How war became a route to growth for the west

The National

3 hours ago

The UK Government's Strategic Defence Review in June promised expanded submarine, weapon, and drone production, integrated digital command, at least six new munitions factories to 'create more than 1000 new jobs' (perhaps familiar from the 'scrapping Trident is anti-worker claim against Scottish independence in the mid-2010s).
It represents an increase of already-above-Nato-baseline defence spending to 3%, and, crucially, a 'whole-of-society approach' that involved 'widening participation in national resilience'.
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This is necessitated, the review says, by multiple new hybrid threats – a staple rationalisation since the Cold War, as in David Cameron's 2013 claim that nuclear weapons were needed 'more than ever'.
Against a background of population economic punishment, the tellingly-named 'sovereign warhead programme' needed another £15 billion – roughly the size of the 'black hole' agonised over by Labour last year, and also of the current nuclear overspend stated in that year.
There has been some grim technocratic inevitability to this, particularly since 2008.
As asset prices gradually became inflated by central bank money channelled into stagnant investments, leaving governments struggling to deliver growth and protect their own legitimacy, classical capitalism was relieved of any lingering responsibility to deliver actual improvement, and the very temporality of progress could be inherited by crisis realism.
Or as the review enthusiastically puts it, 'constant innovation at wartime pace'.
War becomes a final route to growth – one marked by the 52% increase in the BAE Systems share price between January and July. Moreover, post-2000s rearming has lacked much of the protest once coming from civil society.
This has a lot to do with US tech giants combining investments in infotech, AI, and aerospace (Alphabet, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin), their war on attention, and their siloing of individuals, reducing their ability to share moral concerns.
Attention capture has increasingly accompanied the rearming, directing even those far up the political chain away from long-term thinking (the scenario of Don't Look Up). Covid lockdowns were a great accelerator of this, with Silicon Valley's sifting and directing of communication – in an economy Mackenzie Wark has called 'vectoralist' – automatically extracting rent through proprietary algorithms, turbocharging inequality, effectively wrecking the economy for the population, and forcing the turn to war for growth.
Post-2008 algorithmic silencing helps explain the eerie quiet over permacrisis as stability. As numerous nuclear commentators have noted, there is a paradox in claiming to defend democracy by concentrating means of apocalyptic violence in fewer and more secretive hands.
Such a purely performative democracy is an admission of societal dysfunction and some kind of addiction. It leaves a defence realism that, in contrast to the Cold War, struggles to imagine apocalyptic war and so raises it as a political issue.
Benoit Pelopidas has described a need for depictions of nuclear war keep civil society involved, and avoid a sleepwalk into extinction.
For Elaine Scarry, this sleepwalking is the very function of 'out-of-ratio' weapons, which eclipse citizen participation in defence, and effectively 'delete the population'.
Even George Orwell noted something similar after the 1945 atomic demonstration on the recalcitrant beyond of Atlantic commercial empire.
Under the new Pax Americana, fighting had effectively been put out of populations' reach, 'whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance'.
This submission to a cybernetics of extinction is what EP Thompson called exterminism, with technocratic governments finally captured by arms manufacturers promising growth and so political legitimacy.
UK governments duly held on to nuclear weapons as a financial stabiliser even after the end of the Cold War, and through to the 2020s removal of the previous warhead cap, and as Timmon Milne Wallis describes, 'voted against, blocked or boycotted virtually every other multilateral nuclear disarmament initiative'.
In British ideology, nuclear securitisation has always meant financial securitisation. Chancellor Alistair Darling, who would later front the anti-Scottish-independence organisation Better Together, reacted to the 2008 financial crisis by promoting [[Trident]] renewal as public investment. Keir Starmer echoed that this year when he described nuclear rearming as crucial to drive growth.
But way beyond this, British authority has always depended on progressively shifting physical stakes in conflict to economic arbitration, writing populations out of society-as-economy.
The 'disarming' enacted on 1740s Jacobites is also the disarming of Scarry's 'thermonuclear monarchy', in which the Lockean social contract degrades into the apocalyptic whims of small economic elites.
A fully abstracted violence as a 'peaceful' proxy of citizen defence was even a pillar of a British welfare state – in fact from as early as 1941, when the Blitz-era MAUD Committee insisted atomic weapons had to be completed and used.
Absolutised defence extended war togetherness even through the original 'austerity', finding funds for nukes and joining the whole population as a single target. In 2024 Starmer could comfortably appropriate this welfare terminology to describe Trident's ''triple lock', a term previously used for state pensions.
This homeliness remains an issue in defining the militarisation of the economy as a problem. As Margaret Thatcher understood, the idea of the economy as a defence against politics and populations is deeply British, and can command patriotism even from a sceptical population.
Mindfulness of the real violence being abstracted as growth will be crucial to any civil involvement.
Michael Gardiner is author of Empire of Deterrence (2025), published by Repeater