Britain couldn’t raise a conscript army to fight Russia even if it wanted to: modern war is too complex and technical
Yesterday the UK’s prime minister insisted the British Army would remain a volunteer force, rejecting a call from chief of the general staff General Patrick Sanders to prepare to “mobilise the nation” for a looming war with Russia.
So what? The general’s statement was a cry for help. The British military is not just understaffed and ill-equipped; it would also be unable to train and equip a conscript force even if required to.
To the extent a conflict between Russia and Nato is plausible, the UK is not remotely ready:
Senior service. The Royal Navy has 30 ships including Type 23 frigates that were due to be phased out over a decade ago. It has two aircraft carriers but no support ships, meaning they can’t be rearmed and supplied without allied help. Maintenance problems with the ageing Vanguard-class submarine on which Britain’s nuclear deterrence policy depends mean each mission can last around six months – twice as long as they’re meant to and a severe burden on crew members. The Dreadnought class replacement is not coming for ten years.
On the ground. The army is roughly one-tenth as big as it was in the 1950s, and dangerously short of deployable hardware.
- It has 157 Challenger 2 tanks “given a 30-day work-up”, according to parliament’s defence select committee in March 2023. Introduced in 1998, the Challenger 2 has never been upgraded.
- The Ajax armoured fighting vehicle programme – based on a design used by the Spanish army in the 1990s – has been in development since 2010, costing £688 million to date without a single vehicle deployed.
- At least three similar programmes have been cancelled and billions spent. In March 2021, the defence committee was “astonished that between 1997 and late 2020… the [Ministry of Defence] has not delivered a single new armoured vehicle.” It concluded: “We are still some four years away from even being able to field a ‘warfighting division’, which, itself, would now be hopelessly under equipped.”
US umbrella. With Donald Trump all but guaranteed the Republican presidential nomination, America’s allies are having to contemplate the possibility that a second Trump presidency would withdraw US military support from Nato.
Can Britain spend more? Yes, but money is no silver bullet. Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, said this month the UK would increase defence spending from 2.1 per cent of GDP to 2.5 per cent “at some point in the future.” But spending the money isn’t enough, says Jeremy Blackham, a retired Vice Admiral. Entry-level workers have to be drawn into the defence sector to accumulate the skills needed to build and maintain modern armed forces. Instead the sector has atrophied: “There has been a failure to understand that if you want to maintain a navy and a shipbuilding industry you have to provide work.”
What about global Britain? “The British military force is small and shrinking,” Bronwen Maddox, chief executive of Chatham House, said at her annual lecture this week. “Our allies are being sorrowful and polite about that… The task for the government is not to promise too much, particularly to the US.
“I wince when I think of British military leaders taking on Helmand province in Afghanistan with a “yes we can” swagger, and no we couldn’t.”
Challenges unmet – a timeline:
Basra, 2009. Basra was Britain’s assignment in Operation Telic because the army had insufficient spare parts to travel further into Iraq. Unable to control the city, commanders agreed to let the Mahdi militia run it if they stopped attacking British troops, who agreed to stay out of the city. A 2009 offensive saw US and Iraqi forces expel the militia while British troops stayed at base.
Helmand, 2010. British troops were thinly stretched, lacking equipment, helicopters and armoured troop carriers. Besieged by the Taliban, the army never gained the strategic initiative. In 2010, US Marines began replacing British troops.
Bahrain, 2024. Tasked to help US forces counter Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, the Royal Navy minehunter HMS Chiddingfold left her berth last week and went backwards into HMS Bangor, ripping a large hole in a cabin above the waterline. “It appears that HMS Chiddingfold’s motor was wired incorrectly,” a navy insider said.
What’s more: Updating the British armed forces would mean painful trade-offs because the next UK government will inherit the bleakest financial legacy in 70 years (see also Capital.)