Looking Forward to the Tithe Walk today over the disused Didcot, Newbury and Southampton railway line and along the beautiful chalk stream. The theme this year is heritage architecture and we will be looking at medieval structures, as well as Tudor thatched cottages and Georgian rendered properties. We will see two SSSIs and half a dozen listed properties, but sadly no time to view the historic monument.
Hopefully, the swans will be feeding in our part of the river, but just in case they are not, here is a picture of the Cob and Pen cruising their patch yesterday afternoon.
This has been the most important week of the year for Ukraine. After months of bluster and stagnation on the front line, it is now a very dangerous moment in the war for three reasons.
The air attack on the main government building in the capital and the assassination of Andriy Parubiy are symbolic of Russia’s intention to continue with their strategy of attrition. The support from China, India and North Korea, which comprise about 35% of the world’s population (2.8 Billion people), has made a mockery of the West’s attempts to squeeze Russia economically. The failure of the USA to back President Zelensky to the hilt has encouraged President Putin to continue with his current military campaign and threaten any country that sends peacekeepers to Ukraine.
Playing to his audience in Vladivostok, Putin has reminded us that for him nothing has changed since he began the war and that he is winning the diplomatic, economic, military and information battles. I have said many times that Russia is playing a long game in Ukraine and is happy that the interim objective of Ukraine not becoming a member of NATO is being achieved. The situation reminds me of Bismark’s famous quote about the Balkans not being worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian soldier – I do not see any of the current European or American leaders committing troops on the ground this year.
The key question now is whether Ukraine can manage through the winter without land reinforcements from NATO. Reading about why the Ukrainian flag has the same colours as Sweden and how they fought in previous wars encourages me to think they will not give up, but they do need a game-changer to rebalance the equation.NATO needs to step up to the plate.
Britain’s military friendship with Norway goes back a long way. In World War I the government was officially neutral, but it permitted Britain to control its merchant fleet, which suffered badly from German U-Boat attacks. Norway also supported our army fighting for Russia’s white government, after the Bolshevik government made peace with Germany. In World War II, we failed to prevent Hitler’s troops from taking over the country, but the King and many Norwegians were very much on the side of the Allies.
Although there has been some economic rivalry over North Sea resources (oil. gas and fish), it is good to see that the maritime alliance has blossomed recently. Today’s announcement of a deal to supply the Norwegian Navy with at least five new frigates is not only good for the bank balance, but it is also tremendous news for NATO.
My first task after joining my regiment was a three month NATO winter deployment to northern Norway, where I patrolled inside the Arctic circle close to Russia in our light tanks. I have never experienced worse conditions than on Hjerkin Ranges. The weather was especially cruel on the Royal Marines, who suffered multiple cold injuries with many of them have to be flown back to England for medical treatment. From my perspective, the lessons our wonderful Norwegian army liaison officer taught me about surviving in the cold were some of the most important in my life. If the worst happens and we end up in a fight with Russia, I know that we will be able to rely on the Norwegian Armed Forces and with this new contract, protect the vital waters of the North Atlantic.
The damage caused by Donald Trump’s meeting with Vladimir Putin on 15 August in terms of undermining the West’s support of Ukraine is yet to be fully understood by observers on both sides of the war. Trump has said that he will wait for two weeks before deciding what to do, but what is clear is that Putin has played the US President like a puppet throughout 2025 and shown him for what he is – out of his depth.
In contrast, the rallying of other NATO leaders behind President Zelensky, culminating in the Independence Day anniversary today has been dignified and highly effective. By continuing to provide diplomatic, economic, military and intelligence support, Ukraine still has a chance of coming out of this conflict as a free nation. Of these four levers of power, the most important, and the only one that really hurts Putin, is military capability that allows the Ukrainian Army to counter-attack into Russia.
As I have written before, I see no prospect of peace this year and am surprised by how many naïve politicians have been taken in by Putin’s stalling tactics. Of all the leaders who have spoken publicly about the situation, the one who makes the most sense is the former Prime Minister of Estonia, who is now the Vice President of that much derided organisation, the European Commission. Coming from a country on the front line with Russia (and one of the UK’s best allies in Afghanistan) her blunt analysis about land concessions and the vital need for a strong Ukrainian Army should be heeded by all those who support a free world.
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.
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.
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.
Rupert Wieloch 