The British Army - the Best Little Army in The World
‘A hollowed out husk’ Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton gives his analysis of the British Army at present.
Britain is at war. We have been for years.
We do not realise this. Why should we? Even after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – a classic ‘failure of NATO deterrence’ - many of our politicians and most of our media, whilst intent on calling Russia out, applauding our supply of anti-tank weapons to Kyiv, and being individually welcoming to Ukrainian refugees, still see this as a ‘quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing’ - as Chamberlain put it. It’s to do with us, but not really.
In Europe, on the other hand, the penny is dropping. There’s nothing like the prospect of a cold winter with no gas to heat your home for concentrating the mind. Governments across the continent are now committing to an increase in their defence budgets to meet the threat of an aggression long thought dead and buried.
Not in Britain. Here, the Government claims that far from invalidating last year’s Integrated Review, which sees the British Army reduced to levels not seen since the demobilisation of 1714, the Ukrainian experience has demonstrated the foresight of the Review’s authors in coming to the conclusions that they did. Quite how, in current circumstances, reducing our holdings of tanks from 227 to 148 and the size of the army by 9,500 reinforces their pre-February 25th wisdom, I am not entirely sure. It perhaps draws on the same certainty of logic that prompted Boris Johnson to declare in November last year that “we have to recognise that the old concepts of fighting big tank battles on the European land mass are over.”
If it still holds true – as it should - that the first responsibility of government is to protect the people from external threats, then this stubborn refusal to confront the changed reality represents a potentially catastrophic dereliction of duty.
A bit of background. When David Cameron became Prime Minister, defence spending was slashed, again. The pretext this time was ‘Austerity’, though Health, Education, Pensions and DFiD were all ringfenced. To accommodate and justify this reduction, the Ministry of Defence was directed to allocate its budget to a revised set of planning scenarios. Henceforth, these would not include what was known back then as ‘Resurgent Russia’. The Integrated Review is just the latest iteration of this shift.
At the time of that seismic decision in 2011, the British Army was a too-small-but-still-effective organisation, with a full spectrum war-fighting capability - from peer-on-peer high intensity and high-tech warfare, suited to somewhere like Ukraine today, through counter-insurgency operations of the sort seen in Afghanistan and Iraq, right down to the versatility needed to respond to unforeseen domestic emergencies that ranged from floods to fuel-tanker driving. Eleven years on, though the quality of the man and the woman remains extremely high, their capabilities (largely a combination of their training and equipment) emphatically do not.
It pains me to say it – not least for fear it gives succour to Mr Putin – but today’s British Army is not ‘an act of war’. It is a hollowed-out husk. Take the British infantry whose superb past reputation remains intact, for now. The IR reconfigures its battalions from cohesive war-fighting entities into 400-personnel training teams or as ‘light infantry’ who are neither equipped nor trained to take part in the sort of intensive, combined arms (coordinated infantry/armour/artillery) operations of the type happening in Ukraine. It is a sobering fact that the last time a British formation above battalion level conducted combined arms training was over a decade ago. Recent modelling indicates that the Royal Artillery, another arm with a past reputation sans pareil, has total ammunition stocks sufficient for three days expenditure at the rates currently seen in Ukraine.
The refrain of the political and military establishments is that what we see in the regular army is just the spearpoint. Behind it comes the reserves, including all those tanks and other heavy pieces of equipment that sit in warehouses awaiting the day. But what of this second echelon, this army of ‘Old Contemptibles’?
Let me give you the example of one company of reserve infantry, which will remain nameless but is probably, more-or-less reflective of the norm. It has a book strength of 103 personnel. Its actual strength is 50. Of those, 30% are ‘long term absent’ – i.e. on the books, but no longer attending – and a further 30% are still undergoing training. Actual, actual strength for deploying on operations therefore 20 - not 103.
And what about that great reserve of tanks? They are held in a warehouse with a leaking roof. Most have been left with their hatches open and the water as got in. Result: a tank fleet that is 70% non-deployable. No wonder Johnson went rather quiet on his pledge to ship our reserve tanks to Poland to allow the Poles to lend theirs to Ukraine.
To be where we are is a disgrace. More important, it is acutely dangerous. But what to do? There is no easy fix. It will take years to make good the lost manpower, experience and equipment. But make good we must. We are, after all, at war. So, the solution is really quite simple: invest, invest, train, train.
And remember the words of General Normal Schwarzkopf, architect of victory in the 1st Gulf War: ‘The more you sweat in peace, the less you bleed in war.’
By Jamie Lowther-Pinkerton, Senior Adviser at Audley