British Army Cut to Lowest Levels in Over 350 Years With Latest of Many Cuts: Service 78% Smaller Than Cold War Years

On March 22nd Britain’s Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced that, following a sharp economic decline and almost a decade of budget cuts, the British Army would be cut by 10,000 personnel to a size of just 70,000. The cuts came as part of a series a range of plans for modernising the country’s armed forces, which strongly prioritise the Royal Navy and power projection capabilities overall at the expense of ground warfare and more defence-oriented assets. The British Army has already been cut to a small fraction of its size during the Cold War, when it could boast over 300,000 personnel many of whom were deployed to continental Europe. The possibility that the Army could retire its entire inventory of battle tanks has also been raised by analysts.

The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and absorption of more countries with sizeable ground forces into NATO such as Poland and East Germany, and the emergence of China, Iran and other further away countries as primary adversaries, are thought to have influenced the drastic shift away from investment in the Army and towards a focus on the Navy. The last time the British Army was at 70,000 strong or lower was in the mid-17th century during the English Civil War, although the country’s population at the time was only around one twelfth of what it is today. Cuts have also affected the Royal Marines, which will be transformed into the Future Commando Force and are expected to see numbers reduced considerably.