Daire Ní Chnáimh dissects Destination Defence, a new campaign launched by the British government in collaboration with ADS, the arms industry trade group.
‘Destination Defence’ is the name of a new PR campaign by the British government in collaboration with the arms industry trade group ADS.1 The word ‘Destination’ has a holiday feel to it, as if the global arms industry is being invited to spend champagne-filled summers on a rainy island with tax subsidies and low regulation. It also conjures an echo of ‘destiny’: an England, Scotland, Wales, and occupied North of Ireland transformed into munitions factories, nuclear weapons bases, and schoolchildren in the cadets. To understand the meaning of Defence, we can look from the long offensive history of the British empire to its ongoing roles in Gaza and Sudan, where the Israeli Occupying Forces (IOF) and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are using weapons built in Britain to commit genocide.2 Defence here means adding to the profits of weapons companies, while they sell to other militaries who use the weapons to blow the heads off children.
According to Keir Starmer, “defence and security” is now “the central organising principle of government.”3 Unlike much government rhetoric, this might actually herald material change. In September this year, the Ministry of Defence published the first-ever Defence Industrial Strategy. In the span of this parliament (so by August 2029) the government will spend £6 billion on munitions, including £1.5 billion on an ‘always on’ pipeline. It has declared that it will build six new energetics (laser weapon) factories and munitions factories, and four new nuclear submarines. It will drop another £4 billion on “uncrewed and autonomous military systems” such as drones. £10 billion is a lot to spend on weapons. It took less than £1 billion to build the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, the largest NHS building in Scotland.
Unfortunately, the 112-page document goes even further, signalling an intent to spread the tendrils of the military industrial complex much deeper into British society. Militarism is to be folded into all levels of the education system. From teenagers, to schoolchildren, to unemployed adults, the arms industry will be paraded as the ticket to a better life.
Destiny: Defence
To summarise the government’s plans for militarising education: in schools and communities, cadet forces – children practising being soldiers – will expand by 30% by 2030. The undergraduate administration service UCAS will have a new defence portal, and a new graduate clearing system will ensure that “those who narrowly miss out on a defence prime graduate and apprenticeship schemes, which are typically oversubscribed, have the opportunity to work elsewhere in the defence sector.” A new type of Further Education college will be established, called a Defence Technical Excellence College (DTEC). These colleges will train people aged 16 and over in the skills needed by arms manufacturers, and five DTECs will be set up “in areas with deep specialisms in defence.” Universities will join the Defence Universities Alliance, to get students to assist, unpaid, the research demands of arms companies.4 140 PhDs will be funded for “defence”, twenty PhDs specifically on nuclear fission.5 “To support defence, as well as the wider economy,” the DWP will “broaden the range of employers it supports.” It will be made easier to transition to defence mid-career, with a new ‘Defence Skills Passport’.
In other words, teenagers will be pushed toward working on weapons systems, and even if they study something like Environmental Engineering they are increasingly likely to end up working on a weapons system.
Deterring war or attracting warmongers?
During the Cold War, the idea of nuclear deterrence was that if Russia contemplated a nuclear assault on the US, it would be less likely to do so if the US had its own arsenal of nuclear weapons with which to immediately retaliate. Today’s world of weapons is a lot more complicated. Adding another fleet of unmanned drones won’t deter a rival country from sabotaging undersea cables, and stealth bombers which can carry nuclear bombs have removed the ‘mutually assured destruction’ clause from the rules of nuclear warfare. Politicians still lean on the fantasy of deterrence to justify increased military spending – the concept appears over thirty times in the Defence Industrial Strategy – even though it doesn’t make sense.
A more plausible motive for the step change in spending is that the companies who benefit have themselves influenced the political decision to spend. Vijay Mehta suggested in The Economics of Killing (2012) that the US government’s enormous spending on the arms industry has characteristics not of a free market capitalist government, but of a centralised command economy. By way of example, he points out that in 2004, 80% of Lockheed Martin’s revenue came directly from the US government, for “everything from mail-sorting software to nuclear missiles.” (27) The vagaries of the free market do not apply to Lockheed Martin. But is Lockheed Martin commanded by the US government or vice versa? Mehta notes that because arms behemoths rely so much on state funding, they in turn fund tame politicians’ election campaigns, to ensure continued funding. It is the US military who then receives weapons, usually delayed and with a cost far above what was initially promised. The flow of public money to private weapons companies indicates that the seats of power are not occupied just by politicians.
It was pressure from the US which led NATO members to commit to spend 5% of GDP on military by 2030.6 There is no question that this will be of benefit to profits more than people. Trillions of dollars will go from European public budgets, into multinational weapons companies like Lockheed Martin, which can thereby gain even more geopolitical influence.
