Britain’s military disaster The country’s credibility is shot

Britain is heading for a military disaster in the next decade. That grim conclusion is difficult to avoid given the enormous gulf between the ambitions of British politicians and the threadbare, confused state of its armed forces. The year is barely a fortnight old, and already Keir Starmer’s government has pledged boots on the ground in Ukraine, assisted US forces in hunting and boarding an oil tanker heading for a Russian port, bombed an Islamic State arms depot in Syria and deployed 1,500 Royal Marines to Norway. The ambitions of British security strategy stretch from the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. Meanwhile, many of the country’s basic capabilities, and especially the British Army, have been hollowed out by years of deep spending cuts and bureaucratic incompetence. The Ministry of Defense ultimately judged it could muster just 7,500 troops to enforce a ceasefire in Ukraine, amid warnings of a £28 billion “black hole” in the defense budget.

Such is the disconnect between the rhetoric surrounding the British military and its true condition that it is tempting to simply dismiss the strategy documents and high-stakes summits as diplomatic bluster. But the disintegration of global order may well produce scenarios in which politicians and officials, prisoners to their own commitments, are sucked into a shooting war. At that moment, the danger of a tragic and ruinous fiasco will become very real. In his recent book The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975-2025, retired brigadier Ben Barry warns of this very outcome, albeit in the understated language of the military analyst. Unless “capability weaknesses are rectified”, he writes, “deploying British Army units and formations to fight carries increased risk of avoidable casualties and mission failure”.

British strategy is like a man riding multiple horses whose paths are gradually diverging, and some of which are biting each other. With US commitment to Nato in doubt, Britain finds itself with greater responsibility for countering the Russian threat in Europe. At the same time, to maintain its own American alliance — not least in the interests of moderating Donald Trump’s claims on the Danish territory of Greenland — the Government will feel compelled to serve as a junior partner in some of the US President’s ongoing military adventures, as it already did with the seizure of the oil tanker (the ship had evaded a US blockade of Venezuela). Since 2021, Britain has also pledged to follow the United States in supporting a coalition of Asian and Pacific states ranged against China, while remaining active in the Middle East, where British interests are bound up with issues of terrorism, migration and trade.

Since 2010, when the Coalition government took office against a background of financial crisis and unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the British response to these challenges has been shaped, above all, by spending cuts to the armed forces. Barry writes that by 2012, Britain’s deployable combat power was already down by a third compared to 2009. Aircraft carriers and jets were retired early, experienced officers were made redundant, and personnel were slashed across the navy, airforce and army. In 2014, former US Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated that Britain would soon lack “the ability to be a full partner as they have been in the past”.

Britain has since regained its military ambition, but not the budgets to match. It has signed up to develop nuclear submarines with Australia and the US, and a new fighter jet with Italy and Japan. It has played a prominent role in boosting Nato defenses in Eastern Europe and the Baltics — just short of 1,000 troops remain stationed in Estonia today — while focusing resources on the murky realm of “hybrid” activities such as intelligence, counter-terrorism and cyber warfare. It plans to build a new generation of nuclear warheads as well as an AI-enabled “digital backbone” to coordinate its forces.

All the while, conventional capabilities have continued to wither. Britain has drastically reduced its numbers of tanks, planes, ships, armored vehicles and airlift helicopters. Its missile defenses are inadequate to defend its own territory from attack. It has abandoned its major landing craft, meaning that an operation like that to retake the Falkland Islands in the Eighties would now be extremely difficult. It has donated a large quantity of weapons and equipment to Ukraine, without replenishing its own stocks. It lacks the engineering, medical and logistical abilities to support its soldiers in the field. Army troop numbers, which stood at 109,000 in 2010, are now down to 72,500, their lowest since the early 1800s.

The mood music accompanying this decline, and still audible in last year’s Strategic Defense Review, is the hope that new forms of fighting with hi-tech systems will allow British forces to do more with less in the way of traditional platforms and manpower. Drones, cyber and precision strikes will cripple the enemy before the soldiers and sailors arrive. This theory is highly suspect in its own right — because we do not yet know what the demands of modern warfare will be outside the specific contexts where it is happening now, because new technologies will be subject to failure and contestation, and because many of the lost capabilities just cannot be performed by newer ones. More to the point, military chiefs and politicians are now contemplating precisely the kind of mission that will require large numbers of soldiers equipped with a wide range of hardware, namely the deployment of a ground force to Ukraine, the largest country in Europe after Russia, where they will risk war with Russia itself. Should this actually come to pass, the army could, in extremis, deploy a division of 25,000-30,000 troops, which would soon seize up for lack of ammunition and other resources, while leaving Britain unable to fight elsewhere. For comparison, Russia currently has around 700,000 troops in Ukraine.

The frailty of British forces is now common knowledge, but plans to strengthen them are far from convincing. Starmer last year promised to raise defense spending from 2.3 to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, while pledging 3% at some point in the 2030s “if economic and fiscal conditions allow”. A further 1.5% will be earmarked for defense industries and protecting critical infrastructure. Even with such vague timelines, it is questionable whether any of Britain’s parties can persuade the electorate to make the sacrifices required to meet these targets. Public finances are already overstretched, the economy is suffering from years of underinvestment, and the bills for pensions, health and welfare continue to grow. The hope is that defense spending will act as an “engine for growth”, by rebuilding the manufacturing industries that disappeared along with the military reductions of recent years. There are signs that this is starting to happen, but greater certainty will be needed to bring companies into the supply chain, and contracts have so far been slow to appear.

