UK presses ahead with cuts to troop numbers

LONDON — The British Ministry of Defence has confirmed it will cut troop numbers from 82,000 to 73,000 by 2025 — despite opposition from parts of the armed forces and the Labour party.

The cuts, included in an updated defense command paper published Tuesday, will allow the government to save about £5 billion, and mean the army will employ 28 percent fewer troops by 2025 than the 102,000 it did in 2010, when the Conservatives took office. 

Unveiling the plan, Ben Wallace — who will step down from government in the next Cabinet reshuffle — argued that the Ukrainian war has shown a relatively small force can be highly effective if it is properly equipped and trained.

“As Russia has so effectively proven, there is no point having parade ground armies, mass ranks of men and machines if they cannot be integrated as a single full spectrum force, sustained in the field under all the demands of modern war fighting,” he told the House of Commons.

“That takes professional forces – well-equipped and rapidly adaptable, supported by critical enablers and vast stockpiles of munitions.”

But the decision has been criticized by Labour. Shadow Defense Secretary John Healey told POLITICO in March that the Conservative government risked putting “cost above all else.”

The MoD also confirmed that £2.5 billion, already committed in the U.K.’s autumn statement, will be spent over the next decade to replenish Britain’s depleted stockpiles of ammunition, with a further £400 million funding repairs to crumbling service accommodation.

A new Global Response Force will allow a British contingent covering land, sea and air forces to be deployed much faster, the MoD said. And in a bid to make a career in the military more attractive, the ministry will introduce a “zig-zagging” policy allowing members of the armed forces to take up jobs in the public sector and industry, and then return to their military career later. The forces are also making a push to recruit female and minority ethnic candidates, the government said.

“Over the decades ahead, the ships, tanks and planes in our strike groups, armored brigades and combat air squadrons will require ever fewer people but that will not necessarily mean our workforce will be smaller,” the command paper states. “We may have fewer people on the front line but a much larger community of specialists supporting them.”

The document, which aims to modernize the British armed forces in the wake of the Ukraine war, follows the publication in March of a government refresh of its foreign policy plan, which identified Russia as Britain’s “most pressing national security and foreign policy priority in the short-medium term.”