By Patrick Benham-Crosswell – 6 minute read
IN THE LATE Cold War the British Army of the Rhine had about 60,000 personnel. That delivered a NATO army group headquarters and the 1st British Corps, which comprised twelve fighting brigades, mostly at six hours readiness to go to war. The corps was commanded by a Lieutenant General, with five major generals and perhaps 20 brigadiers.
Today’s Army boasts three full generals, seven Lieutenant Generals, forty one Major Generals and 149 Brigadiers. The Army they command can, on a good day and with plenty of notice, field perhaps four brigades. They are far from fully equipped, would take weeks to get to the battlefield and have seldom trained together.
Quite how the Army employs so many people to so little battlefield effect is a mystery. On his appointment, the current Chief of the General Staff (“CGS” – the head of the Army), General Sir Roly Walker, stated that the Army needs to double its lethality by 2027 or risk being unable to deter aggressors. That’s masterful understatement.
The Army got into this mess through losing the ill-considered “Blair Wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, while concurrently suffering savage defence cuts. It convinced itself that expensive heavy armour was no longer necessary – proven wrong in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon, and that advanced technology would enable “any sensor to use any shooter”. It might, which might or might not be a good thing. It’s hardly the revolutionary new idea it was touted to be – originating in a US Army article in 1982. It centres on the concept of striking the enemy at very long range. Western armies seek to do that today with the same weaponry they had in the mid-1980s. (They’ve been upgraded a little, but most of the platforms are the same. Drones are better now, but that’s about it). Deep strike was hard in the Cold War and not really used in the first Gulf War.
In the techno fest of the 2010s cyberwarfare became a priority over raw combat power. The previous CGS, Sir Patrick Sanders, caused uproar in 2022 when he made the point that “you can’t cyber your way across a river”. That he had to say it at all speaks volumes of the Army’s long standing malaise.
The Army’s organisation is needlessly complex. In part the result of the MOD spending a decade shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic and in part due to a lack of a coherent vision of what the army is for. Today its one “warfighting” division, 3 (UK) Division, has never exercised as a complete formation. It comprises two armoured “Brigade Combat Teams” and a “Deep Recce Strike Combat Team”.
The Army often uses jargon or long names to disguise capability gaps; the armoured brigades are short on tanks and the “Deep Recce Strike Brigade” is short of both reconnaissance and strike. The whole division is woefully short of artillery, with perhaps a single regiment. (A cold war division had at least four artillery regiments.) The war in Ukraine is (again) demonstrating how vital ample artillery is.
The two other divisions are not designed to fight as divisions. Why have the headquarters? All it does is provide employment for a major general and associated staff officers. 1 (UK) Division comprises a light brigade combat team, a light mechanised brigade combat team, a security force assistance brigade and a reserve infantry brigade.
It also has the air assault brigade, comprising two battalions of paratroopers in Colchester and a battalion of Gurkhas in erm…Brunei. It has no helicopters; those being separately held in the Joint Aviation Command. (“Joint” means it includes RAF and Royal Navy assets too). That also has an Aviation Brigade Combat Team, although there has never been a brigade level battle with helicopters alone. Why does this organisation pretend to be a combat command?
6 (UK) division is even less sensible. It comprises a brigade of Rangers and 77th Psychological Operations Brigade. The Rangers will never fight together, so why make them a brigade? 77 Brigade is about 450 strong – normally a Lieutenant Colonel’s command. It works primarily on social media and, controversially, got itself involved in the Covid pandemic.
Deterring Russian aggression in Europe requires a credible armoured division. Note, it’s the Russians (and other potential aggressors) who must believe such a division can fight and win, not the MOD, not the House of Commons and certainly not the press and Joe Public. The Russian Army has learned about warfare, western tactics and equipment in Ukraine. They are unlikely to be fooled by the current Potemkin village.
Such a division would comprise three (ideally four) brigades, each of two tank regiments and two armoured infantry battalions, plus abundant artillery, engineers, attack helicopters and logistics. That would total some 370 tanks and a similar number of infantry fighting vehicles . The army will have just 148 Challenger 3s. It’s deleting its tracked and turreted Warriors and replacing them with some 600 (wheeled and turretless) Boxers, which might or might not be sound. If Mr Healey can’t find the money to buy 220 tanks, at £10M each or so, then we can’t field a credible armoured division.
