- UK Minister for Defence Readiness blasts “journalists and armchair generals” as defence rows and budget pressures mount
- UK forces are described as severely weakened after decades of cuts and delays
- Senior Labour figures have accused the government of complacency on defence funding amid the long-delayed Defence Investment Plan
Rattled doesn’t even come close to it, listening to the words spoken by UK Minister for Defence Readiness Luke Pollard, who in an interview with BFBS exclaimed that he was “sick and tired of journalists and armchair generals talking down our military”.
It has been a bruising week for the UK Government and its defence plans, with reports from Sky News that military chiefs are being asked to come up with billions of pounds in savings this year and also suggestions that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) will pick the tab for the Coalition of the Willing initiative, rather than using Treasury reserve funds.
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The BBC this week also outlined the state of the UK military, charting the figures through decades and governments of all political positions.
Elsewhere, one of the authors of the UK’s own 2025 Strategic Defence Review, Lord Robertson, himself a former Labour Defence Minister and Secretary General of Nato, accused Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer of “corrosive complacency” regarding defence funding planning, due to be published in the long-delayed Defence Investment Plan.
Naval Technology has also called the UK Government and Prime Minister Starmer out on the wording of defence-related statements in the House of Commons, that fail to accurately portray that the failures of military planning and funding spread across decades and governments of both the left and the right.
It appears the message has been given that UK ministers should go on the offensive, blaming journalists for doing their job in highlighting the myriad failures, without favour or prejudice, that governments of all persuasions have overseen while in office.
“I’m sick and tired of journalists and armchair generals talk down our military. We know that we have inherited an Armed Forces hollowed out by the last government,” said Pollard in the BFBS interview.
The facts: UK military at lowest ebb
What is without question is that the UK military is at its lowest ebb for generations, brought low by two decades worth of defence cuts, both in budget and real terms, as inflationary pressures and ballooning budgets in other government departments bite.
The UK is now below the Nato average in terms of spending as a proportion of GDP, a figure that might improve, one might think, if removing the imbalance of US defence spending. No, not a bit of it, the UK still remains below the average, even when excluding the United States.
The British Army is unable to deploy a warfighting division, possibly even a force as small as a brigade, into a contested environment. Platforms like the Ajax, Challenger 3, and RCH 155 artillery are still years away from entering service or else having had IOC withdrawn due to persistent issues.
A new main battle rifle under Project Grayburn still years away from delivery, even as allies such as Canada and the US push ahead with their own small arms regeneration programmes. Like much of the British Army’s equipment, the SA80 rifle has its original many decades ago, with what remains in service increasingly obsolete.
The UK Labour Government gave away the service’s entire fleet of AS90 155mm artillery to Ukraine, exclusively revealed by Army Technology, leaving the British Army with a small detachment of the interim Archers.
For a Royal Navy, it is barely functioning as a viable blue water force these days, as fisheries patrol vessels and replenishment ships are tasked to act as available escorts to “intercept” Russian vessels transiting the English Channel.
The UK Defence Secretary recently made an attempt to paint the revelation that Russian submarines were operating over UK undersea infrastructure as a success because, to paraphrase, ‘the Russians knew that we knew they were there’.
And yet, the UK was unable to do anything about it, other than watch and see what the Russian submarines did over the course of a month-long mission over UK critical national infrastructure.
The UK was late in sending a Type 45 destroyer to the eastern Mediterranean as the Iran-Middle East crisis hit the region, acting only after drones fired from Iran’s proxy Hezbollah were able to penetrate the existing UK air defence network around RAF Akrotiri. Whitehall watched on as European allies swept to the aid of Cyprus, which in turn called into question the future of the UK Sovereign Base Areas on the island if London is unable to protect them.
Air defence systems and aircraft followed, but the movement was reactive, not proactive, when all the world could see the potential for a conflict as the US continued a build-up of forces. The same playbook Washington used earlier in the year against Venezuela.
The Type 45 destroyer belatedly sent to the region is now docked up for maintenance, only on station for a matter of days before it had to undergo repairs and so-called optimisation of its weapon systems.
In response to UK ministers being “sick and tired” of what journalists are writing and saying, and “armchair generals” stating, it should be said many of these, speaking as a defence editor of many-a-year, are subject matter experts in their field.
Indeed, in Lord Robertson’s case, he ascended to the highest political office in the UK MoD and led Nato. He is by no means an “armchair general”.
Closing your ears to the news, which is only ever designed to bring into the light what sits in shadow, will only serve to harm the military further still.
