Can Keir Starmer trust his generals? He must heed the lessons of Afghanistan

On 31 March 1982 Henry Leach, the First Sea Lord and the professional head of the Royal Navy, walked into a meeting in the House of Commons in an admiral’s full uniform. Tension was rising over the Falkland Islands, and the room in Westminster was full of ministers and civil servants anxiously trying to formulate a response. The prime minister asked Leach whether Britain could potentially retake the islands, which are 8,000 miles from the UK. Leach responded that, should Argentina invade, Britain not only could but also should liberate them. Within a week a British task force set sail.

“I had an immediate and acute feeling: what the hell’s the point of having a navy if you’re not going to use it,” Leach remarked in an interview, a decade later.

The First Sea Lord’s prediction was correct — Britain did retake the Falklands. But the admiral did not just fight off the Argentine military. He also bested an opponent closer to home. In 1981, Defence Secretary John Nott had formulated plans for major cuts to the Royal Navy’s surface vessels and air power. In Nott’s view, the Navy should concentrate on anti-submarine duties. After the highly public actions in the South Atlantic — and the consequent boost to Thatcher’s image — Nott’s reductions were scaled back. Nott himself eventually resigned.

The Falklands War was not just fought on land, sea and in the air. It was also a battle in London, over budgets and resources. That is worth bearing in mind now, with the discussion of British involvement in an international peacekeeping force in Ukraine. In reality, the contribution that the British Army of 2025 could make is profoundly limited. The army now has around 75,000 regular troops — i.e. full-time — down from 102,000 in 2010 and 153,000 in 1990. Modern armies can only project a small proportion of their overall headcount into the field, given the logistics needed to sustain troops in theatre, training and other responsibilities at home, and the need for operational tours of a manageable length. Today Britain could probably cobble together a brigade-sized force that, with enablers like logisticians, signallers and intelligence, might amount to around 7,000 troops.

At the height of the post-9/11 wars, Britain ran two enduring deployments in parallel, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan, and both around 10,000 strong. Most of those troops came from the army. That was hard enough then, but today sustaining a single brigade beyond one initial six-month deployment would be far more complex. Equally, the equipment a British contingent could take now would be limited. In the late 2000s, as the army’s operations in Afghanistan ramped up, the organisation scaled back the programmes needed to maintain, upgrade and potentially replace its heavy vehicle fleet: the Challenger 2 tank, the AS-90 self-propelled artillery piece, and the Warrior armoured infantry fighting vehicle. Instead, resources went towards a new generation of vehicles designed to resist roadside bombs, the signature weapons of the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns.

Coming up for two decades on, almost the entire working British AS-90 fleet has been given to Ukraine. Most Challenger 2s are tied up in a much-delayed upgrade programme, and so are also unavailable, while Warrior is on its last legs. As an interim artillery capability, Britain bought 14 wheeled self-propelled Archer guns from Sweden; perhaps eight of these are deployable.

The likely British formation that could initially go to Ukraine, 7th Light Mechanised Brigade, is equipped with Foxhound and Jackal, Afghanistan vintage vehicles, which have little protection against conventional heavy weapons. “The problem with it though is it doesn’t have any heavy weapons,” Nicholas Drummond, a former British Army officer, says of 7th Brigade. “It doesn’t have sufficient armoured protection — armoured vehicles — and it doesn’t have any artillery.”

“The British Army is in the worst state it’s been since Dunkirk,” adds Francis Tusa, the editor of the Defence Analysis newsletter. “The only difference was, of course, in 1940 the war production had started two and a half years previously, and they were able to re-equip the army quite rapidly. It’s not the case here.”

The store cupboard, then, is pretty bare. However, the aspect that is often missed in the public debate is the difference in the way a potential operation is perceived internally, within a professional military, compared to externally. This boils down to a question of obligation versus opportunity. From an outsider’s perspective, sending British troops to Ukraine — particularly with very uncertain US support — is a fraught political call. Inside the British Army, however, for the past three decades at least, a chance to deploy into the field has almost always been perceived with great enthusiasm, up to the point where things go badly wrong.