Money is one thing, but Britain is also struggling to find people willing and able to serve in uniform. The Army and Navy have missed their recruitment targets every year since 2010. I recently had a sobering conversation with Mark Maguire, an anthropologist at Maynooth University who has been investigating the erosion of the people and cultures that once underpinned Britain’s military. The forces which have transformed British society in recent decades, from deindustrialization and immigration to falling birth rates, are also being felt in traditional recruiting grounds. “If you go to these military towns, there is no evidence of the people that used to populate the British Army,” Maguire said. “They’re just not there anymore.” He told me of army units which are now recruiting over the phone from Commonwealth countries, their traditional streams of working-class men having dried up.

Attitudes have changed too. Maguire describes focus groups with young people where “the negativity towards the armed forces was stunning, frankly”, the military now being associated with “bombing poor counties and murdering kids”. One young man signed up in secret to avoid the stigma. Recruitment is further hampered by high rates of drug use, obesity, general unfitness and physical and mental disability. In 2024, it was revealed that more than a fifth of regular British forces was not “fully deployable” or deployable at all due to health conditions.

Scarcely less troubling is the MoD’s abysmal record on planning and procurement. The current budget shortfall is anything but unusual. Since 2010, when the department revealed it was £36 billion in the red, defense spending has been marked by, in the words of parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, a “consistent pattern of planned overspend”, “serious organizational failings” and “a dangerous culture of optimism”. This has led to important programs being cut while others spiral into expensive failures. The new Ajax range of armored vehicles, for instance, was originally due for 2017, but has repeatedly been delayed due to design flaws causing illness and hearing problems in soldiers. Consequently, the army still lacks a replacement for its Scimitar and Scorpion vehicles, which entered service more than 50 years ago.

Considering the mismatch between Britain’s posture and its military resources, many will naturally conclude that the former should change. Why must Britain do so much? Surely, the bloody disaster of the Iraq war showed us where blind fealty to the United States leads, and under Trump, we are potentially allying ourselves to a rogue state. And why would we put British lives at risk more than 1,000 miles away in Ukraine, when other European states, with the exception of France, feel no need to? Britain is a declining, middle-ranking nation; what business does it have trying to operate in distant corners of the globe, as though it were still a great imperial power?

These questions are always worth asking, insofar as they pressure our leaders to set aside their vainglory and think carefully about which military endeavors are truly vital to Britain’s interests. It may well be, for instance, that the Navy’s Pacific ventures are not sustainable in a world where Britain has to help compensate for less American involvement on the European continent. But Europe’s humiliation at the hands of Trump, who has imposed one-sided tariffs on it and tried to exclude it from negotiations over its own future, has put paid to the notion that military weakness is a symptom of an enlightened society. Hard power is vital for being taken seriously by friends and enemies alike, especially as the global system fragments. Nothing else is as effective in discouraging aggressors or in reassuring allies.

This logic is especially compelling for Britain, and especially after Brexit. An island nation whose prosperity depends on connections with other parts of the world, Britain has, since the 18th century, pursued a policy of forward defense, recognizing that threats are best met at a distance from its own coastlines, and that its interests must sometimes be protected far from home. Britain needs good relations with other nations, and security cooperation is a very concrete form of assistance to offer. Being a loyal partner to the US can be a thankless and demeaning role, but America remains the world’s greatest military power and one that is crucial for British intelligence, nuclear assets and weapons programs. If we are to stand any chance of influencing Trump, it will be in situations where it can offer material assistance. Starmer has got very little right in his first 18 months as Prime Minister, but he has been wise to insist on not choosing between Europe and America for as long as possible.

Regardless, this is all moot if Britain cannot find the resources to recruit, train and equip its armed forces to adequate levels. And ultimately, those resources are social and cultural as well as material. After decades under the American security umbrella, western European nations like Britain are not only reluctant to make economic sacrifices in order to defend themselves; they have become totally estranged from the reality that societies sometimes have to fight in order to survive. The clearest evidence of this is that the British state makes no real effort to provide young people with a positive vision of the nation as something to which we owe loyalty and a sense of duty. Nor does it give any account of the role of the Armed Forces in protecting our way of life. The numbers of 18-27-year-olds who are proud to be British and who are willing to fight for the country has plummeted over the past 20 years.

But the problem goes deeper. Maguire argues that “every developed economy now has a problem with self-sacrifice”, meaning that they struggle to produce people who are “willing to run towards danger”. Few of us now have jobs which involve any degree of physical risk, and we are more likely to worry about safety than to celebrate physical bravery. We have little acquaintance with violence beyond films and news stories, while the harsh realities of death are carefully quarantined in medical buildings. Much of this is good, but it leaves us unable to fathom what warfare actually entails. Fighting, Maguire points out, is “pretty gruesome work”, a fact that is now routinely repressed even among those responsible for managing it. He calls the UK’s latest, tech-centered Strategic Defense Review “the most bloodless document I’ve ever read”.

In a recent interview, the historian Stephen Kotkin put Europe’s defense dilemma succinctly: “You need to build really large armies, navies and air forces, of killers — of soldiers who can kill, not build homes, or roads, or sing songs… there are many brave people in Europe, but they’re just not interested in war.” The question in coming years will be whether firmer foundations can be established before they are truly tested, or whether the country’s goals will be revised downwards to match its means. The third course, our current one, is that it will stumble into a fight it is not ready for.

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