Britain’s diminished military sinks to alarming levels

ANALYSIS:

FARNCOMBE, England — No visitor to Britain can fail to notice the pride the nation lavishes on its military.

In London, booted and suited troops drill on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace. In Edinburgh, 1 p.m. is marked by the firing of a field gun on the walls of the castle.

London’s Trafalgar Square is dominated by its column to naval hero Lord Nelson, pubs around the city are named for the Duke of Wellington, the victor at Waterloo, and bookstores brim with military titles that document the heroism of battles such as Agincourt and Normandy.

It is not just bygone history.

In the global war on terror, London deployed more combat troops than any other U.S. ally and punched above its weight.

In 2001, British commandos seized Kabul’s strategic Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. In 2003, British troops spearheaded the invasion of southern Iraq.

However, neither proud sentiments nor past achievements can camouflage the atrophied state of the British armed forces.

Since 2024, amid the lethality of the Russia-Ukraine war, multiple revelations about reduced mass and lack of big-war capabilities have been damning.

Veterans Minister Alistair Carns startled Britons in 2024 with the revelation that analysts suspect the British army would likely be annihilated after six months of the kind of high-intensity combat on the battlefields of Ukraine.

Earlier that same year, lawmaker Luke Akehurst told a parliamentary committee that the only missile defense available to London is to moor one of the country’s handful of air defense destroyers in the Thames.

Britain’s last two tests of its Trident submarine-based nuclear missiles failed.

British forces are well trained, yet they are served by recruitment and procurement mechanisms that look unfit for purpose.

London’s military obviously cannot compete with Washington’s in scale, but even European peers France and Italy exceed Britain in virtually every metric.

The military website Global Firepower shows that France (population 68.3 million) fields 264,000 active service personnel, and Italy (population 60.9 million) has 165,000. Britain, despite having a larger population (68.4 million), fields just 141,333.

In naval strength, Italy deploys 17 surface escorts, France 16 and Britain 13. Italy and Britain each field two aircraft carriers. France has one but also boasts three helicopter carriers. For perspective, the U.S. has 11 aircraft carriers.

In terms of air forces, France flies 974 airframes, Italy 714 and Britain 625.

Despite these shortfalls, Britain has a higher 2026 defense budget, $88 billion, than either France — which, like Britain, is nuclear-armed — at $67 billion, or Italy at $37 billion.

Recruitment faces two issues, said Jonathon Riley, a retired general. One is the outsourcing of the function to a civilian business.

“The issue with recruiting is that a core capability has been let to an agency which has responsibility but no accountability for failure,” he said. “If recruiting targets are not met … the agency gets paid regardless.”

Another is the falling number of young, available men.

Soccer hooliganism is largely dead, and youth violence has declined for a decade, cutting the numbers of roughnecks who once manned infantry battalions.

“When the military owned the capability, you could get a recruit from street to training squad in about six weeks,” Mr. Riley said. “It now takes two years, by which time your [local] toughs have gone on drugs, or welfare, or found a civvy job.”

Policy decisions, including the 2025 Strategic Defense Review, which focused on unmanned systems and artificial intelligence, also impact numbers.

“There is a narrative that the technology is so much more capable that you need fewer people,” said Paul O’Neill, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. “In some cases, there is some truth to this, but it has undermined resilience, and, as a personal view, the U.K. numbers are too small.”

A $38 billion funding shortfall, as revealed earlier this year, will slow progress on the sixth-generation Tempest stealth fighter program that Britain is developing jointly with Italy and Japan.

Procurement mistakes and mishaps are in focus over Ajax, an armored fighting vehicle built by the British branch of General Dynamics.

The army has ordered almost 600, costing $8.6 billion, but the project is eight years behind schedule. Worse, soldiers testing Ajax in November suffered hearing and vomiting issues because of noise and vibration. Ajax is now on indefinite hold.

The senior civil servant responsible was fired in January. Even so, Defense Minister Luke Pollard said, “To say I am angry … is an understatement.”

“Ajax, I think, is symptomatic of wider problems and is not an isolated case, egregious though it is,” Mr. O’Neill said.

He noted “a tendency to overspecify requirements that drives up complexity and cost.”

Politics demands support for the domestic industry rather than buying off the shelf from overseas suppliers.

“The U.K. would struggle to do what Poland has with South Korea because of the pressure to support U.K. industry,” Mr. O’Neill said.

Poland, jolted into rearmament by Russia’s war on Ukraine, has invested more than $20 billion in hundreds of tanks, mobile howitzers, rocket artillery systems and warplanes from South Korea.

Middle-power South Korea is a manufacturing powerhouse. Because of the threat from North Korea, it fields a conscript military more than three times the size of Britain’s, enabling defense-industrial economies of scale.

In some specialized areas, British forces retain high reputations, but in major conflicts, niche assets are vulnerable to attrition.

“The U.K. has made long-standing strategic choices to retain certain high-end capabilities, such as carrier strike and special forces, while accepting smaller conventional force structures,” said Ruben Stewart, senior fellow for land warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “This reflects a desire to preserve influence, interoperability with allies, and expeditionary options rather than simply maximize force size.”

The Royal Navy’s two aircraft carriers deploy F-35B vertical takeoff and landing stealth fighters, but their numbers are tiny. Britain operates just 37, and they will not be equipped with long-range air-ground missiles before 2030.

British special forces provided the benchmark for many nations’ Tier 1 units, including America’s, and have conducted multiple daring missions in small wars. In big wars, an upscalable, resilient infantry arm matters, not commandos.

Another policy choice has been to retain the logistical backing to undertake expeditionary operations.

“Where the U.K. might deserve some credit is in the enablers (still small) that give the ability to use the force as a sovereign capability,” said Mr. O’Neill. “Many NATO members invest in the ‘shop window’ but rely on others (mainly U.S.) to provide critical enablers that allow the shop window force to operate.”

These multiple factors have had a deleterious effect on mass.

“The consequence is a force size that is relatively narrow in scale and more sensitive to budgetary and industrial pressures,” Mr. Stewart said. “This is not unique to the U.K., but it highlights the tension between maintaining a technological edge and sustaining sufficient depth and resilience.”