The fact that the Defence Industrial Strategy will be of more benefit to corporations than to workers in Britain is signalled by the report’s emphasis on attracting Foreign Direct Investment. Almost by definition, this type of policy drains the local economy, because companies are invited to use land and labour to suit themselves, and spirit the profits away. Deregulation is part of the enticement, which often directly leads to the despoliation of environments around manufacturing sites.7 This is prophesied in the Strategy: from 2027, large manufacturers will have their electricity costs reduced by £35-40 per megawatt-hour, with the government footing the excess energy bill. Companies will also be exempt from paying the costs of the Renewables Obligation. The government will fund mobile Test and Evaluation Centres that can be transported to the doorstep of arms companies, in case remote test ranges are “prohibitively expensive.” As the report states, the regulatory environment will be “as permissive and simple as possible.” The environment we have to live in is less of a concern.
37/11: Scotland’s Contribution
Scotland produces 37% of the UK’s manufactured weaponry, even though it has only 11% of the population. In November 2025, the Ferret exposed twelve potential locations in Scotland which were being considered as sites for making explosives, including Grangemouth, Loch Long, and Ayrshire. “Emails show weapons companies from around the world took part in early-stage discussions about locating factories in the UK.”8 The fact that these plans predated the Defence Industrial Strategy, and the proposed launch of a ‘Defence Growth Deal’ for Scotland which will involve additional housing and transport links for arms workers, shows that the working class is last on the list to benefit from any of these economic backroom deals.
Inter-imperialist warfare will only bleed more money from the state as Britain’s high-tech weapons are matched by its geopolitical rivals, while the weapons companies make a killing. Of course, Westminster and Holyrood will insist that despite the cuts to public welfare, despite the deaths of our friends in other countries, and despite the likely flow of military technology to the police here in Britain, we will all be more defended and secure. The argument that militarism ensures national security skips the question of how secure the average person will be, in a country where hospitals are stretched to breaking point, schools are understaffed, and the benefits system is subject to cut after cut. Capital needs to make offensive material to defend its surplus value. We could be asking what a people’s defence could look like.
To make the argument of ‘welfare not warfare’ we need to contrast this lavish military spending with the parts of the state that are running on empty. People are dying in short-staffed A&E wards because billions are invested into weapons of mass destruction. There are no school librarians in Glasgow because the government is funding apprenticeships for people to weld armour plates to warships at BAE Systems. Were the government to invest this much into schools, hospitals, housing and social care, life in Britain would be ‘secure’ in a real sense. Workers would also contribute less to global deaths by drone strikes.
Three trade unions who represent arms workers – Unite, Prospect and GMB – have been invited into a new Defence Industrial Joint Council, alongside high finance, universities, corporate representatives and the Ministry of Defence. If workers are to organise against their own complicity in imperialist murder, the trade unions are a key conduit for collective action. The partnership of trade unions in this uptick in militarisation spells a threat that they will continue hand in glove with the arms industry employers. For those of us who oppose fascism, imperialism and climate disaster, the Destination Defence future is a road that needs to be blocked, both in its rhetoric and its material effects.
Daire Ní Chnáimh is a member of Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century (rs21), an ecosocialist, feminist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist organisation based in Scotland, Wales and England.
- Defence Industrial Strategy, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/defence-industrial-strategy-2025-making-defence-an-engine-for-growth ↩︎
- For British built weapons in Israel, see Emilie Ekeberg and Charlotte Aagaard, ‘Major civilian casualties: Danish-equipped fighter jets behind bloody attack in Gaza’, Danwatch, 1 September 2024.https://danwatch.dk/en/major-civilian-casualties-danish-equipped-fighter-jets-behind-bloody-attack-in-gaza/ On British-built weapons used by RSF, seehttps://www.middleeasteye.net/news/rsf-used-uk-military-equipment-sudan-un-told ↩︎
- Quoted by Secretary of Defence John Healey on 20 Oct 2025:https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/defence-secretary-john-healey-mp-mansion-house-defence-and-security-lecture-2025 ↩︎
- This is already a common practice. In 2023/24, 2nd year Computer Science students at the University of Strathclyde were given an assignment to map the wings of drones made by the weapons company Thales. ↩︎
- It is unclear from the report whether the twenty nuclear fission PhDs are included in the 140 pegged for defence, or are in addition. ↩︎
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2025/06/25/nato-allies-agree-to-boost-defence-spending-to-5-of-gdp-after-trump-pressure/ ↩︎
- For examples of how Foreign Direct Investment policy has wrecked environments in Ireland, see Conor McCabe, Sins of the Father: tracing the decisions that shaped the Irish economy, 2011. ↩︎
- Paul Dobson and Rob Edwards, ‘Oops: MoD blunder reveals secret details of bomb project’, The Ferret,https://www.theferret.scot/mod-details-of-secret-bomb-project/ ↩︎