British Army would last ‘six months’ in war – official
In case of an actual conflict, the UK would run out of soldiers in six months to a year, the British Ministry of Defence official in charge of personnel, Alistair Carns, has said.
Carns is the under-secretary of State for veterans and people in the country’s defense ministry. He raised concerns about the size of the British Army during an event at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think tank on Wednesday.
“In a war of scale – not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine — our army, for example, on the current casualty rates would be expended — as part of a broader multinational coalition — in six months to a year,” Carns said.
He based this calculation on questionable Ukrainian claims that Russia was taking 1,500 casualties every day, which Moscow has described as closer to Kiev’s actual losses.
While this doesn’t mean the UK needs a bigger army, “it does mean you need to generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis,” he added. “The reserves are critical, absolutely central, to that process.”
Publicly available information has put the size of the British Army at 109,245 people as of October 1, which includes 25,814 volunteer reservists. Carns argued that the UK has a lot of catching up to do with other NATO members when it came to reserves.
His comments come just days after Britain’s Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff Rob Magowan insisted that the army would “fight tonight” if ordered.
In late October, however, British secretary of defense John Healey told Politico that the army, navy and the air force had been “hollowed out” and “underfunded” during the 14 years of Conservative Party rule. Labour had expected things to be bad, “but the state of the finances, the state of the forces, was far worse than we thought,” he added.
“The UK, in keeping with many other nations, has essentially become very skilled and ready to conduct military operations. What we have not been ready to do is to fight,” Healey said at the time.
Earlier this week, the US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty claimed, citing anonymous sources, that the UK and France were discussing deploying their troops to Ukraine.
As of July, the British Army had just over 73,000 active-duty soldiers, the lowest number since 1823. The UK’s overall population was around 20 million then, and has since grown to 67 million.
The British Army was established in 1707 and is part of the UK’s armed forces along with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (RAF). It is not called “royal” because a standing army is based on the parliamentary forces that fought a civil war against the crown in the 1600s.
