He predicts almost correctly that within three or four years the British army will have an effective fighting strength of around 80,000 or below – which will make it on a par with the army after Wellington's veterans were disbanded after the battle of Waterloo brought the Napoleonic wars to a close in 1815. Altogether the armed forces will drop to around 140,000 within five years from now. At the close of the cold war just over 20 years ago, the British armed forces numbered some 332,000.
Expensive equipment programmes will have to be reduced or axed – as unit costs are rising faster than inflation and in real terms the budget will fall. This means, surely, that programmes like the two aircraft carriers due in 2016 and 2018 must be rethought – the study muses on building one for use with the fleet, and one to go straight into mothballs to be kept for a rainy day.
Of the 150 state-of-the-art Lockheed F-35 Joint Combat Aircraft, whose development costs still soar, Chalmers suggests that only 50 should be bought. Even so, the RAF is going to find it difficult to train and fund enough pilots.
This should lead to the question about whether we should be going about things the way we have been. The whole ethos of armed intervention, whether in Iraq, by ground operations in Afghanistan, and drones over Pakistan and Yemen must be interrogated and examined from top to bottom.
According to the official mantra, American and British troops are in Afghanistan to counter the threat of al-Qaida terrorists. Yet, as Olivier Roy has recently pointed out kamikaze extremists like Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Detroit Christmas aircraft bomber, were radicalised here in the UK, as were the transport bombers of July 7 2005. They only went to Yemen and Pakistan respectively for technical training.
By: Brant
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