Vol. 78/No. 4      February 3, 2014

The cuts mean that Britain “won’t have full spectrum capabilities and the ability to be a full partner [of the U.S.] as they have been in the past,” former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates told a BBC radio program Jan. 16.

Prime Minister David Cameron downplayed the shift. “We have the fourth largest defense budget anywhere in the world,” he said later that day. “We are investing in future capabilities. We are a first-class player in terms of defense.”

There’s no doubting the decline. Military spending in 1985 was 5.5 percent of gross domestic product. Today it’s 2.2 percent. At the time of the 1982 war to maintain Britain’s Malvinas Islands colony, the Royal Navy had some 60 operational frigates and destroyers. Today it has 19. The Royal Air Force had 30 fast jet squadrons 20 years ago but now has 11. The size of the regular army is down from 163,000 soldiers in 1978 to 102,000 today. That figure is planned to decrease further to 82,000 by 2020.

“Unattended, our current course leads to a strategically incoherent force structure,” Chief of Defence Staff General Sir Nicholas Houghton told the Royal United Services Institute in December. “Exquisite equipment, but insufficient resources to man that equipment or train on it. This is what the Americans call the specter of the hollow force.”

Houghton also spoke of the government’s lack of will to use military force and provocatively praised rival Paris. “I have observed with some admiration the ability of French forces to operate with a mindset of aggressive risk management,” he said, in a reference to recent French military intervention in Africa.
 
 
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