The reason for this is that the central business of armies — fighting — does not occur all the time. You can spend a working lifetime in uniform without ever doing it for real. Since the British Army pulled out of Helmand in late 2014 — more than 10 years ago now — it has sent troops to Eastern Europe and deployed special forces, in small numbers, in combat in the Middle East. But the field army has not had a clear role at all. And 10 years is two entire generations of junior soldiers and officers. The “Spicier Subaltern Memes” Instagram account gives an insight into the culture that results. “When you asked the guy who called you a REMF to talk about his last operational tour,” reads one post, as a mechanical mouth spouts gibberish. A REMF is a “rear echelon mother fucker”, the traditional slight troops in combat throw at those in safe rear area jobs.

In this world, the prospect of a real operation becomes an exciting one. A big deployment does not just mean troops on the ground. It would mean resources, equipment, budgets, promotions, perhaps equally a sense of renewed mission. The Russian invasion of Ukraine gave a theoretical post-Afghanistan purpose to the army, but not the resources to really step up to that. Sending peacekeeping troops to Ukraine could open the resource taps, though it seems that the recent announcements from Downing Street do not follow much actual consultation with the army’s own planners. “If you do want 72,000 soldiers to be available at the drop of a hat,” Tusa says, “the operations budget is probably going to have to treble, if not quadruple.”

The senior army leadership of 2025 are seasoned and experienced individuals. Roly Walker, the current Chief of the General Staff, led a battlegroup in Afghanistan in 2009. But his cohort have spent their entire working lives in a shrinking institution. The prospect of purpose and action is therefore — for entirely understandable reasons — often an enticing one for them too. However, excitement can also become a blinding force.

After interviewing numerous retired senior officers for my book, I came to the conclusion that their job is largely a custodial one. The vast shrinking of the British military that has occurred since the Second World War means that the opportunity to actually command troops in the field at the scale that corresponds to rank is almost gone. In 2023, the British Army had nine lieutenant generals, a rank that historically would command a corps, maybe 30,000 troops. None of them will ever do that in an army that contains in total fewer than 100,000 soldiers.

In this context, the real emotional pull of senior command is different. You are given, for a few years, the helm of an institution to which you have devoted your entire adult life, and which for your whole career has been subject to salami-slicing cuts. As a result, the ultimate priority of those at the top of the army is to keep the army safe. That generally means keeping it safe from the Treasury.

The problem is that a can-do culture that thinks an operation is always better than no operation, and that it’s always best to crack on with the limited resources available, has got the army into serious trouble before. There’s a plausible case that the post-2006 Helmand campaign was fought — at least in part — to save the British infantry from manpower reductions. “It’s use them or lose them,” Richard Dannatt, the then head of the army, reportedly once told the British ambassador to Afghanistan in the summer of 2007. Helmand could provide a role for troops freed up by the end of operations in Northern Ireland and the drawdown in Iraq. There was a chance to echo the Falklands dividend that spared the Royal Navy in the Eighties. The irony is that the poor outcome of the Afghanistan operation led to the army losing much of the trust of its political masters, and the infantry were cut anyway.

The early gung-ho Helmand tours — reflected on the emerging platforms of social media, and subsequently officially endorsed by the medal and promotion systems — became highly aspirational for other units to match. But the campaign bogged down and IEDs restricted movement. The rapid march of the Taliban in 2021 eventually showed that the idea that the West had created a local military that could hold terrain was cant. But right up until the end of the British operations, there were individuals keen to deploy. They knew that in an organisation in which credibility — both individual and collective — is so important, a Helmand medal would assure them status.

It is not always better to do something than to do nothing.

There is also a potential ratchet here. The more the army is cut, the smaller the realistic contribution it can make is. Yet paradoxically, the smaller the army is, then potentially a big operational deployment becomes even more enticing — the magic ticket to resources and prestige. There will undoubtedly be ambitious officers in army headquarters at Marlborough Lines in Andover imagining how an enduring troop deployment in Ukraine could transform their own careers. But they might do well to also recall the other thing that Henry Leach (at least) claims to have told Margaret Thatcher in 1982. Yes, he said, Britain could retake the Falklands. But there was also a risk that they might lose the entire fleet trying to do so.

---

Simon Akam is a British journalist and author of The Changing of the Guard: The British Army Since 9/11. His coverage of the coronavirus pandemic was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.

simonakam