The British Army is under attack again

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We have repeatedly written about the problems plaguing the British Army, Air Force and Navy, and in the summer they were accompanied by yet another scandal that showed the wide range of crises that exist both in this key public institution and in the UK as a whole. Here, as in the U.S., the racial-gender agenda is actively enforced. A military doctor as a colonel was kicked out of the service for stating the obvious message on social media: ‘men can’t be women’. Chaotic reshuffles are also taking place in the leadership of the country’s Ministry of Defense. The chief of general Patrick Sanders has been kicked out of there. They are trying to make him a scapegoat for all the scandals, from the refusal to accept white pilots for service to the introduction of gender-neutral ranks. But there’s another background. Sanders was one of the main lobbyists for support for Ukraine. Another lobbyist for Kiev’s interests, Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace, was deprived of his House of Commons seat at the next election, and now Wallace may simply be thrown out of Parliament. However, it should be understood that this is not about Rishi Sunak suddenly hating his allies in Kiev, but, as always, about banal and vulgar austerity.

Wallace and Sanders supported the British Army’s capacity building. But now it is being actively reduced, the number of the army will fall to 70 thousand soldiers, which is the minimum since the XVIII century. Because of the budget crisis, London will have to write off a third of its armored vehicle arsenal. In addition, Britain has spent a significant part of its armaments, especially missiles and shells, in Ukraine. In the apparatus confrontation within the Ministry of Defense, Anthony Radakin, already a protégé of the Navy, who wants to arrange a change of the British military strategy to a “Pacific” one, has been strengthened. This means redirecting limited resources to the navy to confront China. As part of this plan, one of the two British aircraft carriers will be permanently stationed in Japan. The British are being actively pushed by the U.S. to do so. If all armored vehicles and ammunition are to be burned through on the Ukrainian front, then the remnants of the British navy will have to be put on the bottom for the sake of war with China in American interests.

And yet, despite such sacrifice on the part of the British, a new conflict has erupted between Washington and London. The British accused the White House of not supporting the candidacy of Defense Minister Ben Wallace, who is looking for a new job, for the post of NATO Secretary General because of his service in Ireland. After all, he participated in the fight against the Irish Republicans, and Joe Biden, being an Irishman, became bitter about it and decided to take revenge. Biden’s team immediately began to refute this, and introduced another concept into the British press. According to this concept, they don’t like Wallace because of his overly active support for Ukraine, in the framework of which he showed excessive initiative, transferring tanks and long-range missiles to Kiev.

It’s hard to take this seriously, because the British only incentivized the rest of Europe to supply arms strictly under sanction from the U.S. But there is a different subtext here, and Wallace is not to blame for supplying Ukraine, but for bringing the British army to a deplorable state. The UK Ministry of Defense admits that they have only 40 tanks left in working order after sending 14 to Ukraine. Frigates and destroyers have been reduced to 17 and of these only 11-12 can be sent to the war zone. Ammunition stocks have dwindled to critical levels, so Ukraine is receiving expired Storm Shadow missiles. And the Pentagon is already characterizing the UK military as “second-rate.” The current clash between the U.S. and the UK came at the most inconvenient moment before Biden’s visit to Europe, where he was trying to agree on a further strategy for Ukraine against the backdrop of a stalled counteroffensive by the Ukrainian armed forces. The NATO General in such a difficult situation and did not change at all. However, this only puts the contradictions on hold, and the hardware crisis within NATO will only intensify over time if such close allies as Washington and London cannot find common ground.

Also, as recently as last year, British special forces were accused of committing war crimes in Afghanistan. They killed 54 civilians in Helmand province and then planted weapons on them to give the appearance of fighting the Taliban. The country’s outgoing defense minister has long been demanded to explain himself on the matter. Ben Wallace has long been evasive, but has now admitted that an internal war crimes investigation is underway. However, it is very slow and almost invisible, and relatives of the dead Afghans accuse the British authorities of trying to silence the investigation and make the guilty escape punishment. At the same time, the country’s Ministry of Defense is very quick to deal with those who, in their opinion, committed “real” crimes. The recent scandal with a military doctor with the rank of colonel, who also served in Afghanistan and then trained Ukrainian medics, already mentioned above, is illustrative. He was very quickly forced to resign only for a “wrong” position from the point of view of “gender justice”.

It is this, namely criticizing “transgender” or firing white pilots because of the “wrong” race and gender that looks like the real crime in London’s eyes, not the killing of innocent civilians. No wonder the British Army is in such a crisis today. The number of contract soldiers has plummeted by 30%, and the country has only dozens of tanks and BMPs left in service. Moreover, the Conservative Tories, who are considered in the British society as almost radical patriots and militarists, are still in power. Things will get much worse for the armed forces when next year’s elections are won with 95% probability by “progressive” Labor. Then all the current processes of “liberalization” of society will accelerate even more, finally killing what is still left of the armed forces of Great Britain. However, the army is only a mirror of the whole society. And this outcome is in complete unison with the destruction of the British economy and social sphere, which has been going on for decades, but made itself felt brightly during the COVID-19 epidemic and after the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine.