Future Soldier: How ambitious is Britain’s new Army plan?

The British Army’s latest plan to update its military forces – Future Soldier – is the most ambitious for a generation and more. It lays out the blueprint for a key part of British strategy and foreign policy for decades to come – if things go well, that is.           

But as Clausewitz knew, there should be a warning attached. Military plans tend not survive the first few moments of contact with the enemy. Most of the big UK strategic reviews, and defence white papers have been overtaken within a year or so. Most famously the John Nott white paper ‘The Way Ahead’ of 1981 was blown apart by the Falklands conflict a year later – and that forced a reversal in cuts and a re-orientation to a less continental and more oceanic defence and security policy.            

The Blair Strategic Defence Review , devised by the then defence secretary George Robertson, of 1998 was thrown into turmoil by the strategic shock of the 9/11 attacks. They ushered in two decades of on-off conflict in Iraq, and Afghanistan, compounded by the churn of communal wars across Syria and Libya, and the waging of self-styled ‘ambiguous warfare and conflict’ by Russia in Crimea and the Donbas region of Ukraine.           

The Future Soldier plan is a flexible approach with affordable forces to this familiar unstable global context. The British Army is to be capable of basing forward and adaptable units to trouble spots. To enable this a string of ‘hubs’ are being set up for training bases and depots of forward deployed equipment. They cover five continents, and a dozen countries from Germany, Poland and Estonia, to Cyprus, Oman, Kenya, Brunei, Belize, Canada, the Falklands, to say nothing of strategic islands such as Ascension and Diego Garcia. 

The Army is to be cut from its present standing strength of 82,500 to 73,000 – not a great sacrifice as such because it is roughly around 75,000 fully trained strength at present. But altogether some 10,000 posts are to be cut.The size of units is to be reduced – battalions and companies will be smaller.But there are several pluses to this. Training opportunities will be wider, and many of the new skills in cyber, sophisticated communications, managing the digitized battlefield will be highly adaptable for opportunities in civilian life.            

The Army is now noticeably better educated that it was, say 30 years ago when it acquitted itself so well in the highly equivocal peace support role in Bosnia, to say nothing of the slog of security in support of the police for more than 30 years in Operation Banner in Northern Ireland.            

Altogether some £46 billion is to be committed to the Army over the next ten years according to defence secretary Ben Wallace, who announced the new blueprint to parliament on Thursday. It is the Army part of the strategic plan announced in the Integrated Review , followed by the Defence Command white paper, this Spring. The money will go a long way, but the programmes will be costly – as defence inflation rates are generally much higher than those registered in the mainstream RPI calculation. The problems of the highly expensive armoured  reconnaissance, command and communications vehicle Ajax are still far from resolved. The programme has already cost over £3 billion. Ben Wallace said it will take till 2030 before the UK can field a fully digitized armoured division.           

The most eyecatching element of the new list of units and capabilities is the new Special Operations Brigade, with a 1200 strong Ranger Regiment at its core. The regiment has four battalions each with four ‘company’ Ranger combat teams. Each of these units  is about 60 strong – almost a third of the strength of a traditional British Infantry company.            

They are designed to work like the US Green Beret Ranger units – which came to fame in Vietnam. They work alongside allied units to mentor and train them in hot spots – and if necessary fight alongside them.            

This is where the Future Soldier project becomes the Back to the Future Soldier plan. Talking to one of the first fully trained Ranger Combat teams earlier this week, it sounded very much that they were configured for the last wars , in Afghanistan and Iraq, as much as for what clashes the future may bring.            

In Afghanistan small teams of British soldiers served as Operational Mentoring and Liaison Teams – inevitably known as ‘omelets’ . They were often in tight corners, facing imminent danger from several direction at once, not least from mutinous troops they were training. At times they got caught in deadly close combat against superior Taliban numbers.            

The Rangers have both an up and a down side. They are elite, well trained, and highly adaptable. But they are vulnerable against cunning enemies like the Taliban insurgents who know how to operate beneath what is known as the ‘threshold of sophistication’ of such troops. The crude Taliban tactics – IED bombs costing a few dollars and suicide bomb attacks by swarms of fanatics – neutralize all the advantages of sophisticated surveillance, thermal imagery, and drones.            

Tomorrow’s wars and insurgencies will not necessarily follow the pattern of the conflicts of today and yesterday. Weird weather, continuing pandemics and environmental mutation, will produce upheaval and panic. We are already seeing the effect of mass uncontrolled migration. In such scenarios security will require mass deployment of forces. Robust security forces will need a capacity to deploy, and reinforce, in numbers – especially as allies may not always be on hand to help.           

Resilience is a key element to managing security operations – especially in instances and settings of what the Russians now call ‘ambiguous war’ such as in Donbas, Belarus, the Caucasus and round the Eastern Mediterranean from Turkey to Libya. Resilience means managing security over a long period, without necessarily coming to blows, as on the borders of Poland and the Baltic Republics.           

Resilience is also a key element to what the Army and the forces must offer here in UK, in the changing reality of homeland security – witness the crucial role they have played in Covid vaccination strategies, and making up shortfalls in hospital and supply chain services. They will be required to provide a permanent backup to first and second responders across a spectrum of foreseeable emergencies  from energy outages, weird weather effects in flooding especially, and breakdowns in infrastructure, as well as hard power security against attacks by subversives and terrorists.            

This is recognised in the new Army plan with the innovation of a new brigade of reserve forces with homeland security as its prime role. This time the government must support the reserves with more than lip service. Previous reviews have accorded the reserves a prominent role, but then failed to provide money, incentives and support. Reservists are now crucial to making the Future Soldier project work altogether. They provide critical mass – bringing Army numbers to more than 100,000 if fully recruited.           

But this time round the government is more than ever obliged to pay and train the reserves adequately. They must make them appreciated by both their military and civilian employers , which hasn’t happened in the past. The reserves may prove the key to the credibility of the Future Soldier initiative altogether.