Crisis for The Crown? Armed Forces Worn Down After Years of Neglect, Overuse

Time Magazine has a great article about the ongoing crisis in Great Britain's military. This excerpt is a very short one of a much longer article that is worth the 20 minutes it'll take to plow through it.

Politicians continue to justify the adventures in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where British troop levels now stand at 9,500, in terms of national security. Britain, it is said, must take the fight to the bad guys to keep its citizens safe. Yet as the list of rickety states and terror havens has continued to expand, defense spending has failed to keep pace even as equipment costs have spiraled upward. The prospect of lean times as Britain reins in its budget deficit has pitched army, navy and air force commanders into open turf wars. Lower down the ranks, the endemic overstretch expresses itself in a stark statistic: according to Britain's Ministry of Defence, 1 in 5 troops is unfit for frontline duty, often as a result of injury or psychological damage. Officials from France and the U.K. have discussed burden-sharing, including the possibility of joint nuclear-submarine patrols, and a Feb. 3 Green Paper recommended Britain's cash-strapped military seek "greater cooperation" with the French. That didn't go down so well everywhere. "The pride of our forces has finally been surrendered with our leaders admitting we can no longer afford to go to war — without going cap in hand to our historic enemies," spluttered mass-market daily the Sun.

Britain's jingoistic press always likes to revisit the Battle of Waterloo, but such fulminations obscure the deeper significance of the Green Paper and the Strategic Defence Review it foreshadows. The SDR, expected this autumn, will be the first such exercise in 12 turbulent years. Any decisions Britain takes on the future role and capacity of its military — on exactly what the country expects of those bright-eyed Sandhurst cadets — will help determine the way Britain is perceived in the world. And that will determine the way Britons see themselves. The biggest challenge for this once great imperial power lies not on distant battlefields but at home, in reaching a long overdue accommodation between past glories and present realities, between lofty ambitions and diminished global sway. Can Britain, whose military has for many years been considered one of the best in the world, make the lea

By: Brant