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In talking about the State of the British Army this week, I used as my benchmark two reference points in time. The first was 1984, when we were able to deploy 131,565 troops to reinforce NATO’s central front and successfully manoeuvre over 200 main battle tanks against German, US, Canadian and Dutch forces on Exercise Lionheart. The second was 2004, when the British Army could no longer afford to generate the agreed Force Elements at Readiness and declared itself broke!

These moments in history were the pinnacle of power and the financial turning point, after which we began to cancel armoured training exercises in Canada and cannibalise tanks as part of the flawed concept of Whole Fleet Management. The stark truth is that in 2004, we had 386 Challenger 2 tanks, with 80% availability. Now, we have 212 tanks, with less than 20% availability and the Challenger 3 replacement still many mile away from Full Operating Capability. But does this matter?

One of the most interesting aspects of the war in Ukraine is how the character of the war has changed over the three years. The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk has hurt Putin, but it is not the NATO tanks such as Challenger 2 that have brought him to the table, but the Unmanned Air Systems, which have devastated deep targets, harassed supply lines and wearied civilian populations.

This new type of warfare with layered ground and air sensors that trigger loitering drones, mines, missiles and mortars has been highly successful at reducing Ukrainian casualties (still too high), but it is not much good at re-capturing the Donbas. For that, the leaders will need more tanks because armour is still the only thing that can take and hold ground.

In the meantime, Putin and Trump are dangling carrots in front of each other and there is more hints of peace. If I was Putin, offering a pause would benefit my war aims while allowing me time to make plans for a Spring 2026 offensive. Which is why, our Government must ensure the British Army is capable of fighting and sustaining a Medium Scale Land Formation in high intensity warfare by completing the overdue purchase of Challenger 3, Ajax and Ares, MLRS and the new Mobile Fires Platform, as well as the new medium helicopter. Perhaps, more importantly they must also inspire a sense of duty in our young people today and reverse the desperate decline in the Armed Forces recruiting.

Ajax and Ares On Trial

The end of the war in the Pacific Theatre has dominated civilisation’s thinking for four-score years. However, when moralising about the use of nuclear weapons, disarmers must understand the essential fact. The Government of Japan would not have surrendered without the detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Allies had already tried aerial bombing of Tokyo and other cities with little effect on the Japanese culture of no-surrender. Although General Eisenhower suggested that Japan was ready to capitulate, the response to the Potsdam Declaration and the hard intelligence about the defensive preparations against an Allied invasion contradicts this opinion from afar. Perhaps more importantly, the three month battle for Okinawa, a tiny speck of an island between Taiwan and Japan, which resulted in nearly 250,000 military and civilian killed on both sides, supports the argument that fewer deaths resulted from the flight of Enola Gay on 6 August 1945.

Another factor, which is rarely considered, is that by using nuclear weapons to end World War II, the USA prevented a far more catastrophic use of them during the Cold War.

Local VJ Day Commemoration

After looking at the British Army’s main combat equipment in my talk next week, I will turn to the current state of the British Army’s formations. To explain what has changed, I will use the formations in the 1990s as my benchmark of what “good” looks like. At that time the Head of the Army stated that our deployable currency was a brigade and in 1995, we had more than 10 combat brigades ready to fight in Central Europe, or defend the United Kingdom.

Most of the regiments in these brigades were located close to each other and trained together regularly on test exercises and ranges. There was fierce competition, but also respect for each other’s traditions and history. At the brigade level, it was really important that the Commanding Officer of the 17th/21st Lancers knew what the Commanding Officer of the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars would do in battle situations. Training together allowed commanders to know whether their neighbour was bold or cautious; calm or anxious; astute or naïve; brutal or compassionate – and he could make a plan accordingly.

Looking at the current formations, not many of those deployable brigades still exist. More worryingly, of those that do, such as 4th Light Brigade, the geographical span of command make them impossible to command in a coherent way. For example, 4 Brigade has battalions in Brunei, Scotland, Northern Ireland, both sides of the Pennines, as well as Aldershot and Windsor. 7 Brigade, with its valiant history from the Western Desert, is now a shadow of it former self based at Cottesmore and burdened with so much administration that it has lost its ability to deploy as it once did.

The reasons for this devastating change are quite surprising. The seeds were laid by three key decisions taken in the Ministry of Defence twenty years ago. Only by understanding how these came about, is it possible to address the causes and reverse the decline.

Desert Rats in Tobruk 60 Years On – What Would They Think Now

When I give my talk about the state of the British Army in August, one of the important topics will be our battle equipment, including the new British tank, named Challenger 3.