We might field a reasonably powerful all arms division, with an armoured brigade, a couple of infantry brigades and a deep recce strike brigade supported by lots of long range artillery and attack helicopters. The army has plenty of attack helicopters and by 2030 will have lots of long range artillery. However it’s a novel formation. It may well work in simulations but it has never been tested in the field, let alone in combat.
There is still a tank problem. Wars seldom end quickly and soldiers must be rotated through combat. Broadly it takes three units to keep one deployed (one deployed, one working up for deployment and one recovering post deployment). A credible armoured brigade would have two tank regiments totalling 126 tanks, leaving just 22 tanks for those training up. It might work if the size of a tank regiment was reduced to 37, but that has adverse battlefield implications.
The Army will soon be awash with Ajax reconnaissance vehicles, getting four regiments’ worth. One per armoured division was the previous scale. The abundance of lightly armoured Ajax and the shortage of the heavily armoured Challenger tanks risks Ajax being treated as a tank substitute; a death sentence for the Ajax crews.
The Army is already awash with infantry. The credible armoured division or its deep strike equivalent require 18 battalions. The Army has 33. Three are parachute battalions, of whom one works in support of the SAS and two ride in helicopters. Four are Rangers, intended to train friendly forces in the developing world – a questionable concept, but let it pass.
The Army still has eight more battalions than it would need. (Note the Royal Marines have another six battalion equivalents, including an entire sea landing brigade.) The surplus infantry battalions are light role, meaning they fight on their feet without the mobility, protection and firepower of a Warrior or Boxer. Some of them move by unprotected lorries, others have a hodgepodge of protected vehicles purchased for Afghanistan, which Treasury rules preclude replacing. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have demonstrated (again) unprotected infantrymen die like flies to little military gain, just like they did on the Somme in 1916. Axing the excess, light role battalions would save some £20M per battalion per year, £160M per year in total.
The Army created light cavalry by putting armoured troops into (yet more) Afghanistan vehicles and telling them to invent a role for themselves. This they have done, proving that well trained soldiers with decent communications can deliver startingly valuable results. Hardly a revelation. Their vehicles are open topped, which means the crews are vulnerable to everything from a ten rupee jezail to the fallout from a nuclear weapon. What works on exercise is one thing, surviving on a modern battlefield is altogether different.
The Army’s addiction to light extends to artillery as well. Around half of its gun artillery regiments are equipped with the 105mm light gun. Introduced in the 1970s they are towed, vulnerable, short on range and their shells aren’t very lethal. They were superb in the Falkland’s, but that was 40 years ago.
While axing regiments is politically challenging, ill-equipped ones get annihilated. Throughout the 20 years of defence cuts the Army clung to the hope that when economic growth returned the army could recover and expand. It hasn’t worked out that way. Mr Healey must force the Army to get real.
That might help it address its personnel problems. It’s 10 per cent under target strength and last year it lost a net 2,000 trained personnel, or 3 per cent of its strength. That’s three infantry battalions. Why are they leaving? Pay, accommodation and lack of opportunity to soldier.
Under the “Whole Fleet Management” scheme the army keeps most of its vehicles in storage, releasing them to units when they go on exercise. It may be financially more efficient but it prevents soldiers being intimately familiar with their kit, which is part of how units keep functioning when at war. It should end immediately.
Sorting the Army’s problems out is not just going to involve blood on the carpets, it’s going to be flowing onto the streets as Mr Healey slaughters sacred cows. His party has a sufficient majority to weather the storm, the question is whether Mr Healey has the guts for the fight. My next piece considers the particular problems faced by the Royal Air Force. (click here)
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Following a decade as an armoured corps officer Patrick Benham-Crosswell spent several years as a defence analyst before migrating into commerce. He comments on defence matters for a number of publications and TV stations, writing a well-received book “The Dangerous World of Tommy Atkins: How Land Warfare Works” (updated 2022). His blog is https://viewsfrommycab.substack.com/
Photo of a Boxer Mechanised Infantry Vehicle of the British Army by unknown author – defenceimagery.mod.uk, OGL v1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=145894826 and a Challenger 3 by Ministry of Defence – https://www.defenceimagery.mod.uk/, OGL v1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128866842