Allies keep close watch on British plans to reshape armed forces

Out of exasperation rather than expediency, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the head of Britain’s armed forces, keeps in his office a copy of JSP 752, the UK military’s expenses manual that runs to 747 pages, about twice as long as Hong Kong’s tax code.

“He waves it at anyone who goes in . . . as an example of where we have got to . . . It’s nuts,” James Heappey, the armed forces minister, said. “We were texting each other kind of WTF over the weekend,” he told the Wavell Room podcast, citing the manual as an example of “profligate process” that needs to be expunged from Britain’s armed forces.

A reformist mood is gripping Britain’s military. Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine has revealed valuable lessons about modern warfighting. It has also exposed the thinness of Britain’s armed forces, which defence secretary Ben Wallace has described as “hollowed out”.

Earlier this year, the UK’s defence and foreign policy review identified Russia as the most acute threat but also flagged China and its increasingly aggressive stance towards Taiwan as an “epoch-defining challenge”.

Exactly how Britain plans to reshape its armed force — with the defence budget constrained as much as other areas of public spending — and meet these strategic challenges is being closely watched by its allies in Nato, where the UK had long been the second biggest military power, albeit some distance behind the US.

It is also the subject of the Ministry of Defence’s so-called defence command paper, to be published in June. The MoD has taken the unprecedented step of soliciting outsiders for ideas. But how the UK military will square the circle of being “everything, everywhere, all at once” after 30 years of defence cuts, remains an open question.

The UK’s annual defence budget of about £50bn is still the second largest in Nato but cuts to capabilities and personnel in recent decades has meant France is now on par as western Europe’s other big military power. Meanwhile, Germany has begun the slow process of revamping its military.

“What [our allies] see is a medium power . . .[trying] to maintain transformational forces across all domains of warfare,” Professor Michael Clarke of the Royal United Services Institute think-tank told parliament’s defence committee this week. “If we can do it, then others could do it. If we fail . . . they will draw their own conclusions.”

Military analysts, and current and former officials, said there are three broad areas the MoD needs to address.

Top of the list is the need to restock the weapon and ammunition supplies depleted by the £2.3bn of military aid that the UK sent to Ukraine last year as it plans to send at least the same again in 2023.

Second, and allied to that, is the current procurement system, which parliament’s public accounts committee called “broken” and could jeopardise the UK’s ability to meet its Nato commitments.

The third task is to define the role of the army, which has become the poor cousin of the three armed services following the end of counter-insurgency operations in the Middle East.

The navy is in charge of the UK’s submarine-based nuclear deterrent and is slowly rebuilding its carrier strike capability, although its fleet of escort vessels has fallen to below 20. The air force has also shrunk but is slowly taking delivery of new F-35 fighters and has begun a “future fighter jet” modernisation programme, known as Tempest.

But the army has suffered most from the years of spending cuts. It has shrunk to under 80,000 troops, its smallest since the early 1800s, and there are questions about its role.

“There is an urgent need to replenish the [munitions] cupboard, which will take time and be expensive,” Sir Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London, said. “But the main issue is what to do with the army. Unlike the navy and air force, it is conceptually unclear what its job is.”

For some, the army’s shrunken size is a cause for lament but Sir Richard Barrons, former head of the armed forces, calls such numbers “something of a red herring” and believes new technology will help fill some gaps.

“The UK has not now got the equipment for the existing numbers of troops to be able to deploy and fight against a major power. This is what ‘hollowing out’ means,” he said.

“Technological change also means the future army will require fewer people to achieve the mass it currently lacks: an autonomous tank, after all, will essentially be a military version of a Google driverless car,” Barrons added.

The advent of new technologies does not remove the need for western defence industries to mass produce the munitions needed to fight industrial wars of the kind Russia is waging against Ukraine.

“There is now a race to see who [Russia or the West] can restore [industrial defence] capability first. This race may well determine the outcome of the war,” Barrons said.

Yet some believe it does open the way for a new approach to procurement that uses off-the-shelf private sector technologies — instead of high-specification weapons systems that so often go over budget and suffer years of delay, such as the troubled Ajax armoured vehicle.

Former RAF Air Marshal Edward Stringer points out that the UK’s Watchkeeper surveillance drone programme cost £1.2bn over 17 years and delivered only about 40 aircraft. Yet there are UK companies who can make similar drones at a fraction of the cost.

“More importantly,” he told a recent Australian air force symposium, these companies “are adaptable, can rapidly learn from combat experience and . . . manufacture replacement prototypes in days.”

The MoD said the command paper would “prioritise our activities to ensure the UK remains ready to deter adversaries”, although analysts believe it was unlikely to tackle all the issues head on immediately.

“There is lots of doom and gloom about how the army is falling apart and how there is a need to move fast,” said Freedman. “But that is only true in some areas and in others we can probably be more patient.”

At the very least, the review will need to project a strong signal to potential adversaries, and assuage concerns among UK’s Nato partners about Britain’s ability to deploy an effective land force when the alliance meets for a key summit in Vilnius in July.

“It’s a key question facing middle-sized military powers,” said a European defence official. “What is the best kind of expeditionary land force to have so that it brings something useful to its allies in the field.”