I had the honour of operating all the different types of British tanks in service between 1970 and 2020. These included the lightly armoured Saladin, Scorpion and Scimitar (all of which were manufactured by Alvis) and the heavily protected Chieftain and Challenger Main Battle Tanks with their 120mm rifled-bore main armament. Perhaps more importantly, I held the appointment of Head of Defence Equipment Reliability, when our new British tanks were conceived, assessed and designed.

Designing a tank is like playing rock, paper, scissors. It is a balance between firepower, mobility and protection (or survivability). Users who desire perfection will only be frustrated because compromises have to be made; for example, if you increase the calibre of gun, or weight of armour, the tank may end up as a slow, sitting target. So, it is not surprising that the new British tank is closely related to the old British tank with the same hull but a new turret, active protection system and (smooth-bore) gun. For traditionalists, it is sad to see that we are buying a German tank and that the gunnery skills will be diminished, since we will no longer be able to accurately shoot High Explosive rounds beyond two miles.

Fighting Vehicle 4201 Mark 10 Chieftain with Improved Fire Control System

Fourteen years ago, I wrote the Army’s contribution to the Future Land Operating Concept (FLOC), so it was disappointing that at the recent RUSI Land Warfare Conference in London, there was a desperate discussion about the British Army’s decline during the past ten years.

It is quite easy to trace when we started to cannibalise major equipment, such as Challenger 2 battle-tanks, through flawed concepts such as Whole Fleet Management. It is much harder to lay out a programme of re-armament to address the weaknesses in manoeuvre warfare, let alone deliver this in a five-year time-line.

Next month, I have been invited to speak about the current state of the British Army. The problems of equipment will of course be part of this talk. However, the more important aspect will be the assessment of fighting spirit and the ability of our soldiers to defeat an enemy that attacks us with a full range of capabilities in the worst-case scenario.

From this analysis, I will conclude with what I consider to be the top five priorities for the British Army in the next five years.

Apart from hunting war criminals, the NATO peacekeeing force in Bosnia had to help the International Criminal Court build evidence for the prosecutions in the Hague. In 2003, we discovered the largest (at that time) mass grave in the country at Crni Vrh, which helped to convict a number of accused people. It is a desperate but essential job, exhuming the remains of people, who have been murdered and those involved deserve huge respect.

A less stressful, but arguably more important task to build stability in a post-conflict country is to help combatents transition to civilian life. Known as DDR, Demobilisation, Disarmament and Reintegration is the key task that never happened in Libya and its absence led to a second civil war and continuing crisis. Compared to this, Bosnia was a success; during the first six months of 2003, NATO harvested over one billion rounds of ammunition and over 30,000 weapons. Most of this ordnance was destroyed at the steel factory in Zenica, close to where I was based in 1995.

Perhaps the most dangerous peacekeeping task is de-mining. In Bosnia, many civilians were killed or maimed by unmarked mines even in the decade after the end of the conflict. In Libya, one of my soldiers was awarded a Queen’s Gallantry Medal for defusing Chinese mines after they killed an Estonian UN de-miner near Misruatah.

If the British Army is to send a peacekeeping force to Ukraine, they will need highly trained soldiers, capable of not just military patrolling, but also a huge variety of confidence-building tasks to rebuild a country suffering from the deep traumatic effects of modern war.

Doboj Weapons Harvest 2003

Weapon Destruction at Zenica Steel Works 2003

Thirty years ago today, I was in Bosnia commanding the northernmost British troops, closest to the beseiged town of Srebrenica, which had been a UN Safe Area for two years. I was in the middle of hosting a number of British and UN VIPs, including the Chief of the General Staff when we heard about the launch of the Bosnian Serb Army attack and the capture of the UN Observation Posts. Unfortunately, the Dutch Battalion and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina capitulated and allowed General Mladic to take over the UN compound and surrounding area.

I had been attacked in a similar way when I arrived in Maglaj two months earlier. The Bosnian Serb Army had used white phosphorus artillery shells, mortars, rockets and a T-55 tank over a period of five days. However, with the use of British light tanks, Canadian TOW missiles and a New Zealand tactical air control party, we repelled the assault and saved the lives of thousands of civilians.

In Srebrenica, the world did nothing to intervene and as a result, over 8,000 men and boys were murdered in the worst atrocity on European soil since World War II. What has always shocked me was the testimony of a Dutch sergeant-major in Potocari, who was quoted in Newsweek as saying that his battalion knew the British had defeated the Bosnian Serb Army using TOW missiles, so he couldn’t understand why the Dutch did not use their missiles and call upon air support to defend their Observation Posts.

