Battered British army is at its lowest nadir since 1940

When news that the UK would be at the front of the queue to provide troops for a Ukraine peacekeeping force, possibly as many as 20,000, a contact from army headquarters at Andover messaged me: "Where's this 20,000-figure come from? Who's briefing this? We couldn't do this in a month of Sundays!"

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The next few days saw this “offer” drop to 10,000 to 12,000 troops for the as-yet-unspecified ground force – but the panic among army planners was much the same: there has been no requirement for such a deployment, the army is not set up for such numbers and has not been funded to do so.

And, worse, the army is at a nadir as regards its capability to provide robust, capable, war-fighting forces of the type that would be needed for Ukraine – equipment is either ancient, non-existent, yet-to-arrive; ammunition stocks would not last a week if push came to shove; and communications systems are old and flaky.

It might not go too far to suggest that the British army is at its lowest nadir since June 1940, after Operation Dynamo saw the British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk.

Now, the main battle tank (MBT) force is at a disastrous low. The Challenger 2 fleet (just over 400 were bought in the 1990s) has a notional strength of 213 tanks, after 14 were donated to Ukraine. However, these have been at the receiving end of “malign neglect” – maintenance regimes slashed in the 2000s and 2010s, spares not purchased, and supply chains disappearing as companies went bust. In 2023, it was reported that only around 160 of the fleet was in any fit state to be used on operations (after extensive, expensive work) – and the situation got worse.

The end result? The Royal Armoured Corps has not been able to deploy a realistic Challenger 2 regiment of 59 tanks for many years. Lack of available Challenger 2s has meant that the army’s ambition for MBTs has been at the 20 to 25 level, at the very best.