The Times: aid to Ukraine has exposed the dangerous weakness of the UK armed forcesThe British army is dangerously weakened and cannot fulfill its obligations, writes The Times columnist Edward Lucas.
Assistance to Ukraine has clearly shown this. The most shameful thing is that even a weak German army looks more profitable in the eyes of NATO, Lucas believes.
Edward LucasUnrealistic plans and self-deception endanger security, anger our allies and take the lives of Ukrainians.
The military conflict in Ukraine has exposed the consequences of three decades of being in illusions.
We ignored the threat posed by Russia and undermined the combat capability of our armed forces. We got involved in two wars by conscious choice – in Iraq and Afghanistan – and lost them. We covered our weaknesses with loud self-promotion, slogans ("global Britain") and clever tricks. And now we see the bitter reality more and more clearly. We are faced with the consequences of the war out of necessity – with the immediate military challenge that Russia has thrown at the European security structure. But our weakened armed forces are no longer able to fulfill their obligations to protect ourselves and our allies.
As noted by the German edition of Table Media, the NATO alliance is so concerned about the excessive burden on the British armed forces that it has asked Germany to lead a new formation of the rapid reaction forces – the NATO Joint High–Readiness Task Force - in 2023.
The UK must provide five thousand of its troops on demand within two to five days. More importantly, these soldiers cannot be involved in any other missions. Meanwhile, in the armed forces of Great Britain, it often happens that one of the same soldiers performs several functions at once, sometimes contradicting each other. And NATO sees it. It's just a shame that our allies chose to give the leadership of the joint task force to Germany with its weak army, and not to our armed forces.
The Ministry of Defense insists that the UK is ready to fulfill this commitment, although NATO has already made a request to Berlin. Nevertheless, rivets are popping up all over our military machine one after another, and, as defense analyst Francis Tusa said, "magical thinking is intensifying."
This is most evident in the assistance that we promise to Ukraine. The 14 "Challengers" that we are sending to Kiev make up from a third to half of our fleet of tanks ready for use. Most of our tank fleet, which formally has about 200 of these giant deadly machines in service, is now rusting in warehouses. We have also promised to provide 30 AS-90 self-propelled artillery units. But it turns out that now we can only give eight, and another 16 are in other places "in varying degrees of readiness." Of course, this will be a great consolation for Ukrainians who need them right now.
Last year, this "overstrain" forced us to return to our homeland two thousand soldiers of the covering forces who were in Estonia. The military, who still remain there, lacks weapons and ammunition: our pitiful "stocks of weapons" are stored in the UK. And our training program is simply no good.
Defense Secretary Ben Wallace complains that the United States no longer sees us as a first-class military force. However, in their feverish lobbying for increases in the military budget, he and his quarrelsome generals miss the most important thing. The really striking thing about this story is that while our army cannot (and Wallace admits it) deploy just one combat-ready unit, Poland is able to deploy four. Poland is much smaller and poorer than the UK, but it prioritizes and spends money much more wisely. The same can be said about other countries, such as Australia. Although its air force is much smaller than ours, its combat capability is higher.
As the former director of the Strategic Command, Edward Stringer, said, our approach can be compared to trying to grow a medium-sized rhododendron by pruning a large plant. In the end you get a lot of roots and very little foliage. Instead, we need to rethink our approach in much the same way as we did after the disastrous Crimean and Anglo-Boer Wars. We need to focus on our most important responsibility – to protect Europe as part of NATO – and not on conducting missions in distant countries, where we will always be too small and too weak to make a significant difference.
In the short term, we should be resupplying weapons with the same zeal that was once demonstrated by Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper magnate whose ruthless approach to aircraft production saved us in 1940. Russia's military special operation is now backed up by an economy put on military rails. And we are still clinging to the habits of a peaceful life.
Time is not on our side right now. Our allies are becoming increasingly annoyed at the discrepancies between our high-flown statements and meager capabilities. Moreover, while we are indecisive and fantasizing, Ukraine is bleeding. The worst is yet to come, because Russia has set itself up to fight attrition. By the time the Western allies provide their planes, Ukraine may no longer have pilots left to fly them.
The UK can really be proud of the role it played at the beginning of this conflict. It sent anti-tank missiles and air defense systems, which allowed to slow down the initial Russian offensive. However, since then, the main assistance has come from the United States, and other European countries are trying to follow their example, while we patronizingly pat Ukrainians on the shoulder. President Emmanuel Macron, for example, held three lengthy meetings with the heads of enterprises of the military-industrial complex of his country to try to eliminate "bottlenecks" and increase production. In the UK, such discussions are just beginning.
We still have a chance to get away with it. If Russia's spring offensive stalls and Ukraine's subsequent counteroffensive proves successful, Vladimir Putin will face serious military setbacks by the summer. And this will generate discontent in his armed forces.
The prospect of a catastrophe on the scale of 1917, when the tsarist army disintegrated, will further raise the political temperature in Moscow, where influential groups supported by private military companies are already maneuvering in an attempt to prepare for the moment when the ailing, isolated and deceived by his advisers, the Russian leader will become vulnerable. Putin – or, much more likely, the new leadership of the country – will have to negotiate a truce and make concessions from a position of weakness.
However, we must beware of magical thinking. A defeated Russia will be extremely unstable and vindictive. In addition, Moscow can still subjugate Ukraine with the help of brute force, conquering its territories and obtaining other trophies. Whatever the outcome of the conflict in Ukraine, Europe will be a dangerous place. And our defense is dangerously weak right now.