British Army would be wiped out in six to 12 months in large-scale war, Carns warns
The British Army would be destroyed in six to 12 months in a large-scale conflict, a defence minister has warned as he said the UK must place greater focus on its reserves.
Speaking at a conference at the Royal United Services Institute, Al Carns spoke about the crucial role reservists must play in UK defence.
The Veterans Minister, who recently signed up as a reservist after leaving the military earlier this year to stand for Parliament, said: "We live in very interesting and pretty fractious times.
"We have war in Ukraine, costing collectively 1,500 casualties a day – think what that means for the number within our Armed Forces.
"Most wars are attritional in nature, and that's where the reserves come into it.
"In a war of scale, not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine, our Army, for example, on current casualty rates would be expended, yes, part of a broader multinational coalition, in six months to a year."
Mr Carns said Russia will soon move onto its third army in Ukraine.
He said the British Army doesn't need to be bigger, but it must be able to generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis.
"The reserves are critical, absolutely central, to that process," the minister said.
"Without them, we cannot generate mass, we cannot meet the plethora of defence tasks.”
He added that the UK needed to "catch up with Nato allies" to place a greater emphasis on the reserves.
Of the many challenges facing recruitment into the reserves, he told delegates: "Everything is not well in the reserve forces, it can be deeply complicated to join.
"I would like to see it simplified."
Mr Carns said he'd held meetings looking at how the process could be improved.
Also speaking at the conference was General Sir Jim Hockenhull, Commander of UK Strategic Command, who said reservists are "fundamental to our national security".
General Sir Jim said specialist reserves are "not a contingency" and revealed he has 2,000 reservists working at Strategic Command, making up 7.5% of his workforce.
He also spoke of the British reservists training Ukrainian medics.
"There are more amputees as a consequence of the war in Ukraine than there are service personnel in the British Army," he said.
"So the scale of the challenge is enormous and many of our reserve medics are on the front line of helping that support and helping them build that capacity."
The general said specialist reservists' contributions must be "baked in" and not "bolted on", and spoke of the importance of celebrating our reserves as "vital parts of our system".
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