Commons Defense Committee warns about ‘outgunned’ and 'outmatched' Army
As anticipation grows about the government’s long-delayed defense, security and foreign policy review, the House of Commons Defense Select Committee (DSC) has thrown a spanner in the works by highlighting the insidious depletion of the Army’s capacity to fight a major war.
The DSC has just published a hard-hitting report condemning decades-long effort to modernize the Army’s fleet of Armored Fighting Vehicles (AFV) as “woeful”.
The report, entitled Obsolescent and Outgunned, is particularly scathing of “bureaucratic procrastination” and “general ineptitude” which has undermined efforts to re-equip the Army in the past 20 years.
According to DSC Chairman, Tobias Ellwood, the Army’s AFV program has been “plagued with uncertainties” from the outset.
"The decision to invest in fighting vehicles is too often hampered by uncertainties over what the Army wants them for and pitted against the desire to fund other defense priorities", Ellwood added in a thinly-veiled reference to an oft-stated desire by both the government and the Army high command to fully embrace information-era technology.
It would appear that Ellwood, who is a high-profile Tory MP, is trying to pick a fight with the government ahead of the publication of the integrated review of defense, security and foreign policy, which looks set to be the centerpiece of the government’s plan to transform the military for the “wars of the future”.
Scheduled for publication on Tuesday (March 16), the review is widely expected to stress the importance of developing new technology such as robots, artificial intelligence more broadly, in addition to enhancing UK capabilities in the space and cyber domains.
But the SDC’s report not only casts doubt on the government’s ability to successfully execute ambitious long-term military upgrade projects – based on the inability to advance the AFV program – but makes the point that traditional capabilities is still what matters most in a battlefield.
The report states the Army is “four years” away from being able to deploy a “warfighting division”, which even under the Ministry of Defense’s plans, would still be “hopelessly under-equipped”.
The most damning aspect of the report centers on the UK’s inability to successfully fight a “peer adversary”, most likely referring to Russia.
It states British soldiers called on to fight a peer adversary “would, disgracefully, be forced to go into battle in a combination of obsolescent or even obsolete armored vehicles, most of them at least 30 years old or more”.
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