The Numbers Game - Why Reducing the British Army May Be A Good Thing

 

Reports in the media this week suggest that the British Army faces a possible reduction in headcount, from a nominal target of 82,000, down by about 10,000 soldiers to closer to 70,000 troops. This will be delivered by natural wastage, and not redundancies and the savings used to fund enhanced equipment for the force.

The plans are already being attacked, with complaints focusing on the idea that this is too small to be credible as a force, and that in the eyes of the world, the UK will no longer have an effective army. Do these plans make sense, or do the numbers not add up?

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

The argument for a smaller army can be made relatively easily. Although during the Cold War the UK maintained a larger standing army, this was drawn initially a large pool of conscripts (until 196o), and then the maintenance of a large fixed force based in Germany primarily to deter Soviet attack.

This was a force fixed in place with a known main threat, static garrisons and no need to deploy on short term expeditionary operations on a regular basis. On paper the larger army seemed extremely capable – and certainly by the end of the 1980s, had the Soviets come, then it would have given them a very bloody nose.

But, this is also an Army that was not intended for, or equipped for, large scale deployments around the world. Outside of a small range of fixed missions, it was fairly unusual to see the Army deployed on difficult operations at the end of a long logistics tail.

The 1991 Gulf War showed the difficulties of supporting a deployed Division, which meant that even with an army of 150,000 people, it was hard to sustain a force outside of some very predictable areas of operation.

The intervening 30 years have seen the British Army refocus itself as an expeditionary force, dedicated to global operations, and able to send a force, at up to Divisional strength, abroad and fight in high intensity wars. This is an achievement very few armies are capable of – for all the talk of the numbers game, the reality is that most armies cannot really go far beyond their own borders in any meaningful way. The British Army is a notable exception to this.

As we look to the next 30 years, we can see the emergence of a wide range of technology and equipment that will fundamentally change how land forces operate. The future battlefield will be more complex, it will have less clearly defined boundaries between peace and war, and it will involve working across multiple domains at ever lower levels of the organisation.

There has been the growth of easily deployable ISTAR assets like miniature drones, or the rise in better communications, coupled with an increase in firepower most infantry units. This means the level of situational awareness, operational understanding and the ability to deliver an ever wider array of effects means even Company or Platoon sized forces will have an ability to influence matters in a way previously unimaginable.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the future Platoon Commander, or possible even Section Leader will have a situational awareness, understanding and appreciation of the operational environment and ability to influence it, that was previously the domain of battlegroup or even brigade level HQs. We have the real prospect of a future when information will be the lifeblood of the operation, and its dissemination and actionable use will help shape our ability to operate effectively.

This prize is potentially enormous, but it is also expensive. It is emerging at a time when the British Army also finds itself needing to spend a lot of money on re-equipping itself and faces difficult decisions on what to prioritise.

Unlike the Royal Navy and RAF, where crudely put, people are provided to operate the equipment, the Army has to buy equipment for people. The bigger the army, the more equipment is needed to keep everyone properly equipped. That’s fine if you want a relatively low tech army, aimed at peacekeeping / peace enforcement duties, where some light armoured vehicles and rifles will suffice.

If you want an army capable of operating in the so-called ‘Day One’ of operations, acting as an integrated part of a coalition operation (e.g. totally integrated with the US plan), then this calls for a very different force. This one has to be much better equipped, and able to operate at the highest levels of intensity, using advanced capabilities that are very expensive to buy.

You also need to ensure that your vehicles are properly protected from likely threats, and that the whole force is deployable and can be used to plug into a multi-national plan from the word go.   This in turn requires highly capable equipment that is expensive to buy, and to support.

The upshot is that there is a choice planners face here, and its between maintaining a larger army, albeit one that doesn’t have the most modern equipment and is less capable of fighting at the highest levels, or a smaller better equipped army. There isn’t a nice halfway house here where we can keep the big army and hope that this will be okay if we want to fight advanced operations – the US will, politely but firmly, make clear that our presence is not required, and it will get people killed if they try to fight beyond the level they are equipped for.

There is only a finite amount of money in the pot, and this needs to be spread widely across a lot of different priorities. The British Army urgently needs to take difficult decisions on tanks, APCs, self propelled artillery, next generation of drones, network enabled capability and so on. This is a long shopping list, and one that gets increasingly pricey the longer you defer ordering from it.

The argument for a smaller army then is that less front line troops means less equipment is needed, which in turn spreads the finite budget a bit further. You may be able to buy all the equipment needed, albeit in smaller numbers, and keep the Army as a relevant force to offer for high intensity conflict. Its not a great outcome, but its far better than a big army with out of date equipment.

The usual trite response at times like this is for people to go ‘just spend more on the Army’, to which the response is ‘great, wheres the money coming from?’ If you look at the NAO report issued in January this year, its clear the MOD has a real funding challenge – there is a gap of roughly £8bn between what it can afford and what it wants to buy.

