The Vanishing British Army
With the UK beating the war drums, why is the British Army disappearing?
UK defence minister Grant Shapps said last week that Britain must prepare its defences to act against emerging and united enemies in a “more dangerous world”.
This week brings the alarming news from a UK General that forced conscription would be necessary in the event of a war with Russia.
The UK government has stated it will not introduce conscription to fulfil General Patrick Saunders’ wish to create a “citizen army”, with our regular one being woefully small, under-equipped, and comprehensively disarmed following generous donations of irreplaceable weaponry to Ukraine.
Even the ideological bureaucracy that is NATO admits there is no threat from Russia in Europe. How does the bellicose rhetoric from the General and the Minister square with the reality of Britain’s vanishing army?
Reality these days is haunted by the music of the clown car, which caromes through every institution, its wheels and doors tumbling off on cue as another deranged attempt on our national life is announced as public policy.
Today I bring you the news of the self-beclowning of the British Army.
Its name evokes many proud memories, real and imagined. As with practically every institution in the West, from the law to the university, through medicine and science to government itself, the idea we have of the British Army is a vestige - a fond fable, completely contradicted by the parlous reality.
How did our once-hallowed institutions become ghosts of themselves?
These familiar spirits provide comfort, remind us of a saner time, but our emotional attachment to these phantasms is a dangerous enchantment. It charms us away from the realisation that they are dead, and their houses haunted by malevolent spirits masked by cherished memories.
They have been ruined by an ideology of fantasy.
In this three part series I will show how and why the British Army has shrunk in size, has beclowned itself with insane policies, and appears to recruit its intelligence analysts from Reddit’s unpaid moderators.
Part One: The Shrinking British Army
With all this heroic talk of war, and what a jolly good idea it would be to teach the bedraggled Russian army a lesson, it might help to consider the state of the British Army.
Official strength - if that is the word for an army that could not fill Wembley - was around 78 000 when Russia invaded. It now stands at under 75000. The latest news is that this will be reduced to 73000 by 2025.
The British Army has a recruitment, retention and replacement crisis it cannot recognise, with woke policies, terrible food, dilapidated housing and subpar kit just a few of the problems never mentioned by the ministry of defence - which has proposed to increase the ratio of female recruits to 30 percent by 2030.
Currently, one in six soldiers are women - 13000 of them. This leaves 60000+ men in the Army overall.
Not everyone in the Army fights. Those who do in the combat arms- armour, air corps, infantry and arguably the artillery1 - accounted for around 28 000 of the total in 2022. This has fallen further since.
In 2022 this left 50 000 troops who work in support roles - logistics, medics, engineers, staff and the like.
The parlous state of the army is ignored by warmongering ministers and leaders. Their obscene participation in the ritual of remembrance partners a curious forgetfulness when it comes to homeless veterans.
There is no memory either of the dreadful conditions faced by serving soldiers in a hostile ideological environment created by the same leaders who claim to revere them.
If you would like to read more about these enemies of God, of reason, of the truth and of peace whose business is death - and why you should recognise them as traitors - see here:
Combat Strength - Not In Numbers?
So what about the combat arms? Are we fielding the army we hear about in the global statistics, which places Britain at number 8 - or even at number 2 in the world?
Apparently ‘soft power’ and Britain’s ‘cyber strength’ make us more powerful globally than China.
Let’s imagine that fielding troops in combat has some relationship to military power.
The infantry relies on the Warrior Fighting Vehicle. It was designed in 1972, operational in 1984. Its cannon cannot be fired unless the vehicle is motionless and inside it is cramped to say the least.
In 25 years, despite billions spent, there has been no new armoured fighting vehicle.
Our main battle tank, the Challenger 2, is similarly outdated. An upgrade to some of our 227 157 tanks is expected by 2027 2030, which will deliver 148 modernised tanks. In reality we have about 40 operational tanks right now.
To recap, the British Army cannot field a single warfighting division.
What it can field would be beaten soundly by Russia - to whom we we still refer to as a ‘near peer’ enemy - because the British Army relies on dwindling numbers of outdated armour, has insufficient air defence and artillery, and can expect to be very heavily outgunned.
It also does not have very many soldiers.
If you think this is excessively pessimistic, wait till you hear what the British Government said.
