‘I don’t need any more troops and I don’t need any more money.’
It was a striking message from General Sir Roly Walker, chief of the General Staff (CGS), not much more than a month into his tenure as the professional head of the British Army. He was speaking in the margins of the Royal United Services Institute’s annual land warfare conference, but the wider context is much more important: not only is he new to the post, there is a new government in office, and the new Defence Secretary, John Healey, has announced a strategic defence review to conclude next year.
The consensus in the military world over recent years, resisted only by some of the most die-hard Ministry of Defence loyalists, is that the armed forces are underfunded, understrength and underprepared. I wrote in May that the government was ‘fooling not just the electorate but itself’, and that ‘Britain is currently overcommitted and under-resourced in terms of its defence and security policy, trying to do too much with too little’. This was not an unsubstantiated theory: I said it in the wake of reports from the House of Commons Defence Committee, the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office.
Walker is hardly lacking ambition. He told the world that the ‘converging geopolitical threats’ of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea mean that the army must be ready for war in three years, and that requires a reform programme to double its lethality by that date, and treble it by 2030. This is not a man downplaying threats or pretending that our defence is currently anything approaching adequate. On the contrary, CGS is explicit that we could be engaged in a shooting war with another global power before the next Olympic Games.
His answer, however, lies in technology. Walker pointed to the conflict in Ukraine, where a smaller defending force blunted the attack of a much larger army in part through the use of drones, satellite imaging and ‘smart software that is coming from British coders’. He wants an ‘internet of military things’ to allow British soldiers to confront threats ‘twice as far [away], decide in half the time, and deliver effects over double the distance with half as many munitions’. The size of an army is no longer a useful measure of its effectiveness, he argues.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. Like a later wife of Henry VIII, Walker lives in the shadow of his predecessor, General Sir Patrick Sanders, an intellectually brilliant rifles officer who had distinguished himself with his work on cyber security and operations in the ‘grey zone’. Sanders had been open about his anxiety at the reduction of the army to 73,500, its smallest since the Napoleonic wars, and earlier this year made a speech which hinted that some form of conscription might be necessary in the future. This was not cleared by ministers, and his tenure as CGS was brought to an end after two years, the shortest not to end in promotion since the Second World War.
Walker is a gifted officer who has served in the SAS and was decorated for his command of the Grenadier Guards in Afghanistan. He is right to say that technology is a critical part of our military future and that there are many lessons to be learned from the ongoing war in Ukraine. But Sanders, speaking at the same RUSI conference in 2022, made a telling point.
‘Though I bow to no one in my advocacy for the need for game changing digital transformation, to put it bluntly, you can’t cyber your way across a river. No single platform, capability, or tactic will unlock the problem.’
The NAO’s assessment of the Ministry of Defence Equipment Plan 2023-33 was unambiguous: there is a gap between the armed forces’ commitments and their resources of around £17 billion, perhaps more. Rishi Sunak had promised that defence spending would rise to 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product by 2030, a commitment Sir Keir Starmer has matched but only in principle, without a timescale. That increase, however, would not mean a spending bonanza, but would just about plug the affordability holes in the Ministry of Defence’s current projects and plans. It is effectively a status quo promise.
No doubt Walker is managing expectations, acknowledging that the Strategic Defence Review being led by Lord Robertson of Port Ellen will not result in substantial new spending. But the idea that the army has enough money is strikingly heterodox. If CGS really thinks he does not need more troops or more money, he can only have in mind a revolutionary approach to our overseas commitments and capabilities. The MoD currently bases its plans on the availability for deployment of 3rd (UK) Division, but the general consensus is that it is not deployable at divisional strength in any useful timescale. That is an issue of resources.
It is odd to announce that you are radically reviewing the capabilities of the British Army as a review of the whole armed forces is underway. Perhaps Walker has a conduit to Robertson and the other reviewers, General Sir Richard Barrons and Dr Fiona Hill, that tells him he is on the same page. Or perhaps he is merely freelancing, with or without the Defence Secretary’s imprimatur. When he asserts, however, that the existing budget and an army of 75,000 is not a problem, he is taking a stance which is either bravely counterintuitive or daringly Panglossian. His three-year timescale at least means we will all soon know.
Click here to subscribe to our daily briefing – the best pieces from CapX and across the web.
CapX depends on the generosity of its readers. If you value what we do, please consider making a donation.
