British army could be 'expended' within six months if faced with Ukraine-scale war, minister says
The British army could be "expended" within six months if faced with a war on a similar to scale to that in Ukraine, a defence minister has warned.
In a speech on Wednesday, Alistair Carns, a former Royal Marines colonel, stressed the need to “generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis”.
“In a war of scale – not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine – our army for example, on the current casualty rates, would be expended – as part of a broader multinational coalition – in six months to a year,” Mr Carns said at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) defence think tank in London.
He added: “That doesn’t mean we need a bigger army, but it does mean you need to generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis.”
Official figures show the army had 109,245 personnel on October 1, including 25,814 volunteer reservists.
Mr Carns, who is also the minister for veterans and people, said the UK needed to “catch up with Nato allies” to place greater emphasis on the reserves.
However, the head of the armed forces, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, cast doubt on the possibility.
Also speaking at Rusi, the Chief of the Defence Staff said the UK’s nuclear arsenal is “the one part of our inventory of which Russia is most aware and has more impact on (President Vladimir) Putin than anything else”.
Successive British governments had invested “substantial sums of money” in renewing nuclear submarines and warheads because of this, he added.
Sir Tony added that Britain needed to be “clear-eyed in our assessment” of the threats it faces.
“That includes recognising that there is only a remote chance of a significant direct attack or invasion by Russia on the United Kingdom, and that’s the same for the whole of Nato," he added.
Moscow “knows the response will be overwhelming”, he added, but warned the nuclear deterrent needed to be “kept strong and strengthened”.
Sir Tony added: “We are at the dawn of a third nuclear age, which is altogether more complex. It is defined by multiple and concurrent dilemmas, proliferating nuclear and disruptive technologies and the almost total absence of the security architectures that went before.”
The first nuclear age was the Cold War, while the second was “governed by disarmament efforts and counter proliferation”, the armed forces chief added.
He listed the “wild threats of tactical nuclear use” by Russia, China building up its weapon stocks, Iran’s failure to co-operate with a nuclear deal, and North Korea’s “erratic behaviour” among the threats faced by the West.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman said Defence Secretary John Healey had previously spoken about “the state of the armed forces that were inherited from the previous government”.
The spokesman said: “It’s why the Budget invested billions of pounds into defence, it’s why we’re undertaking a strategic defence review to ensure that we have the capabilities and the investment needed to defend this country.”
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