The British armed forces face a serious recruitment problem. The army itself, currently numbering around 70,000 personnel, is the smallest it’s been since the Napoleonic wars.
The Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review, published this week, is an attempt to remedy the UK’s military problems, and move Britain towards a position of ‘war-fighting readiness’. It even talks up making the army ‘10 times more lethal’… by 2035. As former British army chief Lord Dannatt scoffed, this was the equivalent of saying in 1938 to Adolf Hitler, ‘please don’t attack us until 1946 because we’re not going to be ready’.
