Other European nations are rearming at dramatic speed to counter the threat from Russia but the UK is warned its defences are not as strong as its rhetoric.
Britain can put on a show but there are fears for its combat firepower (Image: Getty)
A damning assessment of Britain’s combat readiness has been delivered by retired Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who warns the country’s weakness has been left badly exposed.
He warns: “Our national defences have been revealed to be a flimsy facade. The tide has gone out, and we can now see that the UK military was not wearing any trunks.”
In a new paper for the Policy Exchange think tank, he argues that frontline forces are continuing to shrink and real spending increases are often smaller than portrayed.
He claims that the British Army now has only 14 howitzers and that, for a period, the country was only able to put a single attack submarine to sea.
Britain, he says, “relied on borrowing off the Americans while making cuts to vital capabilities” and the “optics of occasional tactical excellence obscured the increasingly hollow nature of our sovereign capacity”.
He warns: “But now the US is signalling strongly that it is putting ‘America First’ and the rest of NATO will have to look after its own defences.”
There is a “stark” gap between the “image of ourselves we have come to believe” and the “reality of the hard power we can project in practice”, he argues, adding: “The first necessary step is to recognise that, and recognise that the methods that got us into this mess have to be discarded ruthlessly.”
Target dates for new capabilities in the 2030s are far too late, his paper argues. The think tank highlights how other countries have driven rapid improvements since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Poland “already receiving the first 360 of the planned extra 980 tanks, and 685 self-propelled howitzers” and Finland able to “put 285,000 troops in the field tonight”.
The conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of battlefield capabilities (Image: Getty)
An MoD spokesperson said: “This Government is delivering the largest sustained increase in defence spending since the end of the Cold War – with a £5billion boost this year and hitting 2.6% of GDP by 2027, a level not seen since 2010. This will see over £270billion invested into defence across this parliament, meaning no return to the hollowed out and underfunded armed forces of the past.
“The Government is also bolstering the UK’s readiness and resilience, signing over 1,000 major contracts since the election, building at least six state-of-the art munitions and energetics factories this parliament, and implementing at pace the recommendations in the Strategic Defence Review.”