The title of the House of Commons Defence Committee Report of March 2021 said it best:
Obsolescent and outgunned: the British Army’s armoured vehicle capability.
Here is a brief overview from a retired Brigadier consulted by the committee:
“The reduced UK division basically has half the anti-armour capability, only 30% of the tanks of a Russian tank division, two-thirds of the armoured infantry fighting vehicles, 20% of the anti-tank guided weapons and 15% of the self-propelled artillery.
It would be very difficult for that reduced division to stop a Russian tank division.
One Russian tank division would seriously overmatch the reduced Third Division.”
The Third Division is the entire combat strength of the British Army. It could not beat one Russian tank division. Where are the other two? They are history, like the notion of a serious British Army.
Perhaps if Ivan waits for three years we may be able to field one division less than half the size of one of his.
Global Firepower reckons the Russians have 12500 tanks. This is almost twice as many as second-placed North Korea.
The Kiev Independent said that of these, 3300 were operational and modern tanks, with the rest being mothballed Soviet era models. This was confirmed by CBS News in April 2023.
The same graph claims that the UK. placed 57 in the world, has 227 tanks.
Yet in March 2023 Army Technology reported that “the British Army has only 157 Challenger 2 tanks available for operations”.
This would leave the UK at number 72, one tank ahead of Angola. Yet it is now known the British Army has about 40 operational tanks.
This is equal to the tank stock of Albania at number 92 worldwide. Israel, which the new UK Defence Minister Grant Shapps proudly supports, has over 1300.
Shapps has recently gave a speech in which he exhorts Britain to “defend our homeland” against “threats” from Iran and Russia.
The Russian threat does not exist. The threat to “our homeland” is that to Israel, which threatens to drag the UK into a world war via an attack on Iran.
Shapps cites the threats emerging from the total absence of diplomacy resulting from the capture of foreign policy by ideologues such as himself.
In five years’ time we could be looking at multiple theatres involving Russia, China, Iran and North Korea
His government has “no plans” to halt arms sales to Israel, and Shapps spoke of a “100 year alliance” with a Ukrainian nation that is vanishing more rapidly than the British Army itself. These two facts, as Shapps explains this “alliance” , are not unrelated.
It sees us increasing our military support to [Ukraine by a further] £2.5bn – taking the total of UK military aid to more than £7bn.
With even more gifted directly from the UK’s equipment inventory.
This speech comes alongside news that the total strength of the British Army has fallen to under 76000.
The British Army is being disarmed, as its stocks and funding are sent into the black hole of Ukraine.
So did this mess begin with Grant Shapps?
No. He is merely walking the extra mile in the clown shoes of his predecessor.
WALLACE TO THE RESCUE
Novelty egg Ben Wallace, the former UK Minister of Defence is the man who made the Army go woke.
This fact will be addressed in part two.
His efforts towards this progressive goal led to his “refreshed” Defence Command Paper in July 2023, in which he simultaneously announced a move to address falling army recruitment with a reduction in army size.
He said
“We must adapt and modernise to meet the threats we face, taking in the lessons from President Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.”
What this meant was
trying to tempt men discharged from the regular army back into service,
more ammunition to donate to Ukraine,
and a further 6% reduction in army numbers
The “unprovoked” part, of course, was also complete cobblers.
NATO expansion, a proxy for the expansion of the US Empire, has been US policy since Bill Clinton2.
In the same year this policy was announced, 1997, George Kennan called this
“the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era.”
Why? Because it would provoke a war with Russia on its borders. Which is exactly what has happened over Ukraine.
This proxy war has become a parallel economy in itself.
Bureaucracies like NATO and the EU are joining partner governments in attempts to preserve this business model against a reality absent a credible threat of war with Russia in Europe, and with no serious attempt to create any army capable of fighting it.
This supposed security apparatus is not only securing instability and conflict, and corrupting governments at home and abroad, but has completely neglected its own armed forces - especially in Britain.
The Grand Strategy here is to make reckless statements in the press and rely on the US for hard power should any of them be taken seriously by the Russians.
It is a strategy in which Wallace and Shapps are deeply invested, which is why they issue calls for war, whilst destroying the British Army.
One dimension of this is to raise a reserve army on the cheap. Let’s see how that is going.
