Rishi Sunak risks failing in his role as “wartime prime minister” unless he takes urgent action given the growing security threat posed by Vladimir Putin, it has been warned, with calls for a significant hike in spending.
A senior US general has privately told Defence Secretary Ben Wallace the British Army is no longer regarded as a top-level fighting force, defence sources have revealed.
They said this decline in war-fighting capability – following decades of cuts to save money – needed to be reversed faster than planned in the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
“Bottom line… it’s an entire service unable to protect the UK and our allies for a decade,” one of the defence sources said.
The sources said Rishi Sunak risked failing in his role as “wartime prime minister” unless he took urgent action given the growing security threat posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
This should include increasing the defence budget by at least £3bn a year; halting a plan to shrink the size of the army even further; and easing peacetime procurement rules that obstruct the UK’s ability to buy weapons and ammunition at speed.
“We have a wartime prime minister and a wartime chancellor,” one source said.
“History will look back at the choices they make in the coming weeks as fundamental to whether this government genuinely believes that its primary duty is the defence of the realm or whether that is just a slogan to be given lip service.”
Offering a sense of the scale of the challenge faced by the army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, it is understood that:
- The armed forces would run out of ammunition “in a few days” if called upon to fight
- The UK lacks the ability to defend its skies against the level of missile and drone strikes that Ukraine is enduring
- It would take five to 10 years for the army to be able to field a war-fighting division of some 25,000 to 30,000 troops backed by tanks, artillery and helicopters
- Some 30% of UK forces on high readiness are reservists who are unable to mobilise within NATO timelines – “so we’d turn up under strength”
- The majority of the army’s fleet of armoured vehicles, including tanks, was built between 30 to 60 years ago and full replacements are not due for years