James Snell is a writer and researcher. He has written for Spectator World, Foreign Policy and other media.
British forces are not engaged in Ukraine. The country’s contribution to the arming and training of Ukrainian forces is also not the most significant. And British aid does not support Ukraine’s economy like that provided by its neighbours.
But despite all this, the United Kingdom occupies an outsized role in the propaganda of the war, on both the Ukrainian and Russian sides.
The Ukrainian Ministry of Defense recently made a video clip of appreciation for British aid. Meanwhile, on Russian state TV, hosts complain about British intransigence and intrigue, as they plot exactly how they would destroy the UK with nuclear warheads and speculate on whether Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will be sent to hell to sanction the Patriarch of Russian Orthodoxy.
In each case, it’s overkill. The UK is not Ukraine’s greatest ally, nor Russia’s deepest and most committed enemy. And amid all this wartime rhetoric – sometimes triumphantly emitted by the British government itself – the ability of the British military to do the job of defending the realm is generally assumed. But should it be?
The scale of Russia’s military failure in Ukraine was unexpected. Russian military scholars like Michael Kofman and Rob Lee have documented Russian military failures against Moscow’s own flawed assumptions about how wars are fought.
Rather than extol the chasm between these beliefs and reality, however, one obvious possibility should be considered: that the militaries of the rich world and the NATO sphere have made similar mistakes, or might.
Recent tests of Western military prowess are not comforting reading. The era of the War on Terror has not proven the invincibility of the Western military.
The United States has been defeated in a protracted way in strategic terms in Afghanistan, culminating in the humiliating collapse of August 2021. France – a NATO country that values strategic autonomy and has launched several military missions in the Sahel region of Africa over the past two decades – was thrown out of Mali by the junta there, and was replaced in much of the region by the United States. And African dictators are increasingly turning to more brutal and willing Russian mercenaries.
Britain lacks the military capacity even for action independent of France.
A recent book by Simon Akam depicts a British army deficient in culture, leadership and funding. It is an army chronically uncertain of what it is for. As Akam documents, Britain’s armed forces have been hammered in Iraq and Afghanistan, and faced more than a decade of cuts and degradations.
A force sometimes conceptualized as the “best small army in the world”, in practice serves simply as a subordinate complement to the American armed forces. For example, in the last major engagement British forces were in – fighting Islamic State – Britain at one point provided just six active Typhoon fighter jets, with three more in reserve.
In the UK, the military is a band-aid that politicians rely on to mask cracks in other state institutions. Soldiers plan and organize vaccination campaigns, drive heavy trucks when drivers are short, and frequently take on the role of squealing police forces under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.
Last week, Boris Johnson reluctantly agreed to increase defense spending by the end of the decade, which was originally set to fall to just 2% of GDP – the NATO minimum – by 2022. Johnson had resisted for some time, despite being told publicly by the Minister of Defense that the country’s armed forces exist on a “regime of smoke and mirrors, hollowed-out formations and fanciful economies of efficiency” .
Nominally, the total personnel employed by the British Armed Forces exceeds 190,000. But that’s a crude figure – and a gross overstatement. Britain’s army will effectively be down to 72,500 troops by 2025, which defense analyst Jonathon Kitson likens to a capacity crowd in a mid-sized football stadium – and one hopelessly deficient in artillery too.
According to third-party statistics, such as those from the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance 2022, Britain’s defense budget is still the third largest in the world. But, as numerous parliamentary inquiries into military procurement have shown, including one last December, it is riddled with waste and inefficient spending.
It’s a numbers game, and across Europe countries are increasing their defense spending. A total of 11 NATO members spent more than 2% of their GDP on defense in 2021, compared to just three in 2014.
Germany, for example, announced a major spending hike in February, with economically libertarian finance minister Christian Lindner chastising those who worried about another €100 billion in debt. It was, he said, an investment in German freedom.
Such things are not said in Britain.
In this sense, as Sweden and Finland are now officially invited to join NATO, it is worth examining not only the nature of Russian imperialism – which compelled them to do so – but also why they felt safe before.
Neutrality requires strong arms and large numbers. The Finnish Army calculates its reserve strength at around 900,000, and it has plans in place for the rapid arming and mobilization of a significant proportion of its adult population in the event of an invasion.
When Russian strategists lament the nature of the country’s attrition war in Ukraine, they also do so through the prism of numbers.
Igor Girkin, alias Strelkov – a retired GRU Internal Security Service officer and commander of Russian and allied forces in Donetsk and Lugansk since 2014 – regrets the Russian insistence that this war is a “special military operation”. Because this is not a “war”, Russia fought with an army in peacetime. Only mass mobilization, sobbed Girkin, could match the Ukrainians’ ability to put a million men on the ground.
A similar point was made by Mikhail Khodarenok, a former colonel who was allegedly “thug” on a state television talk show in May. Mobilization is important – it’s a numbers game.
But the British army is small and shrinking in size; its navy is expensive but not expansive. And defending the home islands, while conducting operations in the Indo-Pacific to cement the AUKUS alliance with Australia and the United States, could require more than two aircraft carriers, six destroyers, 12 frigates, nine submarines and Horatio Nelson’s preserved HMS Victory.
If Britain wanted to match the Russian and Ukrainian images of its military importance, it would dramatically increase its defense spending. He would also start planning less for the War on Terror conflicts – in which he was tactically defeated – and instead focus on the kind of war Ukraine and Russia are currently waging. A war in which artillery matters, numbers matter, and where large swathes of the adult population may have to serve
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