The Iran war has exposed the shortcomings of the British military, showing it to be “ill-equipped and unprepared” for conflict, a former UK security minister has warned.
Tom Tugendhat also highlighted a failure to learn the lessons of contact with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and said the group has since been exploiting Britain’s legal system.
In a speech titled The Defence We Have Chosen, Mr Tugendhat delivered a stark assessment of Britain’s armed forces and said that decades of complacency have made the nation vulnerable in today's volatile world.
“The Iran war has revealed the reality of the British way,” he said. “It has shown us to be legalistic, ill-equipped and unprepared. It has revealed the risks we’ve hidden, not the resilience we’ve built.”
The former British army officer, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, warned that the present moment must serve as a turning point. “If we fail to use the moment this gives us to realise the challenges we face, the next wake-up call may cost us very dear indeed,” he said. “We are no longer planning for an uncertain future but a dangerous present.”
Navy in decline
Britain’s Royal Navy looked particularly exposed when it took almost four weeks to get a destroyer on station off Cyprus, replacing a French warship that had been protecting the island in the early days of the Iran war.
Those shortcomings were acknowledged by its First Sea Lord in a speech, also on Wednesday. When Gen Sir Gwyn Jenkins leaves the service as planned in 2029, he is “determined the Royal Navy will be much stronger than the one I inherited”.
In a speech to the Royal United Services Institute think tank, he claimed a new force would be a hybrid fleet of drones and warships “fit for 21st century warfighting”. It would be “a navy better integrated with our closest allies, a navy leaner, more agile and more innovative, a navy embracing the changes it has to make”.
With only a handful of warships available for operations, he said the “status quo is simply not good enough”, with the navy is “at an inflection point”.
But he said the first drone to operate from a British aircraft carrier would take off next year, and also touted the prospect of “our first uncrewed escort ship sailing alongside our Royal Navy warships within two years”.
While Britain and its allies are attempting to assemble a force to protecting shipping when the Strait of Hormuz reopens, Gen Jenkins said Iran’s actions had demonstrated that “sea power is vital if we are to maintain the free flow of trade and deter our adversaries” and protect against global shocks.
IRGC weaponised
Mr Tugendhat decried the gap between Britain’s self-image and its current capabilities. “For three decades, we have been projecting an image of a Britain that no longer exists,” he said in a speech at the Policy Exchange think tank. “We must be prepared to look honestly in the mirror and realise the truth about ourselves.”
The Tory MP, who served in the Conservative government from 2022 to 2024, criticised what he described as legal constraints on British troops, claiming they have had a chilling effect on operations and morale. “The choice to fetter our forces with reams of red tape … has done more to weaken our country and endanger us than any number of lost battles in foreign lands,” he said.
He said the IRGC, through militias in Iraq, had been able to weaponise Britain’s legal system, deterring future military action.
On operations in Iraq, he described how British soldiers who fought Iran-backed militias later faced spurious legal challenges at home, driven by false claims. “Let’s be clear, what we’ve seen soldiers fighting hand to hand … being hounded by those same militias’ legal mandate, carved up by solicitors paid by the very taxpayers who looked to these soldiers for protection,” he said. “Only to see that aggression empowered by the courts while their protectors are persecuted.”
He described a widening gap between Britain and its allies, with countries such as Poland and Germany now rapidly expanding their forces.
In a sharp attack on the Treasury’s penny pinching, he accused policymakers of being “busy playing accounting tricks in the purser’s office at the Titanic”.
Fit for eight days of war
Mr Tugendhat warned that Britain could sustain major combat operations for only “approximately eight days”, with limited munitions stockpiles compared with other Nato countries. Such weaknesses, he argued, risked undermining deterrence.
He said a general who had commanded a force of 5,000 troops in the 1990s had told him the “entire firepower of British Army” today is less than he had in his brigade.
“The evidence is now too great to be ignored,” he said. “We have too few frigates, too few soldiers and too few planes … and a government too keen to punish those who try to protect us.”
He also questioned whether the political will existed to prioritise defence in an increasingly dangerous world.
