The regular British army could be wiped out in as little as six months if forced to fight a war on the scale of the Ukraine conflict, a defence minister has warned. Alistair Carns said a rate of casualties similar to that prompted by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would lead to the army being “expended” within six to 12 months. He said it illustrated the importance of having reserves in order to be able to fight in a “war of scale”. Official figures show the army had 109,245 personnel on 1 October, including 25,814 volunteer reservists. Carns, a former Royal Marines colonel who is also a reservist, said Russia was suffering losses of around 1,500 soldiers, killed or wounded, a day.
In a war of scale – not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine – our army for example on the current casualty rates would be expended, as part of a broader multinational coalition, in six months to a year.
That doesn’t mean to say we need a bigger army, but it does mean we must be able to generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis. The reserves are critical, absolutely central, to that process. Without them we cannot generate mass, we cannot meet the plethora of defence tasks and challenges that we require, and we cannot seamlessly integrate the very best experts into the heart of our armed forces.
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