Two years of all-out war in Ukraine shows size matters for British Army, former commander says
It has now been two years since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and a former general has told Forces News how the conflict is teaching the British Army valuable lessons about fighting a modern digital land war.
General Sir Richard Barrons, a former head of Joint Forces Command, said the sheer attrition of the conflict had proven that even with huge amounts of modern technology, any force facing Russia must have scale.
"You need really big concentrations of forces to break through a really coherent defence, such as the one that Russia has built in southern Ukraine," he explained.
'Mass matters'
Gen Sir Richard added: "Mass matters when you are trying to get a force ratio of at least three to one, hopefully five to one and better still seven to one in the attack.
"And if you have an army of 72,000 and quite limited pots of equipment, well, if you are going to do that sort of thing you are going to have to get bigger and get more stuff."
'A Dad's army'
The former general added: "The second way mass really matters is endurance.
"If you look at the frontline of the Ukrainian military, the average age of the frontline is 43, this is genuinely a dad's army.
"Ukraine has probably got something like 60,000 amputees from the war so far... the size of the British Army today is about 73,000, so you need mass."
Recruitment
But he said that increased size would not come from recruiting more regulars.
"The conversation that people think we are having is we must have more regular soldiers That is highly unlikely in big numbers because they're so expensive", he said.
Gen Sir Richard added: "We are going to have a conversation about how you have a bigger Army, which is a combination of the regular, the regular reserve, the volunteer reserve and if you need to, how you could begin to mobilise civil society when you have a big enough problem".
In January, General Sir Patrick Sanders, the head of the British Army, said Britain should train and equip a "citizen army" to prepare the country for a potential land war.
The outgoing Chief of the General Staff said increasing Army numbers ahead of a potential conflict would need to be a "whole-of-nation undertaking".
However, Gen Sir Patrick said even a mobilisation of this scale might not be enough, highlighting how the UK's allies in eastern and northern Europe were "laying the foundations for national mobilisation".
Gen Sir Richard added: "We are back to thinking about how you make the Army big quickly when you have a major crisis."
He said the British Army would also be scrutinising how the war was being fought, it being a mix of brutal trench warfare and digital age technology.
"It's mostly about how the Army moves from being essentially people with equipment, executing tactics and drills skilfully and robustly, and scale and well supported, to an army that is a mixture of people, unmanned systems like drones, that fly, drive and walk and increasingly autonomous systems that operate," he said.
He said the other big takeaways for the Army were the effectiveness of precision weapons in Ukraine and the transparency of the battlefield.
Gen Sir Richard said: "Today's Army going forward will be able to see more clearly and further forward where the enemy is.
"And as they acquire longer range weapons, for example, the PrSM [the US Army's next-generation long-range precision strike missile] which the [British] Army aspires to get, would give the Army the range of 500km. They've never had that before.
"As we are seeing in Ukraine, neither side has worked out how they can assemble an attacking force of any size and then move it into the attack before it's seen and destroyed, that's where the British Army is heading."
The British Army today is the smallest it has been for 300 years.
Gen Sir Richard says two years of war in Ukraine has proven that it may need to be considerably bigger if a European war broke out.
To do it, the Army must focus on strengthening its connections with civil society and industry, building mechanisms that would help it rapidly expand if the unthinkable happens.
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