- Reaction score
- 146
- Points
- 710
Sir Humphrey's Thin Pinstriped Line blog is back (could we deploy even a brigade?)--excerpts:
And note Canadian politicians' increasing reliance on our special forces.
Mark
Ottawa
How Do You Solve a Problem Like a Deployable Division?
...
What this quick canter through history shows us is two key issues -firstly the UK has sustained an Army of a size to combat external threats, and deployed them primarily overseas. As the threats have receded, so has the size of the Army. The second issue is that the Army remains determined to see the deployment of a division globally as the benchmark against which its performance is measured.
The manpower issue is the first challenge – the Army has not responded well to attempts to reduce its size, and has fought a strong rear-guard action to prevent further headcount reductions. The 2015 election was fought on a clear promise to not cut the size of the Regular Armed Forces, and to keep the Army at a strength of 82,000 people.
The problem for the planners is twofold. Firstly, there is no clear sense of what these 82,000 people are needed for. Secondly, there isn’t enough money to equip all of them to the right standard to be uniformly deployable...
The commitment in 2015 to not cutting the Army ahead of the SDSR led to the outcome where the Army was forced to keep soldiers it couldn’t afford to equip, and perhaps more importantly couldn’t easily identify a role for, in its structure for primarily political reasons. Speak candidly to most Army officers and many of them recognised that an Army of 82,000 makes sense if you have a clear role for it, and can afford to give everyone the same level of equipment.
Instead the outcome was a fudge, whereby the two-tier Army was formalised as a small high readiness force, with a much larger regeneration force with lower readiness and equipment held behind to do defence engagement roles. The various restructuring seemed aimed at trying to maximise some form of warfighting capability, while recognising that politically it would be impossible to carry out deep reform of the Army by scrapping ‘capbadges’ – nothing riles the Conservative backbenches more than knowing their local Battalion of ‘Loamshires’ is at risk.
How do we solve a problem like a Division?
The 2015 SDSR also committed the Army to be able to deploy a Division globally at 6 months’ notice as a ‘best effort’ commitment. This felt like a sop to the Generals and backbenchers who felt that this was the ‘great power’ standard to which the Army should be judged [Canadian reserve regiments?]...
This...leaves the Army in a bit of a quandary. It has focused on delivery of a global division as its benchmark at a time when the Politicians simply do not want to do this. It has focused on keeping 82,000 troops when it can’t afford to keep them all equipped, and to meet the political priority of protecting certain Regimental capbadges, it has been forced to sacrifice its far more valuable logistics, communications and other enablers that keep it as a genuinely effective force...
The Army today faces a structural and existential crisis. Too large to be properly funded, and politically barred from restructuring itself (although the recent 2017 manifesto pledge is merely to preserve the headline strength of the forces, not the individual services, so there is still hope). Denied a credible enemy that it can prepare to fight against, it has no clear rationale for why it needs to operate at a large scale when the political decision makers are increasingly set against boots on the ground for long term commitment...
https://thinpinstripedline.blogspot.ca/2017/08/how-do-you-solve-problem-like.html
And note Canadian politicians' increasing reliance on our special forces.
Mark
Ottawa