War without arms | Robert Clark

Only eighteen months into office and the Labour government has now been in various political crises — largely of their own making. A further blunder is looming; not entirely theirs, but which they refusing to confront seriously: the perilous state of our Armed Forces. 

Events in Europe must now force the government to take stock: only last March Stamer declared that the UK stood ready with France to formalise the Coalition of the Willing& lead a peacekeeping force of group of 34 nations in Ukraine; both Stamer and French President Emmanuel Macron have signed a declaration of intent to deploy troops to Ukraine when a peace deal is made with Russia.

Starmer has promised a vote in the House ahead of any deployment; whilst some politicians have notably come out to criticise such a deployment, including Reform leader Nigel Farage, such a vote would likely pass with ease. 

However, as someone who fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan knows, there must be an end-goal, a timeframe, and deliverable objectives which a military deployment would achieve, to avoid the mission-creep which is the basis of the Reform leader’s caution. This has yet to be communicated effectively by the government, and the nature of the conflict in Ukraine shows that any post-conflict resolution will likely remain in some unpredictable state of stagnation and chaos for many years to come. 

A multinational troop deployment is unlikely to change this reality. Instead, it will consume enormous military resources with the potential for vast mission-creep. Indeed, these worries were the reasons behind Farage’s concerns: that the British Army has neither “the manpower nor the equipment to go into an operation that clearly has no ending timeline”.

Whilst most can readily agree that indeed Putin should be deterred from further acts of aggression in Europe, the legitimate concerns of the nature of our armed forces should now be fully laid bare – especially when the stakes are this high. Only this week the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Marshall Richard Knighton, revealed in an extraordinary and heated evidence session with MPs of the Defence Select Committee, that Labour’s flagship defence strategy could not be fully funded — compounding dizzying estimates that the Ministry of Defence requires and additional £800 billion by 2040 just to meet current obligations.

Labour’s flagship defence strategy could not be fully funded

Whilst these figures reveal the degree of financial mismanagement, a multi-year recruitment and retention crisis means the Army has missed their manpower targets consistently for a decade. There are problems with steel as well as flesh; with so few tanks now being upgraded to the next generation Challenger Three, there will only two regiment’s worth of tanks left for an Army that is supposedly able to field an armoured division.

That armoured division was Britian’s core promise to Europe for almost a century. In the last decade, due to this country’s obsession with ploughing money into the welfare state over the nation’s defence, that has been utterly trashed. We are now in a situation where we cannot even deploy  5,000 troops — never mind the government’s mooted Ukranian deployment number of somewhere closer to 7,500. 

The bare minimum deployment to Ukraine to resemble any shred of deterrence and capability is an armoured brigade. Currently we have two, 20 and 12 Brigade Combat Teams. Given the nature of rotating troops operationally, you need three times the number deployed (to include the rotation in theatre, the one about to deploy, and the one just recovered), meaning that the British Army already is already unable to deploy one armoured brigade on a full rotation. That the nation which invented the tank can no longer field even a brigade properly is a stark measure of Britain’s military decline.

The previous Conservative government decided to repeatedly slash troop numbers for over a decade in a purely bean-counting exercise imposed upon the military by a historically unforgiving Treasury. This Labour government are doing no better — yet now making the cardinal sin of assuring a significant deployment, without the steel or flesh required — both of which have been highly expendable commodities on the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. 

Further compounding this is the fact there are only approximately 53,000 deployable soldiers. Even if the UK could deploy one whole bridge, with roughly 15,000 troops needed as a bare minimum, the Army would require almost one third of all deployable troops — and that’s before any questions of sustainment or future operations. 

there are only approximately 53,000 deployable soldiers

My point here is not to undermine a noble Ukrainian deployment, in which I will once again volunteer to serve my nation. It is simply to contextualise just how badly the British Army has — to borrow that popular phrase — been hollowed out.

After U-turn upon U-turn, Labour is discovering that it is not merely flip-flopping that will cost them. It is that their inertia on defence — sustained in large part to preserve a bloated welfare state — amounts to a dereliction of national defence, which will accelerate their political decline. Only by a serious change in government at the next election can hope to fix this mess.

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