Gaps exposed in the heat of the Ukraine war have led to the head of the British Army warning that UK equipment is “not fit for purpose”, while academics have signalled that Russia’s arsenal is improving.
Gen Sir Patrick Sanders derided much of the military’s armoured vehicles as archaic and decades out of date, suggesting “these are rotary dial telephones in an iPhone age”.
Meanwhile defence experts warned that Russia’s forces in Ukraine were “learning very fast” and rapidly introducing new technology.
Gen Sanders’s comments could act as a spur for the government to more rapidly modernise an army that has fallen behind others in recent decades.
“Many of our platforms are outdated and not fit for purpose,” he told the Rusi land warfare conference.
“I trained on the 432 armoured personnel carrier in the 1980s when it was already 30 years old and it is still in service today.”
He said that the Warrior armoured vehicle was introduced in 1987 and the Challenger 2 tank in 1998, making the analogy that Britain was trying to fight with old-fashioned telephones in a smartphone age.
Britain had to accept that “our procurement record has been poor [and] we've allowed our industrial base to wither”, he told the audience that included the heads of the French and Finnish armies.
He also derided the Army Reserve, which has 26,000 part-time soldiers, as “not as capable and credible as it needs to be”.
A previous policy called “Future Soldier” that aimed to reinforce the much reduced regular army with reservists was “unrealistic” given the time constraints on soldiers with civilian jobs.
The army was also still “too bureaucratic” and there was “not a moment to lose” in rectifying the faults.
“We must never again be unprepared as our forebears were in the 1930s,” said the veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
But he did add that the government was now spending £35 billion to update the army over the next decade.
“The armed forces of Ukraine have granted us an opportunity,” he said. “A chance to reverse some of the disinvestments made during the ‘peace dividend’ that came with the fall of the Berlin Wall.”
Ukraine’s former defence minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk said it would be “extremely unwise” to think that the Russian military that stole “toilet basins and washing machines” in 2022 was similar to today’s fighters.
“They're learning very fast and bringing out new technologies and new equipment,” he said.
Despite having western equipment like the Challenger 2 that was “decades old”, the kit did a “tremendous job and the Russians are extremely afraid of them”.
With both attack and surveillance drones now seen on a vast scale in the conflict, Mr Zagorodnyuk, chairman of the Centre for Defence Strategies in Ukraine, said they were seeing new systems on an almost daily basis.
“I'm sure that we’ll soon see drones fighting other drones,” he said.
Leading US military academic Michael Kofman agreed that while Russia had been slow to adapt. it was “not as slow and incapable as often represented in popular narratives”.
The lead Russia analyst from the Centre for Naval Analysis also stated that Ukraine’s vaunted US-made Himars long range missile strike system had lost effectiveness due to Russian counter measures.
While highly successful when introduced last summer, taking out ammunition dumps and command posts, the Russians had quickly adapted by pulling back and dispersing logistics.
The tactics meant that it had also been difficult for the recently introduced British Storm Shadow missile to find targets, bar an arms dump and possibly a bridge into Crimea.
He also bemoaned the “critical deficit” of short-range air defences in the Ukraine military that has made its current offensive particularly vulnerable to Russian attack helicopters.
“Russian rotor aviation has proven to be a very big problem behind Russian lines against Ukrainian armoured formations,” he said.