Regulars In Reserve
The Army Reserve is made up of volunteers with civilian jobs. Its trained strength was reported at about 24000 in October 2023.
The Army Reserve is part of what is called the “Future Reserve”, because its projected strength never arrives.
Reservists are cheaper than regular soldiers. For example, as a trainee infantry reservist I was once paid a monthly emolument of minus £4.72 .
Now that’s cheap.
All my field kit was stolen by my comrades in arms and likely hawked on Ebay.
One fellow recruit had to swipe kit from the dummy used to display the charms of the Army to bright eyed recruits. The dummy has declined to comment.
Through incentives like these, the British Army relies on its reserve to “surge” in wartime to a credible combat strength. What is more, it is losing regular soldiers at an alarming rate.
With this in mind, the Army had prepared for further cuts by appealing in February 2023 to former soldiers it had previously kicked out.
Yet men being kicked out cannot explain alone the dire recruitment and retention problem faced by the army.
To explain this decline, we must consider how and why the army became a hostile environment for sane white British men.
In part two: The Transitioning of the British Army - How Woke Destroyed its Warfighting Culture
Artillery relies on the use of shells. The combat strength of the Royal Artillery is limited by the fact that we have very few shells left and no means of making enough of them. According to a report in 2022 by RUSI, the industrial capacity does not exist, and even following UK Government initiatives to “ramp up” production “eightfold”, stocks will not reach pre-Ukraine war levels until 2025-6.
According to one report in RUSI of December 2022, the UK does not have the industrial base nor the secure supply chain to significantly increase production, and mere replenishment to former levels will take years.
By September 2023, the UK had donated 300 000 shells to Ukraine. This supply - equivalent to ten days of the highest rate of Russian fire - was sufficient to deplete UK stocks to a level which will not be replenished for two years.
By contrast, Russia was reported to have fired up to 30 000 shells per day, and has a reported manufacturing capacity of 2 million shells annually. Meanwhile, in the UK and according to the RUSI report:
“Successive governments have allowed the stockpile to dwindle, so it will take multiple successive governments to replenish it.”
“The small production output limits the ability of defence manufacturers to increase their output in a short space of time because the infrastructure does not exist, and nor do the staff or the materials.
In addition, the machine tools used to make complex guided weapons are generally configured for limited series production, as opposed to mass production. Adjusting them to allow for much greater quantities would require different manufacturing processes.
So, it does not follow that the existing base could be used to create an immediate increase in productivity.”
What is more, the supply chain relies on microchips from China and elsewhere, whose lead times are “measured in years, not in months”.
The UK has also deindustrialised to the point that it lacks the base for sustained warfare in the absence of total mobilisation to a war economy - which would not solve the reliance on component supply from “enemy” China.
NATO and the UK especially does not have the industrial base to fight and beat Russia in Europe. This reality is dawning on the bureaucrats now, as the limits of hard US power are also revealed in its backfired attempt to secure the Red Sea.
ME Sarotte (2019) ‘How to Enlarge NATO: The Debate inside the Clinton Administration, 1993–95’ International Security, 44/1, pg. 7–41; and D Brinkley, (1997) ‘Democratic expansion: the Clinton doctrine’, Foreign Policy, 106: 110–27
This is happening here in the good ol' US of A as well . Recruiting is falling far short in all services (except my Alma Mater , the Marines , despite the best efforts of myself and every other grunt to dissuade our young men) and the human capital is far short of what will be needed to fight an actual war in contrast to a drone operation to secure sex change operations . Much of what passes for the pointy end of the spear is from young men who sighed up during the Trump administration when morale was high , a decision many have come to regret . The rest is pure diversity hires , in for the gibs and the possible future payoff of murdering their erstwhile countrymen in furtherance of sodomy .
A lot of medical services in all three forces rely on reserves. The same labour pool that is in the NHS, but because of nationality and residence rules a smaller bit of the NHS than you'd think.
I'm sure lots of other support services are the same, placing great reliance on reserve specialists who might be better and cheaper but aren't the same for long term planning.
The British armed forces are adequate if their goal was actually defence policy, instead it's running around after America like a puppy. One day a new foreigb policy, not focussed on the USA and NATO, needs to be discussed because the Cold War is long gone and now we just have a British elite acting like the Suez crisis never happened and we can still scare Jonny Foreigner into obedience with a few gunships.