles conference in Farnborough, come amid uncertainty about the future of military spending.
Labour says it aims to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP after the completion of the sector-wide Strategic Defence Review but industry figures fear the review could be delayed into the autumn.
Warning of the growing Russian threat, Gen Sir Roland claimed Vladimir Putin had decided to invade Ukraine in 2022 because he was confident at the time that he had “military advantage over the West”.
He said the Russian military machine was now using its soldiers, as well as fresh North Korean troops, as a “consumable and attritable resource” on the battlefield.
‘Threat is evolving’
“The threat is evolving, as is the changing character of warfare,” he said. “The confluence of vast increases of data and computer capacity coupled with this rapid commoditisation of componentry is changing the battlefield and business.
“The era of the consumable platform is here and it needs to be our focus. Putin’s options may well be narrowing, and are narrowing further. Attrition is his problem, time is ours.”
Gen Sir Roland said that British troops stationed in Estonia, whom he described as being at the “coal face”, were transitioning “from being a strategic trip wire into being a regional strike capability”.
He added that the Army had also embraced artificial intelligence in its data systems which he said translated to “raw lethality”.
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