When the Berlin Wall fell, the British Army had 152,800 soldiers. Tony Blair’s government cut this to 110,000; David Cameron’s reduced it to 87,000. Plans to let that number fall to 82,000 were accelerated by the former defence secretary Ben Wallace. It’s generally accepted that by next year numbers will have dropped to 72,500. That’s a generous estimate: there are credible reports the army could soon number just 67,800.

This week the British Army is playing a leading part in Operation Steadfast Defender, the largest Nato exercise in peacetime history. Yet it is smaller than it has been at any point since the 1790s. More importantly, it’s far too small and too badly equipped to deliver everything we’re promised it can do. The saga of the navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, is telling. Last week it was due to lead a Nato exercise off the Norwegian coast, signalling our military’s power and strength. But its propeller shaft broke. We’re not alone in this: Germany’s army is beset with similar problems. A military exercise intended to showcase the West’s readiness for war may well end up demonstrating the opposite.

Operation Steadfast Defender is designed to test whether Nato can achieve what it was set up to do. ‘We are preparing for a conflict with Russia and terrorist groups,’ says Rob Bauer, a Dutch admiral who chairs the allied military chiefs. ‘If they attack us, we must be ready.’ To this end Britain is supplying 20,000 troops to the exercise, Poland 15,000, Germany 10,000 and the Netherlands 5,000. All 31 Nato members are taking part.

A Nato exercise intended to showcase the West’s readiness for war may end up demonstrating the opposite

Apart from anything else, it’s a test of whether troops can be moved in time. The results are far from certain. Ben Hodges, a former commander of US forces in Europe, argues there aren’t enough trains to move people fast enough in the event of an emergency. ‘Today there is the capacity to move one and a half armoured brigades,’ he said at a defence symposium. ‘All of our plans involve moving eight, nine or ten armoured brigades in Europe at the same time.’

If the Nato exercise serves to advertise weakness, the fact will not be lost on America. Donald Trump has a point that Europe has been freeloading under the umbrella of American defence. The US has sent more aid to Ukraine than all of Europe put together. If Trump makes it to the White House again and then withdraws America from Nato, leaving Britain to fend for itself with the rest of Europe, what then?

The UK prides itself in having a ready, war-tested and routinely used military. But the gap between pride and reality has been widening after years of under-spending and neglect. Things were bad enough in Iraq when British forces in Basra suffered what one American commander at the time called a defeat. But the situation, bad then, has become much worse.

The British Army operates on the assumption that it can deploy a 25,000-strong war-fighting force at division level. This is illusory. Even General Sir Patrick Sanders, its current head, has half-admitted it. ‘There will be capability gaps in our ability to get there,’ he said. General Sanders is no fan of today’s defence strategy, either. ‘[It is] perverse to be cutting the army in the face of a land war in Europe.’

Military vehicles are loaded onto a cargo ship in Marchwood, England as part of Operation Steadfast Defender, 13 February 2024 (Getty Images)

Then there’s the issues around defence procurement. The Ministry of Defence consistently mismanages billions of pounds’ worth of major programmes. It never learns its lessons and holds no individual decision-makers to account. Consider the army’s new Ajax family of armoured fighting vehicles. They are medium-weight tracked vehicles that provide reconnaissance, troop transport and armoured recovery among other capabilities. They are part of a joint UK/US project, called Tracer, that was signed in 1996.

In 2010, the first vehicles were expected to be in service by 2017; by 2020, Ajax had reached the trial stage but the trials had to be halted because of excessive noise and vibration. A year later, the MoD admitted it was ‘not possible to determine a realistic timescale’ for the programme. The latest guess is that Ajax will be in service between 2028 and 2029, more than 30 years after the requirement was identified. So, after almost 30 years and £3.2 billion, not a single vehicle is in service.

But is the leadership of the Armed Forces disheartened or self-critical? ‘This project really has turned the corner,’ said the defence procurement minister, James Cartlidge, last summer. David Williams, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Defence, also emphasised the positives. ‘The vehicle [Ajax] has successfully been through the user validation trials,’ he told the Commons defence committee last year. Andy Start, CEO of Defence Equipment and Support, went further. In procurement terms, he commented, ‘the broad picture is one of improvement’.

All of this has big implications. The army proposes to restructure itself next year around Challenger, Ajax and Boxer vehicles. That’s impossible as neither Ajax nor Boxer is in service. It has been necessary to extend the lifespan of worn-out old kits. The FV430 Bulldog armoured personnel carrier is due to stay in service until 2030, having arrived with the army in 1963.

The MoD’s unwillingness to admit responsibility means it is condemned to constantly repeat mistakes. In 2020, as the Armed Forces fed their most up-to-date thinking into the Integrated Review, it was widely reported there were plans to mothball the army’s fleet of main battle tanks. Such valuable assets, requiring a crew of four each, were thought by some to be old-fashioned, inflexible and vulnerable, especially to unmanned threats like drones.

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When Russia invaded Ukraine, the need for large-scale battles between armoured units was underlined. Ben Wallace tried to persuade the House of Commons that nothing had changed, and neither had there ever been any doctrinal or operational doubts. ‘No one was ever writing that we should get rid of tanks,’ he said. ‘Ukraine has shown that armour is important, and not just for the basic protection from hand grenades dropped by UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles].’

It would be defensible to have thought a few years ago that battle tanks were becoming obsolete. But it defies logic now. Grant Shapps, the Defence Secretary, is fully in the grip of Pollyanna syndrome. The army, he said, ‘is not projected to go down to 50,000. It’s actually, specifically, to 73,000 plus the reserves.’ This is the goal: the actual strength has been lower for years. But Shapps says numbers don’t matter. ‘It isn’t a question of how many men and women you have on the ground only, it’s about how lethal your Armed Forces are.’

Shapps likes to talk about how the UK has signed an agreement with Japan and Italy for a new combat aircraft; that the Royal Navy currently has larger ships than it has ever had in its history, that the MoD is testing a new directed-energy weapon called DragonFire which will use lasers to bring down aerial targets. All these things are true, but they neither address nor remedy the underlying challenges: that the Armed Forces are failing to recruit the numbers they require and that billions are being wasted on useless projects.

America is becoming more and more unnerved. The Pentagon has, in past years, been polite and tried not to criticise allies. This is changing: its generals share dismay on and off the record. The concern is that Britain can no longer be regarded as Tier One (the US, Russia, China and France) and is now closer to Germany or Italy: countries with a military, but not one that could achieve much if deployed. Even then, one US general told Wallace that ‘it’s barely Tier Two’. A Nato general from a European member state said the UK ‘can’t put a brigade in the field’ and that its kit is ‘falling apart’.

Britain’s allies do not make these observations for effect. The aim is to highlight the gap between rhetoric and reality and encourage Britain to close that gap of defence capability before it’s too late. If the UK’s capabilities are so badly stretched then this compromises all its allies. The MoD, and the government more widely, is scraping by on promises, reassurances, redefinitions and sleight of hand.

Defence is expensive. The headlong gallop of technological progress has made this problem more acute, but an unwillingness to face the truth can make it far worse. Breaking the delusion means picking missions wisely and matching them to a realistic assessment of the resources we are prepared to commit. That is the only way to construct a coherent policy framework. Failure to do so now will leave Britain unable to contribute when the world needs us most./>