The once mighty and proud British military has become a joke. From Kit Klarenberg at kitklarenberg.com:
In September 2024, Britain’s House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee published a little-noticed report, Ukraine: a wake-up call. Based on extensive consultations with military veterans and think tank apparatchiks, it amply exposed London’s “decline as a full-spectrum military power,” and how the country’s fantastical “commitment to retaining global influence” is based on “military aspirations” that are “unaffordable”. The appraisal also amply underlines how the country is woefully ill-equipped and unprepared for major conflicts overseas, let alone defending itself at home.
The report’s topline findings are blunt. The Ukraine proxy war “has exposed fundamental weaknesses” in the “military strength” of both Britain and NATO. In London particularly, the conflict “has raised serious questions regarding the preparedness of government, society and the defence industrial base to support conventional warfighting at scale.” Put simply, the British have no “coherent model” for augmenting their “small” armed forces, with “capabilities needed to sustain or deter warfighting”. In an all-out hot war, their military would last weeks at most:
“[Britain’s] armed forces lack the mass, resilience, and internal coherence necessary to maintain a deterrent effect and respond effectively to prolonged and high-intensity warfare. In a war with Russia, [we] would need to be capable of fielding second and subsequent fighting echelons at the same time as providing military support to the protection of critical national infrastructure within the UK…[Supporting] our NATO allies…with a land force [requires] troops and ‘teeth’ units, which the UK cannot currently field.”
Multiple witnesses consulted by the Committee bemoaned how many core areas of Britain’s defences had been “hollowed out” in recent years. This dangerous deficit is particularly pronounced in the Army itself. A November 2021 decision to make the military “more agile, more integrated, and more expeditionary” reduced London’s forces to just 72,500 in total, and despite the Ukraine proxy war, has not been reversed since. In January 2024, then-Defence Secretary Grant Shapps unbelievably asserted the British Army could offsets this hazardous shortfall with a “can-do” attitude.
