Britain’s defences uncovered like ‘swimmer not carrying trunks’ | Politics | News | EUROtoday

A damning evaluation of Britain’s fight readiness has been delivered by retired Air Marshal Edward Stringer, who warns the nation’s weak point has been left badly uncovered.

He warns: “Our national defences have been revealed to be a flimsy facade. The tide has gone out, and we can now see that the UK military was not wearing any trunks.”

In a brand new paper for the Policy Exchange suppose tank, he argues that frontline forces are persevering with to shrink and actual spending will increase are sometimes smaller than portrayed.

He claims that the British Army now has solely 14 howitzers and that, for a interval, the nation was solely capable of put a single assault submarine to sea.

Britain, he says, “relied on borrowing off the Americans while making cuts to vital capabilities” and the “optics of occasional tactical excellence obscured the increasingly hollow nature of our sovereign capacity”.

He warns: “But now the US is signalling strongly that it is putting ‘America First’ and the rest of NATO will have to look after its own defences.”

There is a “stark” hole between the “image of ourselves we have come to believe” and the “reality of the hard power we can project in practice”, he argues, including: “The first necessary step is to recognise that, and recognise that the methods that got us into this mess have to be discarded ruthlessly.”

Target dates for brand new capabilities within the 2030s are far too late, his paper argues. The suppose tank highlights how different international locations have pushed speedy enhancements since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Poland “already receiving the first 360 of the planned extra 980 tanks, and 685 self-propelled howitzers” and Finland capable of “put 285,000 troops in the field tonight”.

An MoD spokesperson stated: “This Government is delivering the largest sustained enhance in defence spending for the reason that finish of the Cold War – with a £5billion enhance this 12 months and hitting 2.6% of GDP by 2027, a stage not seen since 2010. This will see over £270billion invested into defence throughout this parliament, which means no return to the hollowed out and underfunded armed forces of the previous.

“The Government can be bolstering the UK’s readiness and resilience, signing over 1,000 main contracts for the reason that election, constructing no less than six state-of-the artwork munitions and energetics factories this parliament, and implementing at tempo the suggestions within the Strategic Defence Review.”