- Joined
- 27 September 2006
- Messages
- 6,622
- Reaction score
- 7,443
While the Royal Navy has always focussed on the numbers and quality of its ships and the Royal Air Force the cutting edge of its planes Britain's Army has had a much harder job defining its size and composition.
In peacetime politicians and public alike have opted for the smallest and cheapest army they can get away with. Two world wars and the Cold War saw the British Army enlarged and equipped to a level which probably bankrupted an increasingly challenged nation.
Since 1991 the British Army has been in combat roles continuously in various places and ways. Its focus in Germany on British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) replaced by a series of involvements in crises from the Balkans to the Gulf.
Compared with our allies the British Army has remained small and not always well equipped. Despite some shows of public sympathy for returning bodies in Wiltshire the RAF and Royal Navy remain better known and liked. The row over Ajax shows yet again that its equipment compares unfavourably with those of our friends.
As the Government is pushed grumpily into spending more to defend Britain from a snarling Kremlin the size and composition of Britain's army ought to become clearer. But given our place and location compared with Poland or Germany is not the judgement of 1930s British governments that rearmament must focus on the RAF and RN detering our opponents and defending our cities valid again? There is something of the Stanley Baldwin in the dull Kier Starmer.
Like the Spanish Civil War Ukraine has exposed the feebleness of Western governments and the pace of change in modern warfare. But Putin's Russia is not the juggernaut of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union it is a third world economy with nuclear weapons.
WIll Britain choose belatedly as it did in 1939 to send an army to fight on the Continent? or opt as it did in the 19th Century to leave it to others?
In peacetime politicians and public alike have opted for the smallest and cheapest army they can get away with. Two world wars and the Cold War saw the British Army enlarged and equipped to a level which probably bankrupted an increasingly challenged nation.
Since 1991 the British Army has been in combat roles continuously in various places and ways. Its focus in Germany on British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) replaced by a series of involvements in crises from the Balkans to the Gulf.
Compared with our allies the British Army has remained small and not always well equipped. Despite some shows of public sympathy for returning bodies in Wiltshire the RAF and Royal Navy remain better known and liked. The row over Ajax shows yet again that its equipment compares unfavourably with those of our friends.
As the Government is pushed grumpily into spending more to defend Britain from a snarling Kremlin the size and composition of Britain's army ought to become clearer. But given our place and location compared with Poland or Germany is not the judgement of 1930s British governments that rearmament must focus on the RAF and RN detering our opponents and defending our cities valid again? There is something of the Stanley Baldwin in the dull Kier Starmer.
Like the Spanish Civil War Ukraine has exposed the feebleness of Western governments and the pace of change in modern warfare. But Putin's Russia is not the juggernaut of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union it is a third world economy with nuclear weapons.
WIll Britain choose belatedly as it did in 1939 to send an army to fight on the Continent? or opt as it did in the 19th Century to leave it to others?
