If the war in Ukraine isn’t over quite yet, the end certainly seems to be in sight. Donald Trump is determined to get a deal, and will clearly place pressure on a country reliant on US military aid into signing up to whatever he agrees to with his Russian counterpart. Kyiv is likely to accede to his terms.
Attention in Ukraine will then turn from the battlefield to rebuilding, and from this war to the next one. In other European capitals, this shift has already taken place. Sir Keir Starmer is musing about putting British troops “on the ground” to guarantee Ukraine’s security after the war is over, making sure that any deal is not “merely” a “temporary pause before Putin attacks again”.
To paraphrase another Russian leader, the response in Moscow is likely to run along the lines of “Keir Starmer? How many divisions has he?”. The answer to that is “not clear, but possibly none”. While Brigadier Andy Watson might insist that his brigade is totally ready “to conduct the whole range of military operations”, and that “the Ministry of Defence would not send us into theatre without having the correct force package”, the prospect of Britain projecting force at scale seems slim.
Our Armed Forces are “too small and inadequately set up for large, prolonged conflicts”, “hollowed out”, “below critical mass”, and possibly unable “to field a heavy war-fighting division within reasonable time”, lacking “equipment and the logistics required to support it”. It is, in other words, far from clear that we would be able to sustain a large deployment at the scale required to deflect a Russian attack.
This might come as a surprise to some. Adjusted for inflation, British defence spending in 2024 is a little higher than it was in 2003-2004, when we were sustaining a deployment tens of thousands strong in Iraq. But in 2003, even though spending had been cut in recent years, we still had the legacy of a decade of spending 2.6 to 4pc of GDP each year between 1984 and 1996.
That’s emphatically not the case today. From 2011-2012, defence spending dropped significantly in real terms, only recovering in 2021. If we’d kept spending flat, we’d have invested an additional £44bn over the last decade.
If the war in Ukraine isn’t over quite yet, the end certainly seems to be in sight. Donald Trump is determined to get a deal, and will clearly place pressure on a country reliant on US military aid into signing up to whatever he agrees to with his Russian counterpart. Kyiv is likely to accede to his terms.
Attention in Ukraine will then turn from the battlefield to rebuilding, and from this war to the next one. In other European capitals, this shift has already taken place. Sir Keir Starmer is musing about putting British troops “on the ground” to guarantee Ukraine’s security after the war is over, making sure that any deal is not “merely” a “temporary pause before Putin attacks again”.
To paraphrase another Russian leader, the response in Moscow is likely to run along the lines of “Keir Starmer? How many divisions has he?”. The answer to that is “not clear, but possibly none”. While Brigadier Andy Watson might insist that his brigade is totally ready “to conduct the whole range of military operations”, and that “the Ministry of Defence would not send us into theatre without having the correct force package”, the prospect of Britain projecting force at scale seems slim.
Our Armed Forces are “too small and inadequately set up for large, prolonged conflicts”, “hollowed out”, “below critical mass”, and possibly unable “to field a heavy war-fighting division within reasonable time”, lacking “equipment and the logistics required to support it”. It is, in other words, far from clear that we would be able to sustain a large deployment at the scale required to deflect a Russian attack.
This might come as a surprise to some. Adjusted for inflation, British defence spending in 2024 is a little higher than it was in 2003-2004, when we were sustaining a deployment tens of thousands strong in Iraq. But in 2003, even though spending had been cut in recent years, we still had the legacy of a decade of spending 2.6 to 4pc of GDP each year between 1984 and 1996.
That’s emphatically not the case today. From 2011-2012, defence spending dropped significantly in real terms, only recovering in 2021. If we’d kept spending flat, we’d have invested an additional £44bn over the last decade.