Sir Humphrey refutes the call for a bigger army in the United Kingdom:
Humphrey has a very personal view that when people call for the military to be changed, it usually involves change to try and make it reflect the military that they served in. For decades people have been complaining bitterly that the UK military doesn’t do what we want it to do, and that only deep change can possibly solve the problem. Meanwhile the British Armed Forces carry on deploying and succeeding on their missions, despite this lack of a ‘wonder weapon ORBAT’. It is very easy to look at an order of battle and decide that somehow the UK lacks a real army – indeed anything can be proved with statistics, and it’s easy to say that because the UK plans a relatively small force with only limited numbers of equipment relative to other powers, it somehow lacks a real army. The problem with such a simplistic argument is that it ignores several issues.
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So, when we hear demands that the UK has to have a ‘real army’ the question must be ‘what does a real army look like’? We cling to a view that somehow because the British Army doesn’t possess thousands of tanks and legions of artillery batteries it somehow doesn’t have the same impact as other nations which possess much larger military forces. But to the authors mind there are two very different types of armed force out there – those which exist on paper, and those which have genuine capability to meet their missions. One only has to look across the world to see a plethora of nations who on paper possess large reserves of troops, weapons and equipment which theoretically place them at the top of whatever table one looks at. The problem is though that they are often poorly trained, funded and their equipment lacks support or maintenance – the ‘shiny toy in the shop window’ syndrome. When one reads accounts of large armies, it is often striking how they are in reality unable to deploy and effectively use more than a small fraction of their overall strength, or deploy at any distance. The author still shudders when he hears tales of various UN peacekeeping forces where nations with statistically large militaries deployed sizable contingents, only for them to arrive with next to no equipment, logistics or food, and then to have next to no effect on the job at hand. The other category of army is the one that is funded and equipped properly to do the job at hand. This is a much smaller category of nations, and the UK firmly falls into this category. It involves providing a force which may not be numerically large, but where the equipment – both first line and support, is of a good quality, and which works well together.
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The reality for the British Army is that it is a force which does not have a likely opponent, nor an existential threat to defeat. It is all very well calling for it to grow, but at a time of very constrained budgets, and ever more expensive equipment, the question is where is the money to support this? The challenge for the UK in the next SDSR and beyond is perhaps to better justify why it warrants a regular British Army of 82,000 people at all – an island nation with no existential threats, and any likely deployments to be small in nature, perhaps the question is whether we need an Army that large in the first place? Given the Royal Navy and RAF are better suited for the type of expeditionary warfare that is so in vogue at present, does the Army warrant being the size it does? To the author at least the answer is a qualified ‘yes’. The current force provides sufficient personnel to be able to support coalition operations (for we are highly unlikely to deploy an armoured force in isolation), and to meet all likely outputs required of it. But, it is not just about numbers – the UK could do what the French does and pay smaller salaries, invest in front line equipment to the detriment of support equipment and put a numerically larger force in the field which struggles to support itself. This would not be sensible – rather the current structure means that the UK can afford some very useful ‘enabling capabilities’ which mean it seen as being an ally of value to other nations. Investing in ISTAR, in logistics and in other key but ‘unsexy’ assets makes the UK well placed to be able to maintain a force which other nations want to work with – one of the so-called benefits of soft power, as nations seek UK troops for training and support.
In conclusion then, Humphrey remains confused as to what exactly the benefit would be of the UK changing course and trying to fund a vastly larger army. The money doesn’t exist for such a course of action, and the infrastructure to support such a force no longer exists (even in BAOR days the majority of the Army wasn’t based in the UK, so we’d need to build it from scratch), and the costs associated with recruiting and equipping a large force are enormous. Given the lack of existential threats, and the reality that there is no real desire for sustained overseas operations for at least the next few years, it is hard to escape the view that the UK not only possesses a reasonably sized army proportionate to its current strategic position, but that by keeping it relatively small, it retains the funds to keep it well trained and well equipped, and in turn enabling it to punch above its weight as a partner of choice for other nations.
