UK ‘not prepared’ to fight ground war in Europe

What are we to make of Britain’s new top soldier, General Sir Roly Walker, and his widely reported address to the Royal United Services Institute’s Land Warfare Conference earlier this week?

Bullish, upbeat, and perhaps overly optimistic, he pledged to ensure the British Army would be ready to fight in the next three years, to double its fighting power by 2027, and to triple it by 2030.

This would be achieved, he opined, not by increasing troop numbers but by “urging” the British Army to modernise quickly by focusing on AI and technological advances in firepower to enable it to defeat an enemy “three times its size”.

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Compare and contrast with his immediate predecessor, General Patrick Sanders, who told it like he saw it and was rewarded with early retirement. His much more pessimistic valedictory message to troops and media was that Britain’s armed forces were so worn down they would only be able to fight a small war for a month and that ammunition stockpiles are so low their true size “would put the hairs up on the back of your neck”.

Sanders also said that Britain’s political leaders are “trying to shield the public from the reality of the world that we’re now finding ourselves in” … facing “as dangerous a moment as any time that we have had since 1945”. Worryingly, he advised that NATO may have less than five years to substantially re-arm to ward off a Russian attack on its soil.

Who to believe? Well, it appears to me that Sanders’ assessment is the more realistic of the two. Insiders say that Defence Secretary John Healey’s commitment to be able to contribute two British armoured divisions to NATO is an aspiration and nothing more. They say that Britain’s 3 (UK) Armoured Division is a division in name only, lacking the equipment, the combat support, or the manpower.

And, more importantly perhaps, it may be a formation without a role after the Strategic Defence Review reports back. At the moment it can’t even put a brigade in the field without major contortions, about a third of its designed establishment. And as for the other formation, 1 (UK) Division, it would be hard-pressed to deploy a battalion-size battlegroup in short order.

The message is stark. If we are to accept that the UK may well be involved in a conventional war in Europe by 2030, then it’s quite clear that we are not prepared adequately. Walker talks about doubling the lethality of the British Army within three years without saying how we define “lethality” or how we get there. And the idea that technology can replace numbers is pie-in-the-sky stuff.

He seems to have fallen victim to the techno-romanticism which has infected military circles recently, the belief that new sensors, networks, and integration are the answer to the maiden’s prayer and will solve the real and enduring problems in war.

I have often said that the fundamental tenet of warfare is to “get there first with the most men” (attributed to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in the US Civil War, 1862-65) and that everything else is detail. I believe this is still pretty appropriate. Unfortunately, Britain has neither the capability of getting there first nor the most men.

A succession of Chiefs of the General Staff (Carter, Carlton-Smith) has let the British Army down. They have focused on their comfort zone of small unit operations in far-off sandy places, leaving it with too few troops and the wrong equipment to operate in a conventional armoured confrontation like we see in Ukraine.

Now, we’re facing the possibility of being at war in the next five years without the means to wage it satisfactorily. The only light on the horizon was Sanders, who has been replaced by yet another small unit-oriented officer who is destined to repeat the errors of the past two decades.

It’s enough to make you weep.