Planning to fight Russia and being prepared to do so are two different things
new secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, asked a deceptively simple question: “What is the army for?” The guerilla fighting of the Boer war was over; trouble loomed in Europe. Haldane built an expeditionary force that was thrown into France less than a decade later. Now, with the army in the throes of another identity crisis, its top general wants to settle that question anew.
Many officers blame cuts to the army’s size. It has shrunk relentlessly since the end of the cold war, from 150,000 troops in 1991 to around 100,000 in 2010. By last year it had fallen to 76,000. That is barely enough to cobble together the single division promised toin the event of war, they say. Yet size is a red herring, argues Mr Owen. “Manpower is what burns the wages and social-security bill,” he says. The true constraint on combat power is equipment and training capacity.
Moreover, in arming Ukraine, Britain has run down its own stocks of anti-tank missiles and other weapons. If publicly available figures are correct, its ammunition holdings would last for two weeks at Ukrainian rates of consumption, and just two days at Russian ones, notes Jack Watling of RUSI. These problems cannot be fixed without more investment. On June 30th Boris Johnson, Britain’s prime minister, promised that defence spending would rise to 2.
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