British Army ‘is too small to cope’

Michael Evans

Des Browne, seven months into the job of Defence Secretary, is confident that the Army can still sustain the two major operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But for the first time he has voiced his fears about how much longer the Army can cope with the commitments without there being the risk of serious consequences.

Speaking to The Times, he said that he was fully aware of the concerns expressed by military commanders — notably the outspoken remarks of General Sir Richard Dannatt, the head of the Army, in his newspaper interview in October — that with so much focus on Iraq and Afghanistan, insufficient time and resources were being devoted to training.

Exercises have had to be cancelled and crucial battle-group formation training, involving the full panoply of tanks, artillery and armoured personnel carriers — carried out regularly during the Cold War — have been severely reduced.

General Dannatt said in his interview with the Daily Mail that his troops were stretched to capacity and that everyone was going to end up serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. He urged a withdrawal from Iraq “sometime soon”. He also referred in another interview to the Army “running hot”.

Mr Browne told The Times that he had given the service chiefs permission to speak out in public about their concerns. “I told them that constitutionally I was happy for them to speak in public, but I reminded them that we all work for the same management board and have the same responsibilities for policy,” he said.

Although General Dannatt was obliged to make a number of clarifications to draw his remarks closer to the accepted government line on Iraq, Mr Browne has clearly taken his warning to heart and now believes the Army might be too small to keep up such an operational tempo at the same time as trying to hone its basic skills.

Faced by even bigger troop deployments, President Bush indicated this week that the size of the US Army and US Marine Corps might have to increase to cope with the global commitments. The US Army, including reservists, stands at about 596,000 and the US Marine Corps at 185,000.

The Defence Secretary said that there were no plans at present to increase troop numbers. However, he revealed a likely change in one commitment. He said that the 600 troops still in Bosnia — 14 years after Britain first sent soldiers there — were just carrying out a policing role. “That’s inappropriate,” he said.

He indicated that many of these troops would be pulled out next year. Other positive moves, also next year, would be the planned drawdown of troops in Northern Ireland, reducing the garrison to 5,000, and the hoped-for cutback in numbers in Iraq. But the timing and the size of the cuts depended on security conditions, he said. If these cutbacks all went ahead, the extra troops available would “bring back a degree of flexibility”.

Despite the potential for a reduction in the numbers of troops assigned to overseas commitments, releasing them for other duties, Mr Browne said his main concern was to ensure that additional time was provided to train troops in a broader range of skills in between the operational tours.

Under the Government’s present strategy, the Armed Forces are supposed to be configured to take on two simultaneous medium-term overseas operations, although defence sources said planning was underway to keep troops in Afghanistan for at least ten years. This projected operational commitment will keep thousands of troops tied up in six-monthly rotations. More than 100,000 troops have already served in Iraq since 2003.

Under a series of manpower cuts, the Army has fallen from 112,000 when Labour came to power in 1997 to today’s trained-strength of 95,560.

Mr Browne pointed out, however: “Army numbers were cut from 156,500 in 1990 to 112,000 [by 1997] and these reductions took place during the term of the last Government.”