In 2003, I was responsible for planning NATO’s operations against the indicted War Criminals in Bosnia, when Bill Clinton took part in the dedication of the Srebrenica Potocari memorial and cemetery on 11 July. Later on, I visited the area with an American military colleague, with three aims in mind. First, to pay homage to the victims away from the hubris of the anniversary. Second, to see for myself the mass graves which were being exhumed to provide forensic evidence for the International Criminal Court (difficult because there were still many unaccounted mines in the area). Third, to assess from a military point of view whether the UN troops that were on the ground could have prevented the genocide.

What struck me most about that day was the suffocating sense of haunting that accompanied me as I walked alone through the rusty UN compound. It is a profoundly moving location in a way that is similar to visiting Ground Zero and the Belsen concentration Camp. I do hope the international representatives who attend the 30th anniversary this week take the time to look behind the scenes and reflect on how the international community can reassert the rule of law in today’s angry world.

July 1995 in Northern Bosnia with the Chief of the General Staff

I know NATO very well. My first decade in the British Army was spent patrolling the Northern Flank in a light tank (Scorpion) and manoeuvering around the Central Front in a tank regiment (Chieftain and Challenger). The annual operational readiness tests were taken very seriously with all 60 tanks in the regiment ready to drive to their war positions at the drop of an Active Edge hat. The complex reinforcement in Germany exercises were impressive war-rehearsals with the one in 1984 involving 131,565 British personnel – more than twice the size of the current British Army.

That immense strength was a potent deterrent to Moscow and acted as a significant tripwire before the battlefield nuclear weapons of 50 Missile Regiment were to be used. If you wish to read more on this, The National army Museum has put together an excellent summary of the British Army and NATO at that time: https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/nato-and-british-army

Our capability of 1980s proved itself in the Falklands and Gulf Wars and was the foundation for NATO’s first military operation after the Cold War. I was in Bosnia for Operation Deliberate Force in 1995 and also for Operation Joint Forge seven years later. I also deployed to NATO operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya after 9/11 and had to develop numerous concepts for NATO headquarters, such as the Over The Horizon Force for the Balkans in 2003.

One has to remember that NATO is a political organisation as well as a military alliance. However, it is tragic for those of us who worked for a highly capable military organisation to see what it has become. Having visited Estonia recently and spoken to several Royal Engineers, Medics and Combat soldiers who have returned from their deployments, it is clear that we are being mis-informed about the deterrence capability on the ground. The British Army (along with most of the other NATO armies) has been completely hollowed-out, so Its no wonder, the Government has agreed this week to raise the Defence Budget by a small amount.

Battle Group Training In Canada In 1982

The impression gained from the US bombing of Iran was that Donald Trump had hoped that Israel would get the job done and wouldn’t need the B-2s with their Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs. He possibly also hoped that he would garner more international support; however, his legal and political advisors were unable to put together a compelling justification that would pass muster in an international court. Since the Iranian regime would not contemplate “surrender” and was gaining traction through their diplomacy, it was inevitable that Trump would press the button.

This feels similar to when US Special Forces killed Usama Bin Laden. It demonstrates the global reach and power of the US military, but does little to bring peace to the region. Trump probably hopes that his action will be the end of something, but the World has now become more, not less dangerous, with British non-combatant evacuation operations being planned in the Middle East and the Foreign Office issuing travel warnings for British passport holders.

Part two is just around the corner…

The ideas around Hybrid Warfare developed from the Israeli war with Hezbollah in 2006, when 120 IDF soldiers were killed in action over a 34 day period. The form this threat took was like a chameleon because the belligerents adapted their tactics, exploiting all modes of warfare simultaneously; including: conventional weapons, irregular tactics, criminality and advanced technology to destabilise an existing order.

The current war between Israel and Iran has quickly moved from a limited operation to a hybrid war of survival. It may be that Israel’s aims are achieved in the same way that Colonel Qaddafi was overthrown in 2011 (although this took much longer than NATO anticipated). However, Iran is nothing like Libya (the population comprises 90 million Shia compared with only 7 million Sunni in Libya) and there is no UN Security Council Resolution, or NATO agreement for Israel’s attacks.

The consequences of this war are difficult to predict, but from my experience of living on the other side of the Tigris to Sadr City for six months and clearing the mess after the frequent rocket and missile attacks, the Shia assassinated leaders will be hailed as martyrs and their replacements will look for asymmetric ways to attack their enemies, using the principle of “an eye for an eye”. I would expect revenge attacks to occur using some of the many hand-held, surface to air missiles that are unaccounted for around the world.

The two-week pause that Trump has announced will no doubt be filled with behind-the-scenes meetings, counting of friends and allies, modelling of options and evidence-building to justify US involvement. The big worry for Washington remains how to protect the oil and gas fields in the Gulf and the big concern for Britain is whether to support the USA, or not.

Is this their Suez moment?

A Coalition on the Tigris