Following
the publication last week of the separate so-called integrated review [above] of foreign and defence policy, ministers have said big changes are necessary to create a
more agile military. As part of that review, the
government increased the cap on UK nuclear warheads from 180 to
260.
"The size of the Army is to be reduced to
72,500 soldiers by
2025 as part of a move towards drones and cyber warfare. The Army currently has
76,500 personnel and has
not been at its "
established strength" of
82,000 troops since the middle of the last decade.
A cut to the size of the Army - with a reduction of 10,000 - had been anticipated. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced a cut to the target for the number of fully-trained people in the Army, from 82,040 today to 72,500 in 2025. "Full-time trained strength" is the number of soldiers who have completed both their general, basic training and a second phase of specialised training for a specific role.
However, the Army is not currently meeting its target - there are actually 76,350 such soldiers in the Army, which is almost 6,000 short [of prior target]. So the Ministry of Defence is already well on the way to getting down to its new target.
The changes set out in the paper - titled
Defence in a Competitive Age - include
£3bn for new
vehicles, long-range rocket systems, drones, electronic warfare and
cyber capabilities. The government plans to increase the UK defence budget by
£24bn over the next four years. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace set out plans for new capabilities such as
electronic warfare and drones in a command paper in the Commons. He said "
increased deployability and technological advantage" meant greater effect could be delivered by fewer people. "These changes will
not require redundancies and we wish to build on the work already done on utilising our
reserves to make sure the whole force is
better integrated and
more productive."
Announcing the
major overhaul of the armed forces, Wallace said it marked a shift from "mass mobilisation to
information age speed", insisting they must be able to "seek out and understand" new threats to the country's security.
The plan sets out how forces will spend
more time overseas to
support allies and deter hostile powers, such as
Russia. Wallace said
previous reviews had been "
overambitious and underfunded leaving forces that were
overstretched and underequipped".
As part of the
military restructure, the
Royal Marines will be transformed into a
new Future Commando Force, taking on many of the traditional tasks of the
special forces - the
SAS and
SBS (Special Air Service and Special Boat Service).
The force will receive more than
£200m of direct investment over the next decade to carry out maritime security operations and to "pre-empt and deter sub-threshold activity, and counter state threats".
Other changes announced include:
Protector: UK's New American-made Drone > .
Boris Johnson spoke to NATO secretary general Jens Stoltenberg ahead of the announcement and gave reassurances that increased investment would take the UK's total defence spending to 2.2% of GDP - above the NATO target
"Throughout the last year and a half the issue of recruiting has become increasingly public, resulting in the Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Defence Staff having to defend the Army and explain the situation openly. In
April 2018 the National Audit Office reported that
regular personnel across the military were
down by 5.7% or 8200 people, with the
Army being
down by 4000 troops. Meg Hillier MP, chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee has branded this ‘unsustainable’.
However, it is not just recruitment that is the issue; the
British Army has a less well reported, but unsustainable problem with retention. After all, recruitment would be far less of an issue if soldiers were not leaving the Army at such a rapid rate. This speed of this
exodus means that currently the Army cannot recruit in anything like the numbers required to fill the gaps of those leaving, resulting in an
ever shrinking army and
serious pinch points developing in key areas such as
Engineering and
Intelligence. Retention is a huge problem and something must be done to address it.
Many regiments are seriously affected by this, The
Scots Guards, for example, has only 469 soldiers, a
deficit of 260 or
37%. This leaves them, as well as other units in a similar position, frankly
unable to deploy in their primary warfighting role
without ‘borrowing’ companies from elsewhere, affecting the combat effectiveness of the Army as a whole."
Mutual Support: Maximising the Army Reserve:
