quaking in his boots
With Britain pledging soldiers to a multinational Ukraine force and allocating £200m to fund preparations for the possible deployment of troops, the question is what state is our armed forces actually in and are we up to the job?
In a rare cross-party agreement, the current defence Secretary, John Healy, and his predecessor Ben Wallace, both admit the Britain’s armed forces have been hollowed out by decades of underfunding. This has become a greater issue since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine as, until then, few thought it plausible that our forces might soon be involved in a European land war. Trump’s return to the White House with his obvious scepticism towards Nato and oft-stated view that we are a bunch of free-loaders, has further exacerbated the situation.
The British Army is forecast to imminently fall below 70,000, making it smaller than at any time since 1793. In total UK regular forces now number exactly 136,000: 74,000 in the Army, 32,000 in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and 30,000 in the Royal Air Force. These numbers are down from 192,000 in 2010, 321,000 in 1980, and over half a million in 1960. Britain has attempted to maintain a wide spectrum of capabilities – from aircraft carriers and trident submarines to superfast jets and cruise missiles, from tanks to cyber-operations – but has found itself stretched very thin. To give some real-world comparison, the Army currently has about 200 main battle tanks of which half are serviceable, whereas Russia has already lost over 4000 in Ukraine!
Notwithstanding, we remain the world’s sixth most powerful military country, below the US, Russia, China, India and South Korea. Though we have a level of sophisticated weaponry, a hi-tech defence industry and well-trained servicemen-and-women, it faces an international crisis of credibility – largely because it would be nigh on impossible to deploy a fully-integrated force to fight for any length of time, or even an efficient peacekeeping force with a serious deterrent effect. In a recent simulation of a European war, the Army ran out of ammunition in just ten days. If it ever had to fight a Ukraine-scale war it would be annihilated in as little as six months, bulldog-spirit or not. How did it come to this?
The post-cold war ‘peace dividend’ witnessed funding heavily reduced, and diverted elsewhere. In 1956, Britain spent 8% of its GDP on defence. In 1980, it was halved to 4% and sits currently at around the 2% mark. By contrast, over the same period, the health budget has risen fourfold from 3% to 12%. With the best will in the world, Keir Starmer’s promise to raise defence spending to 2.5% by 2027 (an additional #13bn) is unlikely to make any tangible impact on recruitment numbers, morale, low munition stocks and ageing equipment. At the same time, the MoD has to contend with the military revolution brought about by drone-centric digital warfare. Furthermore, fiddling with the age-limit rules to make it easier to mobilise former armed forces personnel is unlikely to change anything of significance.
Call me a cynic but I can’t imagine Putin and his generals quaking in their boots at our recent pronouncements.
