It appears that a general consensus has been achieved where people have accepted that the British Army is taking a ten year holiday from being able to do much beyond the deployment of Special Forces and small detachment form the planned "Ranger" Regiment. The MoD and Government will never publicly accept that, and will repeatedly go on about future plans and new capabilities even though many of these will not be mature until the latter part of teh 2030s if not later if funding is not provided. The greatest danger to the British Army though is if spending is concentrated on the new "Sexy" capabilities and more traditional and conventional capabilities are left to wither through lack of investment, possibly beyond the point where they can be reconstituted.
The Government and especially the Treasury must be made to see out conventional forces as being a crucial deterrent against aggression by another nation in the same way our nuclear Deterrent protects ourselves and our allies against a nuclear thereat form a foreign power. If we are not willing to maintain a conventional deterrent we might as well give up our nuclear deterrent as well. The latter cannot be used to prevent a conventional attack, no British Government would use id Nuclear weapons in response to a conventional attack even if they fail to say as much publicly.
Our Armed forces are already far too brittle to be able to effectively fight a peer level conflict of any length. We simple do not have the reserves of personnel, equipment and consumables to do so. All the Treasury's calculations seem to be based wholes on peace time usage and assignment. They do not seem to care that in wartime, especially at peer level, if one looks a the usage of consumables, the increase in their usage will increase massively, and that we will not be able to purchase replacements in any timely manner. We could "Borrow" kit from our allies, but many of these are in the same situation as ourselves.
As stated at the beginning, the Army is gambling that no major conflicts requiring its services will take place for at least a decade. It has procurement programmes in place that will fill many of its capability holes though it will still lose more mass. But all these programmes are on a knife edge with no room to manoeuvre with out causing the entire transformation to fall apart. By the early 2030s the following must be in place;
-Networking of all command units down to Platoon /Troop Level, for both personnel and vehicles.
-Challenger 3
-Boxer in all required variants including Recce and IFV.
-New 155mm Artillery Systems.
-Precision and cargo extended range rounds for 155mm.
-Modified M270 GMLRS.
-Very long and extended range precision rockets with unitary and munition warheads.
-MRV(P) phases 1 and 2.
-New ATGWs covering ranges form 2km to 20Km+
-Improved Air Defences for Army units combining missile and gun weapon systems as well as soft means to disable UAVs.
-Greatly increased and improved EW capability will improved mobility.
-Greater and more flexible ISTAR platforms.
-New Combat Engineering platforms to increase the mobility of Army units.
-Improvements to existing heavy Combat Engineering Platforms.
-New and improved Small Arms.
The list is actually longer but these are just the headlines as those needed for the British Army to be viable in any peer conflict post 2030. The Army may have been top of the pile for funding during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but this funding was mainly used in the letting of UOR related contract, often for kit our troops should already have had. Not having a viable Army in future will mean that we aill still be bale to show the flag using the Royal Navy and contribute to allied air operations, but any significant ground forces beyond small company sized battlegroups will be very hard to deploy let alone sustain. If our Government is happy for that to happen then so be it but they will be accountable if a ground war, that the experts said would not happen, does!
Sunday sermon done.
) and might as well just scrap their defence budgets entirely for all the defending they can do in the 21st century.
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