Army chief sets 2027 war test for UK armoured plans

The Chief of the General Staff has told an international defence audience that the British Army is reorganising its priorities around a blunt readiness question: what would have to change now if UK land forces were heading for large-scale combat in 2027.

Addressing the International Armoured Vehicle Conference 2026, the Army chief said his core responsibility is to generate the nation’s land forces and described the annual pipeline that turns civilians into trained soldiers.

“As the Chief of the General Staff, my role is clear, well, certainly it is according to Wikipedia, my role is to develop and generate the nation’s land forces,” he said.

“Each year we take roughly ten thousand civilians, turn them into new soldiers, group within generalist and specialist units and formations which are already filled with experienced soldiers. We then equip them and train them with the tools and methods of war. In short, we prepare them for war to better keep the peace,” he added.

He told delegates the event connected industry and the battlefield, saying: “This unites the tacticians and the technicians, the scientists and the artists, the thinkers and, importantly, the doers. And it connects the factories to the foxholes, because that’s what it takes.”

Setting out the strategic backdrop, he argued that threats are converging and growing more dangerous, pointing to Russia’s war in Ukraine and wider geopolitical competition.

“The threats we face today, I think, are dangerous. They are converging, and they are increasingly interconnected,” he said.

He said Russia’s 2022 invasion was enabled by a belief it had reached parity with the West, adding: “And that should give us pause, as to, ‘how on earth did we let that happen?’”

Despite heavy losses, he argued Russia continues because of broader strategic aims: “Putin’s goal is to fracture the transatlantic security arrangement that has kept the peace for the last 80 years,” he said, adding that in the words of a NATO analyst, “he seeks a strategic defeat of the United States”.

Turning to lessons from Ukraine, he stressed the industrial dimension of warfighting.

“Armies may well be able to win the battles, but it takes nations to win wars,” he said. “Deterrence today is not just about the boots on the ground at the front. It’s about the ability to regenerate, outproduce and outlast from the back to the front.”

He described how modern conflict is being reshaped by the combination of mass and accessible precision, and by the pace of adaptation on both sides.

He said the Army is acting on the Strategic Defence Review now, rather than waiting for long-term plans to mature.

“We can’t wait for the perfect army of 2035, we have got to transform the army that we have now,” he said, adding: “My ambition continues to remain about doubling our fighting power by 2027, relative to where we were in 2024, tripling it by 2030.”

The chief argued that technology, particularly AI, will be central to that transformation.

“We need to be increasingly software defined, not hardware confined,” he said.

He told the conference he had narrowed the Army’s 2026 focus by posing a single “pre-mortem” question.

“If we knew, now, that the UK’s land forces would find themselves in large scale combat operations in 2027, what would we be doing differently now, and why aren’t we doing that?” he said.

He said the effect of that question has been to shift discussions with industry and society towards war sustainability.

“The energising effect that that question has had, has surprised me,” he said. “It has lifted the conversation with industry, for example, from a technical one about how soldiers war-fight, increasingly, to a conversation about how the whole country will war-wage.”

From that framing, he set out a future “20:40:40” approach to lethality, where a smaller share of killing power comes from crewed heavy platforms, and a greater share comes from attritable uncrewed systems and consumable mass effectors.

He said: “In the future, we want only 20 percent of our ability to kill, the raw lethality, only 20 percent of that ability to kill, to come from that central heart of crude, survivable platforms,” adding that these include “our tanks, our armoured vehicles, our other fighting vehicles, as well as our attack helicopters.”

He described the next layer as uncrewed attritable platforms and the final layer as low-cost, consumable systems: “These are the cheap, throwaway, one-way-effectors that are on a fast product burn and are available at mass,” he said.

He also said Task Force Rapstone is already driving rapid acquisition and scaling of new capabilities.

“From just September last year, we’ve invested over £200M in British systems,” he said, adding that the effort supports formations earmarked for potential operations and support to Ukraine.

However, he cautioned that the focus on the “40 and the 40” must not come at the expense of survivable armoured platforms.

“I don’t want our system to be undermined by an inability to field the 20 percent of survivable, sovereign, world class platforms which will carry our troops into, through and beyond battle,” he said.

He added: “Most soldiers, most of the time, will drive to, and fight from, their vehicles in battle.”

On the armoured vehicle pipeline, he said Challenger 3 remains aimed at an initial operating capability in 2027.

“On Challenger 3, we still intend to hit the IOC with 18 new tanks delivered in 2027,” he said, adding that discussions with Rheinmetall BAE Systems Land include accelerating aspects of the programme and spiral development with fielded units.

On Ajax, he acknowledged current issues, referencing an investigation linked to events on Exercise Titan Storm, but said the capability remains essential.

“Please be in no doubt, we need an armoured, reconnaissance and armoured cavalry programme for the reasons that I’ve laid out above,” he said. He added that the situation has brought operators and engineers closer together: “We know exactly what it is that our soldiers need to see to change, to have confidence that this is a warhorse they can go to war in.”

On Boxer, he said: “We do hope to reach IOC this August,” adding that he remains hopeful of meeting full operating capability in line with the original contract and seeing “well over six hundred vehicles in the first batch.”

He said the Mobile Fires Platform, based on the RCH155, is being accelerated, with first systems expected to enter service in 2029, and confirmed progress work on protected mobility through the CAVS arrangement. He also said the Army intends to move to contract next financial year for a Light Mobility Vehicle programme to replace ageing Land Rovers and Pinzgauer fleets, aimed at replacing more than 13,000 vehicles across the services.

Concluding, he said the Army is trying to move faster because of the strategic direction of Russia and the realities of industrial war.

“We are trying to act with the urgency of wartime,” he said.

He cited advice he attributed to a former Ukrainian Chief of the General Staff, emphasising that industrial output is central to deterrence.

“They will only take you seriously when it comes to deterrence, and strength, when they see your factories producing at wartime production rates,” he said, adding: “Industry and the world of finance must become the fourth arm of defence.”