New Zealand’s biggest defence build-up in a generation will mostly be carried by governments that have not yet been elected, a report released on Wednesday by The New Zealand Initiative warns.
In Worth Defending, retired Major General John Howard argues that a credible, combat-capable Defence Force is not discretionary spending but the foundation of the country’s security, sovereignty and economic prosperity. Howard is a Senior Fellow at the Wellington think tank and was New Zealand’s first Chief of Defence Intelligence, after more than four decades in the Defence Force.
His worry is staying power. The Government’s 2025 Defence Capability Plan sets out $12 billion of defence spending over four years, $9 billion of it new money, and the report backs it as a correction of decades of under-investment. But the plan’s indicative investments run out to 2040, so most of it will fall to Parliaments that do not exist yet.
“It is a beginning, not an end point,” Howard says of the plan, according to the Initiative’s release. “Its success will depend on whether successive governments, across political cycles, are willing to sustain the investment and discipline required.”
The report sets out how New Zealand got here. It says defence spending fell from a Cold War high of 2 to 3 percent of GDP to around 1 percent by the mid-1990s as the money went elsewhere. In 2001 the air combat force was disbanded on the basis that the country faced a benign strategic environment. Since then, the report says, competition between major powers has reached the Pacific while New Zealand’s military capability kept declining.
“Successive New Zealand governments have mistaken periods of relative calm for permanent conditions and dismantled capabilities that take a decade or more to rebuild,” Howard says.
Denmark is his warning from abroad. According to the report, Denmark let its defence force run down after the Cold War, and when the strategic picture changed the rebuild took a decade and cost far more in relative terms. The report also looks at New Zealand’s four million square kilometres of ocean, and at how Singapore, Finland and Israel keep themselves secure with limited resources.
The plan Howard is defending was launched in April 2025 by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the then Defence Minister Judith Collins. “This new Defence Capability Plan contains $12 billion of funding over the next four years, which includes $9 billion of new spending,” Luxon said at the time, according to the Ministry of Defence. Under the plan, defence spending is meant to rise to more than 2 percent of GDP within eight years. Newswire has previously worked through what that 2 percent target means in dollars.
The plan’s own text is candid that everything beyond the first four years is provisional. The 2025 Defence Capability Plan says its investments out to 2040 are indicative and were outlined to show intent. “The mix of investments and timings is likely to change over the next 15 years,” the document says. The Ministry of Defence says the plan will be reviewed every two years, beginning in 2027.
So far the money has kept coming. Budget 2026 added $1.6 billion of new defence funding, which the Defence Force says brings total new investment to $5.8 billion since the plan was released. When Defence and Veterans Minister Chris Penk announced the package at Devonport Naval Base in May, he made an argument close to Howard’s own. “New Zealand’s prosperity and security depend on the sea,” Penk said, according to the Defence Force.
What the report’s argument means in practice is that the next hard calls land in the next parliamentary term. The first two-yearly review of the plan is due in 2027. The plan itself says most of the Navy’s current ships will reach the end of their intended design life by the mid-2030s. And when the Initiative published Howard’s July research note on the Navy, Adrift, it said Cabinet must decide by 2027 what should replace the country’s two main warships, the frigates. “The window for action is very narrow, and it is closing fast,” Howard said then.
Worth Defending is the third defence paper Howard has written for the Initiative this year. The first, God Defend New Zealand, published in April, argued that without institutional reform the new money risked being absorbed into a system too slow and fragmented to deliver modern capability. It recommended an independent 90-day review of defence policy settings, reporting to Cabinet, along with faster investment in intelligence and information capability.
With the election on 7 November, the people choosing the next government are also choosing who will run the 2027 review and sign off on the Navy’s future. If you are still weighing up where the parties stand, you can find out which party best matches your views with our voting tool.
Howard is due to discuss the report with the Initiative’s executive director, Oliver Hartwich, at an online launch at 3pm on Wednesday. The Initiative says the full report is being published on its website.
Should defence spending be locked in across election cycles, or should each new government be free to set its own priorities? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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