There is also a problem that the RAF and Royal Navy don’t have much spare cash to draw on without cancelling most of their projects. With many already on contract, to draw down funds and reallocate them to the Army would effectively result in either massive delays (thus leading to cost increase), or possibly cancelling the project.

Would Ministers be prepared to countenance a course of action that frees cash up for the Army, to keep equipped at 82,000 people, if the cost meant the cancellation of major aerospace projects and gutting the UK aerospace industry? This sounds extreme, but this is the sort of scale of funding we’re talking about here – to find the cash means major cuts to other programmes – there is no magic pot of money here to buy the Army out of its crisis.

Ultimately it becomes a political conversation about the sort of things that we as a nation would like to do with the British Army. The arguments for both the RN and RAF as globally facing, high tech and highly deployable forces for warfighting seem well understood by Whitehall – both services offer flexibility and the means to escalate and de-escalate quickly, while being rapidly redeployable if required. This appeals to Governments keen on a global footprint without necessarily leaving a long term presence in any one specific area.

The Army by contrast feels less clearly understood – what is it that it can do that this gives to policy makers? An ability to take and hold ground is fine, but whose ground are we taking and why? Where is the nation we are likely to invade that requires this capability, and is this threat credible?

The murmurs coming out of Whitehall speak of planning for the wars of tomorrow – and if that’s the case, then the Army arguably has reason to feel concerned. Those wars are less likely to be ones of ground holding, or nation building, but instead far more discrete actions, often in areas like cyberspace or the information domain where plenty of other non-military parts of Government can deliver the desired effect far more quickly and effectively than the Army can.

It makes sense then for the Army to look to the next 10 years as a chance to reinvent itself as a smaller and more deployable organisation. The pitch of being ‘the ability to smash doors in side by side with the US Army’ is unsubtle, but perhaps captures eloquently that if it can do this, it can also do everything below that scale too – enabling it to lead in NATO and wider operations, and be ready as an ultimate contingency for ground combat.

A smaller and properly equipped organisation makes a lot of sense, although we need to be honest about what that means for its order of battle. For all the talk of ‘no redundancies, only natural wastage’, this still implies a lot of units will face disbandment over the next 10 years.

The reason for this is that if roughly 5-8,000 soldiers will leave without replacement then this leaves roughly 10% of currently established posts in the British Army gapped. Is the plan to retain these posts on strength and never replace them again (or move people around to fill posts that are urgent, leaving a constant gapped presence around), or will the order of battle need to change?

While this isn’t the place for a detailed line by line ORBAT assessment, it does seem reasonable to assume that as people leave, units will disband or be amalgamated to better respond to the new structures that will emerge. This will doubtless lead to difficult conversations about units, regimental amalgamations and the future of the Black Watch (again), because seemingly its impossible to have a grown up and mature debate about the credible future of a historically badly underrecruited unit that has reportedly been reliant on commonwealth recruits for years, without inflaming some toxic parts of the social media community.

 This is the challenge that lies ahead, no matter how this debate is carried out. There will be a long litany of people bemoaning the end of the British Army and decreeing that ‘we won’t be taken seriously in Washington/NATO because we’ve cut to an arbitrary number’ (ignoring the fact that many NATO nations have smaller armies, spend less on defence and that these changes are being done intentionally so that we do get taken seriously in Washington and NATO).

There will be debates on which unit should go, and no doubt a variety of pressure campaigns to save the ancient and historic regimental titles, some of which date back to the 1991 Options for Change, others even older like the 1968 changes, or those in the 1950s. We’ll doubtless hear how changing the name again of a unit that has been through multiple name and uniform changes over the centuries will mean we can no longer be taken credibly as a fighting power (because naturally all our opponents are going to roll over and surrender when they hear the Loamshires are coming).

This may sound slightly flippant, but it’s a good taste of what’s coming. The RN and RAF, and their supporters, will take the results of the Integrated Review in good faith and accept that there is a plan afoot. The worry is that the British Army will find itself bogged down in a minefield of angry former Regimental Colonels, grumpy backbenchers and pressure campaigns to ‘do something’ even though these changes are right for the security of the nation as a whole. There is perhaps a kernel of truth in the view that for all the good it does, the Regimental System is the British Army’s’ worst enemy at times.

The next few months will see the proposals of what the next 10 years is likely to be for the armed forces. There is the potential for some really exciting times ahead, with new equipment and ways of operating in the pipeline, and the chance to embrace some incredible new technology too. It has to be embraced, supported and made clear that this is the right path to take.

Our nations security will not be imperilled by the theoretical loss of a few thousand soldiers as they retire and the Army restructures. It will be imperilled though if in order to maintain delusions of grandeur based on size alone, we step away from tough decisions on equipment and force structures, and instead decide that overall mass matters more than capability.

This is the path that leads to our troops going in harms way without the right equipment to operate effectively, and due to their lack of credibility, being unable to operate alongside those who would support us – we owe it to our troops to support these changes as the right but difficult decision for the UK and our allies as a whole.