This article is taken from the December-January 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
In 1900, socialist pamphleteers and “national efficiency” enthusiasts deemed it a sorry indictment of late-Victorian capitalism that more than a fifth of those volunteering to fight against the Boers were rejected for failing the physical fitness tests. Still, an army of 350,000 was dispatched to southern Africa.
Despite the UK’s population having nearly doubled since news broke of Mafeking’s relief, the British Army of today has shrunk below 75,000 regulars (served by 55,000 civil servants employed across the Ministry of Defence).
The Army is leaner. Yet, remarkably, it is not fitter: a quarter of serving soldiers are considered unfit for deployment. Unlike in 1900, these are the ones who made it into the ranks, not the rejects.
Regardless of whether this is an indictment of late welfare-state capitalism, it certainly suggests the British Army’s training and medical care aren’t living up to its copywriter’s boast: “Be the Best”.
Indeed, a lack of exercise is amongst the startling conclusions of Brigadier (retired) Ben Barry’s article in this magazine — the first of our new series of long-form essays.
In 1984, the British Army deployed 131,000 regular and reserve troops for Exercise Lionheart and brigade-level exercises continued thereafter until the Afghan and Iraq wars brought them to a halt. However, as those two misadventures wound down, the Army did not recommence large-scale exercises.
Though they were recently restarted, the Army went 20 years without a brigade-level exercise. Given how few soldiers aged under 35 have direct experience of being under fire, the gap in organising large-scale exercises is inexcusable.
The disconnect between what politicians pretend the army can perform and the reality of what an underfunded, shoddily-billeted, morale-depleted, poorly paid and badly supplied soldiery at risk of prosecution through legal activism can deliver is a national disgrace.
Yet, this is the hallmark of 21st century Britain — professing reverence for a previous century’s sacrifices whilst being demonstrably indifferent to those prepared to risk their lives for us now.
The MoD’s procurement failures represent staggering debacles of the modern state
To govern is to choose. Successive Conservative and Labour administrations since 1990 chose to halve the armed forces (what other public sector service is half the size it was 35 years ago?). But they did not conclude that we should have a foreign policy to match.
Wars of choice were fought and — in retrospect — lost in Afghanistan and Iraq. Britain postures that its armed forces can face off Russia in Europe and help check China’s Taiwan ambitions. Who are we fooling, other than ourselves?
The MoD’s procurement failures represent some of the most staggering debacles of the modern state apparatus.
This is not just about delays to the delivery of big ticket projects and highly technical R&D. According to a 2022 Royal United Services Institute report, the British Army’s ammunition stockpile would only last a week of war.
Three years later, building our capacity in the light of Russian aggression in Ukraine has made glacial progress. In March last year, the former armed forces minister John Spellar told the Commons that our ammunition stockpile would be exhausted in ten days of warfare. Ten days? For what contest has the MoD spent the last decade preparing — the Olympic Games trap semi-final?
It is impossible to overstate this dereliction of duty. In the event of President Trump negotiating a Moscow-Kyiv ceasefire, a British peacekeeping force might be called upon to act as a “trip wire” to ensure Ukrainian security.
This assumes that if Russia tripped the British wire, we could then call up reserves. But there is no readily deployable reserve. And this time the Americans likely won’t ride to the rescue. So, not a trip wire, but a trip switch.
Britain is at least 15,000 troops short of the absolute minimum required to field a significant force as laid out in the Commons defence select committee 2024 report, “Ready for War”.
That assumes the existing 75,000 are all deployable, which is not the case, and that we can find the additional recruits (which we currently can’t, except by importing them from the Commonwealth).
With a brigade already committed to Estonia, speedily deploying more than 30,000 troops anywhere else stretches plausibility.
Rightly reluctant to openly challenge the decisions of their political masters, some within our armed forces leadership have adapted to the Whitehall mindset. How else to explain the directive the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, Lieutenant-General David Eastman, sent directly to all corps and regimental colonels in October instructing them “with the seriousness it deserves” that it was “a strategic necessity” for their units to be “advocates for change” and disassociate from any gentlemen’s clubs whose “rules, policies or cultural practices may not align with the army’s commitment to inclusivity”.
“Strategic necessity”? There was a time when this required holding Pegasus Bridge or achieving the element of surprise in San Carlos Bay. Now it means preventing our fighting men from dining at Buck’s Club.
So effective has been the Army’s diminishment and consequent self-abasement, that such senior officers engage in distraction activities, pretending that the vapours of “soft power” determine geopolitics and not the hard realities that, for centuries, attracted and inspired the defenders of our realm.
Philip Larkin’s 1969 poem “Homage to a Government” foretold a Britain content to be irrelevant. The last stanza begins, “Next year we shall be living in a country / That brought its soldiers home for lack of money” and concludes, “Our children will not know it’s a different country./ All we can hope to leave them now is money”.
And now, not even that.
