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By Sean Rayment
Britain’s “hollowed out” armed forces are not ready for a war with Russia, defence chiefs have declared.
The UK’s armed forces need more soldiers, warships and combat aircraft if British troops are going to help Nato defeat President Vladimir Putin in a future war with Russia.
The disclosure comes after the Russian leader declared that he was prepared to go to war with Europe if peace talks in Ukraine failed.
Although Russia has lost more than one million troops and the country’s economy is about to go into recession, Putin said that he was ready to fight a war with European nations.
Many military experts believe that it could take up to five years for Russia to build up its armed forces before Putin could invade another country.
But figures obtained by National Security News reveal that the government must invest billions more in defence if the UK is to have a chance against a future conflict with Russia.
Last week the Royal Navy revealed that only 50 per cent of its fleet was ready for operations, Army troop numbers are at a historic low and the RAF has less than a third of the combat aircraft it possessed the last time Britain was preparing for a war with Russia.
All three of the UK’s fighting forces are short of troops and equipment and one former British Nato chief, Lord Robertson, has declared: “We are under-prepared, we’re under-insured, we’re under attack and we’re not safe.”
Earlier this week, the head of the Royal Navy warned the government to “step up” and fund defence or risk losing the UK’s superiority in the Atlantic to Russia.
Should that happen, General Sir Gwyn Jenkins said it would be the first time since the end of the Second World War that Britain’s warships and submarines were not the dominant force in their most vital sea lanes alongside their allies.
“We are holding on, but not by much,” he told a conference in London on Monday.
“There is no room for complacency. Our would-be opponents are investing billions. We have to step up, or we will lose that advantage.”
A former Rear Admiral has also claimed that the Royal Navy is “no longer capable” of running a nuclear submarine programme after “catastrophic” failures pushed it to the brink.
Rear Admiral Philip Mathias said the UK’s “silent service” was facing an “unprecedented” situation from which it was highly unlikely to recover without radical intervention.
The former director of nuclear policy at the Ministry of Defence said delays in building new attack boats had reached record levels, while the duration of patrols for crews in nuclear-armed submarines had been driven up from 70 days during the Cold War to more than 200 days now.
This had led to a “shockingly low availability” of submarines to “counter the Russian threat in the North Atlantic,” the retired submarine commander warned.
The admiral, who led the Trident value for money review in 2010, called for Britain to pull out of the multi-billion Aukus defence deal with America and Australia to build 12 new nuclear submarines.
“The UK is no longer capable of managing a nuclear submarine programme,” he said.
“Dreadnought is late, Astute class submarine delivery is getting later, there is a massive backlog in Astute class maintenance and refitting, which continues to get worse, and SSN‑Aukus is a submarine which is not going to deliver what the UK or Australia needs in terms of capability or timescale.
“Performance across all aspects of the programme continues to get worse in every dimension. This is an unprecedented situation in the nuclear submarine age. It is a catastrophic failure of succession and leadership planning.”
He added: “The public should be aware of the gross mismanagement of this hugely expensive and important programme. Our adversaries certainly will be, not least by counting our submarines alongside using satellite imagery and reading audit reports already in the public domain.”
Since the end of the Cold War, successive British governments have slashed defence spending and reduced the size of the armed forces in the belief that there would never be another major European war.
The UK currently spends £62.2bn – 2.3 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), the amount of income the UK gets from taxes. Defence spending will increase to 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2027 and will go up again to 5.5 per cent in 2035.
In 1989, the UK spent just over 4.0 per cent of its GDP on defence – equivalent to £121.2bn in today’s money.
As the Cold War came to an end in 1989, Britain’s armed forces were composed of more than 312,000 professional full-time troops – one of the largest in Nato.
The Royal Navy, which was the jewel in the crown of Britain’s defence, was composed of more than 200 ships and 65,000 personnel. The fleet had three aircraft carriers, around 50 destroyers and frigates, and 30 submarines.
Today, the Royal Navy is composed of 33,000 sailors and consists of 63 ships, which includes two aircraft carriers, eight frigates, six destroyers and a fleet of 10 nuclear-powered submarines.
In 1989, the British Army was composed of 150,000 soldiers, 2,650 tanks, 1,900 armoured personnel carriers and around 930 armoured reconnaissance vehicles, which were mainly stationed in Germany ready to halt a Russian advance into western Europe.
Today, the Army is composed of just 70,000 personnel and 288 Challenger 2 tanks, which will be reduced to 148 when the new Challenger 3 comes into service in 2030.
The Army will also have a further 623 Boxer armoured personnel carriers and 589 Ajax armoured reconnaissance vehicles by 2030.
In 1989, the RAF had 93,300 personnel and more than 1,500 aircraft, of which around 600 were combat jets.
Today, the RAF is composed of 30,300 personnel and 700 aircraft, which includes 37 F-35 stealth jets and 113 Typhoon multirole combat aircraft.
By comparison, Russia has sustained over one million casualties in the Ukraine war and has more amputees than the UK has soldiers in the Army. Over 13,000 tanks and armoured vehicles have been destroyed.
Russia has been losing up to 1,200 soldiers a day killed and wounded, which would mean that if the British Army lost troops at the same rate, it would become operationally ineffective within two months, according to military experts.
The nature of modern conflict is changing rapidly, experts have warned, and drones are now playing a major role in Ukraine.
In the last two years, Ukraine has launched around seven million drones against Russian forces.
The UK currently has an arsenal of around 4,000 drones, which if used at the same rate as the Ukrainian forces would last less than 24 hours.
Former Nato Chief and UK defence Secretary Lord Robertson warned in October that the armed forces were in urgent need of investment. He said: “Our armed forces have been hollowed out … we have shortages of ammunition, spare parts, logistics and medical capability. We are not ready. And if we are not ready, we cannot deter.”
Lord West, a Falklands War veteran and former head of the Royal Navy, said that the UK needed to spend more on defence.
He said: “There’s been too little spent on the defence of our nation and I think the Army is too small. I thought the Navy was too small with too few ships.
“I think there are probably too few soldiers. Our defence has been squeezed for so many years.”
Colonel Phil Ingram, a former Army intelligence officer, told The Sun on Sunday: “The British military has never been ready for a war with Russia and is in an appalling state at the moment – but it will never fight Russia alone. It would only be as part of a NATO operation, so the risk is negated. However, the British military are not pulling their weight in NATO, and conventional forces are rapidly falling behind enhancements other NATO partners are actually delivering.
“The nature of modern warfare means we would have to fight with what we have because there would be very little time to produce enough tanks, jets and people. What is clearly obvious is that we don’t have enough troops or equipment, so we must start investing now.”
An MoD spokesperson said: “We are in a new era of threat, which demands a new era for UK Defence, and our landmark Strategic Defence Review sets a vision to make Britain safer, secure at home and strong abroad.
“The SDR sets out how we’re moving to warfighting readiness, with investment in air and missile defence, munitions factories and an increase in the size of the Army.
“This is backed by the largest sustained increase in Defence spending since the end of the Cold War – hitting 2.6 per cent of GDP by 2027 – and an extra £5bn for defence this year alone, ensuring no return to the hollowed out and underfunded Armed Forces of the past.”
