But we simply don't need to be spending as much as we do on defence, because the likelyhood of another massive world war is slim, and if it happened. Well lets look at previous world wars, when it really comes down to it you can turn an entire countries industry into a war machine and what you'd do to survive at war when it really mattered has pretty much smeg all to do with what you've spent in previous years.
A world war isn't going to creep up on us in this day and age, we can increase spending as the situation deteriorates, we don't need to keep up spending inbetween. WE don't need a massive readyness level when theres very little risk of war.
You are correct in saying that the world we live in is very different to the 1900s and we aren't facing a large aggressor but the rest isn't really a true reflection.
Our spending on defense by GDP is meant to be 2.5%, this means we are number 70 in the world for defense spending. That's a tiny about when you consider two things...
1) We are one of only nine country with nuclear weapons. Those alone are going to cost between £75 billion and £135 billion.
2) We aren't really spending 2.5%. Usually when we go to war the cost of running the conflict is funding by the Treasury (the MoD doesn't have a line item in there yearly budget that says 'war') but both the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are coming out of the MoD's budgets. The 2.5% figure factors this spending so Labour can claim they aren't spending less of defence.
It's common knowledge that we couldn't fight another Falklands conflict and we couldn't produce a fighting force to match the ones we committed to either Gulf War. Fighting a world war against a Russia that is rebuilding it's forces paid for by new found wealth in oil / gas or against a rapidly advancing China would be a non starter.
You say we could (as we did in previous World Wars) turn industry into a war making machine. The only trouble with that is most of 'our' industry is now abroad! Even if it was still here technology has moved along since those days, we can't just knock up a few thousand fighters as we did with the Spitfire. It takes decades to produce a new fighter. If we used the current Typhoon (assuming it isn't outdated by this point) it would still takes years to build up a force of them and who would fly them? Where would we put them?
Any aggressor who had designs on attacking us would see this attempt at building a war machine and attack first whilst we would be 'weak'.
To some people it might seem that we're at war, to justify maintained high spending on the defence budget, and really nothing else at all, which is disgusting. The more we spend on defence budgets, the more the board members of the companies being used to supply equipment for defence make.
For me we are at war. We have a significant number of people and assests deployed overseas for an extended period of time. Guns are being fires, bombs dropped and people killed. That pretty much says war to me, or at the very least a conflict.
I wouldn't say we are spending on nothing else, take a look at the figures...
Work and Pensions - £132,732 million
Health - £104,464 million
Education and Skills - £68,060 million
Defence - £38,986 million
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