The UK needs “credible” land forces and cannot “hide behind” NATO armies in the face of the Russian threat, the head of the British Army has said.
Addressing the Land Warfare Conference at the Royal United Services Institute on Monday, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the chief of the general staff, compared the challenge from Russia to the Nazi threat in the run-up to the Second World War.
He said Britain “must never again be unprepared as our forbears were in the 1930s.”
Private Patrick Rodgers of Britain’s Anglian Regiment, 2nd Battalion, maintains the perimeter as a Chinook helicopter carries out a medical evacuation during a military exercise on Salisbury Plains near Warminster, England, on July 23, 2020. Leon Neal/Getty Images
Sanders said Britain is safer than 90 years ago thanks to NATO power and the Ukrainian resistance, but “there isn’t a moment to lose.”
“Unlike our predecessors, we are safer—for now. NATO is stronger, Russia is temporarily weaker, and Ukrainian bravery and sacrifice is buying us time—time to modernise, time to train ourselves, time to ensure that we are prepared so we can deter.”
The army chief said the Russian threat will remain no matter how the war in Ukraine ends.
“This will be a generational struggle. It is one we must arm ourselves for. It is one we must be ready for,” he said.
“For the UK deterrence to succeed, we need credible armed forces that are balanced across all of the domains. Those who believe that our geography allows us to minimise investment on land or that we can simply hide behind the armies of other NATO contributors are simply wrong.”
‘Rotary Dial Telephones in an iPhone Age’
Sanders said much of Britain’s military equipment is outdated and unfit for purpose.“I trained on the 432 armoured personnel carrier in the 1980s when it was already 30 years old; it is still in service today. Our armoured reconnaissance vehicle CVR(T) came into service in 1973, our infantry fighting vehicle Warrior in 1987, and Challenger 2 in 1998; these are rotary dial telephones in an iPhone age.”
A Challenger 2 tank fires during Exercise Tractable, in Salisbury, England, on March 19, 2015. Matt Cardy/Getty Images
He stressed that “changing is coming,” with more than £35 billion being spent on new equipment over the next ten years and 35 out of the 38 existing platforms going out of service and being replaced by new capabilities.
But he said the British military’s procurement record has been “poor” and the UK’s land industrial base has “withered.”
He added that the British Army must restructure itself “to meet [its] core purpose—to fight and win wars on land—and provide genuine utility and credibility to NATO if called upon, while still being able to operate globally in support of the United Kingdom’s interests.”
Army Cuts ‘Beggars Belief’
Both military experts and politicians have raised concerns over the shrinking size of the British Army.In the past decade, the number of regular soldiers has fallen from 97,000 to 76,000, and is set to fall to 73,000.
Lord Nick Houghton, who was chief of the defence staff between 2013 and 2016, criticised the decision to cut regular troop numbers at a meeting of the House of Commons Defence Committee on June 20.
He said: “It beggars belief to me that we have a reduced size of army. We have witnessed the first real formalised warfare above the threshold of war in Ukraine and Russia and within weeks both sides have sort of run out of troops.
“They have mobilised their nations, they have had to call on reserves and yet we as a nation have no strategic methodology for mobilising the reserves. We don’t have a properly functioning reserve. To me, it’s a national embarrassment but they don’t appear to want to do anything about it.”
Houghton, who spent 40 years in the army and served in Northern Ireland and Iraq, said the UK’s military capability had not been “eroded to the point where we should worry.”
Last week, General Sir Tim Radford, the deputy supreme allied commander Europe, the second-in-command of NATO’s military arm, said Britain is only “just holding on” to its influence in NATO because its army is too small.
Britain’s position as one of the alliance’s leading nations could be in doubt after years of defence cuts, he told The Telegraph.
