What Are We Really Defending If We Break Society to Pay for Defence?

I keep coming back to this question every time I hear the same argument repeated with absolute confidence: defence spending must rise, and therefore public services must fall. It’s said as if it’s a law of nature—like gravity or night following day. No pause. No moral hesitation. Just an assumption dressed up as realism. And the more I hear it, the more uneasy I become, because I feel we are skipping the most important part of the conversation altogether.

For me, the issue is not whether defence matters. Of course it does. Every society has a responsibility to protect itself from real threats. But protection is not just about tanks, missiles, and military budgets. Protection is about what makes life worth protecting in the first place. And when I look at the trade-offs being casually proposed—cutting healthcare, social care, housing, education, and basic dignity—I’m forced to ask: what exactly are we defending if society itself is being hollowed out?

I don’t believe people fight, sacrifice, or stand together for abstractions. They don’t do it for GDP figures, credit ratings, or vague ideas like “national competitiveness.” People fight—if they ever choose to fight at all—for places where life feels meaningful, where citizenship means something, and where the burdens of crisis are shared rather than dumped on the weakest. A society that abandons care in favour of constant austerity is not strong. It is brittle. And brittle systems don’t endure pressure; they crack under it.

What troubles me most is how normalised this false choice has become: defence or care, security or welfare, strength or compassion. I don’t accept this framing. It assumes that governments are like households with a fixed pot of money, that spending more in one area automatically means cutting another. History tells us this simply isn’t true. When societies have faced existential threats before, they didn’t respond by dismantling the social fabric. They reorganised resources, mobilised unused capacity, and—crucially—asked more from those who could afford to give more.

We often forget that underemployment, wasted skills, and unused human potential are themselves forms of weakness. When people are left idle, insecure, or fearful, that isn’t fiscal prudence—it’s policy failure. A country with crumbling public services, rising poverty, and deepening inequality is not safer just because it spends more on weapons. In fact, it becomes less secure, because social trust erodes, legitimacy weakens, and the sense of shared purpose disappears.

I also find it deeply revealing who is usually protected in these trade-offs. When cuts are justified in the name of defence, it is rarely the wealthy who are asked to sacrifice. Instead, the message—sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant—is that the poorest should bear the cost, while the existing inequalities remain untouched. That doesn’t feel like collective security to me. It feels like defending a status quo that is already failing too many people.

Defence, in my understanding, should mean defending people first. Defending healthcare systems that don’t collapse under pressure. Defending housing security so fear of homelessness doesn’t become normal. Defending education, community resilience, and the idea that society will not abandon you the moment you become vulnerable. If these things disappear, then even the most advanced military hardware cannot buy loyalty, solidarity, or trust. And without those, no defence strategy truly works.

What frustrates me is how rarely this becomes a moral discussion. We talk endlessly about budgets and percentages, but not enough about values. If defence spending requires us to accept worse living conditions, greater fear, and deeper inequality, then we should at least be honest about what kind of country we are choosing to become. A society stripped of care is not a society at its strongest—it’s one running on borrowed time.

I don’t believe austerity is inevitable. I see it as a political choice, repeatedly presented as necessity. Choices can be made differently. Priorities can be reordered. Resources can be mobilised in ways that strengthen both security and social well-being. But that requires us to reject the lazy narrative that pits protection against compassion, as if the two were enemies rather than allies.

In the end, I circle back to where I began. Defence only makes sense if it preserves something worth defending. If we protect borders but abandon people, if we safeguard power while dismantling dignity, then the concept of security loses its meaning. So before we agree to any more cuts made in the name of protection, I think we owe ourselves one honest pause—and one uncomfortable question: what are we really defending if society itself is the price we’re willing to pay?