Can the UK rely on the British Army to defend itself?

The British Army is no longer regarded as a top-level fighting force as decades of spending cuts have left its ranks depleted and equipment obsolete, a senior US general has privately warned Defence Secretary Ben Wallace.

Sky News reported “defence sources” as saying this decline in capability needed to be reversed faster than planned in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The news site added that Rishi Sunak risked failing in his role as “wartime prime minister” unless he took urgent action to counter the growing security threat posed by Vladimir Putin.

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“Bottom line… it’s an entire service unable to protect the UK and our allies for a decade,” one source told Sky News’ security and defence editor, Deborah Haynes.

What did the papers say?

The current state of the UK’s armed forces was laid bare last week when General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army, said the decision to send 14 Challenger 2 tanks to Ukraine would leave the UK “temporarily weaker” and at risk of failing to meet its Nato obligations.

“Although the timing of Sanders’s intervention was controversial,” said The Times, “he is not alone in thinking that years of wasteful procurement and underfunding have left the British Army in such a ‘dire state’ that it would struggle to mobilise a division of 10,000 troops if forced to fight a European war.”

According to Haynes: “While the picture is bleak across the military, the army is in a particularly bad place.”

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a British Army officer from 1988 to 2012, told The Independent: “Our own situation has become rather bleak. I heard giving 14 tanks to Ukraine would be detrimental to our own forces when we had hundreds ten years ago. This should be a massive wake-up call.”

According to a Ministry of Defence report published in 2021, all but one of the UK’s 33 infantry battalions were dangerously short of combat-ready troops.

To compound matters, at the start of the year the Mail on Sunday revealed that one in four British troops have been officially classified as dangerously overweight or obese, with military chiefs “accused of a ‘failure of leadership’ over the Army’s expanding waistline”.

What next?

Sky News said plans to reverse the British Army’s decline “should include increasing the defence budget by at least £3bn a year; halting a plan to shrink the size of the army even further; and easing peacetime procurement rules that obstruct the UK’s ability to buy weapons and ammunition at speed”.

However, Sunak has so far resisted calls to follow his predecessor, Liz Truss, and lift defence spending to 3% of GDP by 2030, up from just over 2% at present. On current plans and unless new money is found, the British Army is due to shrink to just 73,000 frontline troops. This is less than half the size it was in 1990 and the smallest it has been since Napoleonic times.

Yet while everyone agrees money is undoubtedly needed to help rebuild the armed forces and counteract the twin effects of inflation and a weaker pound, some have suggested the blame for the army’s lack of modern equipment lies with the army itself.

Francis Tusa, a military analyst, calculated that £14bn has been invested over the past decade and no new armoured capability has been provided, “leaving the troops with essentially the same kit as when they invaded Iraq in 2003”, said The Times. “Outdated weaponry and other legacies from decades of neglect leave the country vulnerable,” said the paper.

In light of the army’s recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, “it is difficult to avoid the painful conclusion that the British Army functions for the Americans as the Gurkhas do for the British Army: a highly motivated, loyal auxiliary force, incapable of prosecuting a campaign on its own, whose colourful traditions still carry the romance of an earlier, more glorious era”, said UnHerd’s foreign affairs editor Aris Roussinos.

“Today, however, even this limited role is now in doubt,” he concluded.

While it is true the armed forces “have been cut to the bone for years”, said The Spectator, the problem ultimately is one of “confidence”.

“France, as well as ambitious countries in Asia, seem to appreciate the value of their militaries”, the magazine said. “Given our global links and history, a booming Britain climbing up the world economy rankings would find it incumbent to retain its current (and adopt an even greater) geopolitical role, with a military budget to match.”