The first duty of any government, so they say, is defence of the state and its national interests. In the UK this task is remitted to our armed forces, comprising (in order of seniority) the Royal Navy, the Army, and the Royal Air Force.
Together they are meant to defend our democracy from those who would do us harm both domestically and abroad, plus a myriad of other tasks which ensure we, the citizens, can sleep safe in our beds at night.
The question increasingly being asked, though, is whether they are up to the job.
A cursory glance at our armed services shows that all is not well in British defence circles. Take the Royal Navy, for example.
We learned recently that the Senior Service’s recruiting was down by a whopping 22% in 2023 and that two Duke class Type frigates, HMS Westminster and HMS Argyll, have had to be decommissioned so that there will be sufficient sailors to crew the new Type 26 frigates – which are not yet in service by the way.
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On top of this, the Defence Secretary Grant Shapps has reportedly asked the Royal Marines to justify their existence as a similar threat has been made to decommission the Albion class Landing Platform Docks (LPDs) HMS Bulwark and HMS Albion. Without these two vessels the Royal Marines are hard-pressed to carry out the sort of amphibious landings which are essentially a major part of their raison d’etre.
The army is not in any better shape either. It too has been facing a crisis in recruitment and retention for many years now as it has suffered successive cuts to its numbers over the past decades. Famously, it is now at its smallest size since Napoleonic times, and it cannot realistically put one fully equipped armoured brigade in the field these days without a supreme effort and much robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Our army is simply just not big enough, certainly in the light of renewed conventional armoured warfare in Europe, and has been ill-served by a succession of leaders who have been mesmerised by fighting small-scale operations in far away sandy places and taken their eyes of the ball elsewhere.
Lt Col Stuart Crawford is a defence analyst and former army officer. Sign up for his podcasts and newsletters at www.DefenceReview.uk
Lt Col Stuart Crawford’s latest book Tank Commander (Hardback) is available now
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