Rory Stewart

Well, fundamentally, we're trying to do it all.

And the only people who can do it all are people like the US and China.

US and China are spending so much on defense, you know, the US is spending a trillion dollars a year, that it doesn't need to make decisions and prioritize in quite the way we do.

So they bet on everything.

They have an advanced fighter, they have submarines, they have aircraft carriers, they recapitalize their army, they can munition stockpile.

We can't do all those five things, and that's the fundamental problem.

We cannot afford to both fund our own sixth-generation fighter in 2040 and have a full aircraft carrier group and have the next generation of advanced submarines and recapitalize our army and have our munitions.

We just can't do it.

But the government is incapable of making any decisions.

My guess is that even John Healey, he tries to get around it by just asking for more money.

If he had wanted to cancel one of those programs, let me try one on you.

The most obvious one, aircraft carriers, total waste of time.

Total waste of time.

These aircraft carriers can only operate if you have a whole fleet of other ships around that we can't afford to have.

We can barely afford to pay for the planes on them.

They were all based on projecting us into the Indo-Pacific, which we're not interested in anymore, and fighting .

Forget it.

Is any politician going to say, we're canceling our aircraft carriers and tell the Navy we're getting rid of all that?

Absolutely.

Second one, this fighter, let me explain about the GCAP fighter.