The head of the British Army has said the United Kingdom will “double its fighting power” by 2027 and then triple the lethality of its army by 2030. The NATO country plans to have its land forces ready to deter but ultimately win a war within three years.
“I have a bold ambition to double our fighting power in three years and triple it by
the end of the decade,” General Sir Roly Walker, the new chief of the British Army, said at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) land warfare conference in London on Tuesday.
The term “fighting power” does not refer to doubling and then tripling the British Army’s manpower but is measured by other factors, such as doubling the amount of time an armed forces can endure a conflict, using half the amount of munitions for the same impact, or double the distance a force can detect the enemy.
“We have just enough time” to “prepare, act, and assure the reestablishment of credible land forces to support a strategy of deterrence,” Walker said. There is an “absolute urgency to restore credible, hard power,” he added while insisting that war was not inevitable.
It is understood that this vision will have the U.K. prepared to deter and, if that fails, win a war by around 2027 or 2028.
Alarm bells have long been ringing over the state of the British Army as NATO nations across Europe move to quickly build up their defense industries and military forces while hiking up defense spending.
This is particularly acute on NATO’s eastern flank, with Poland upping its defense spending to 5 percent next year.
Senior British military and government figures have said the British Army has suffered from years of underinvestment, and Britain’s new defense minister, John Healey, described the force as “hollowed out” during a speech in London on Monday.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, the former British Army chief who left the position last month, warned earlier this year that the U.K. needed to take “preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing.”
The British land forces will need to be able to destroy an enemy “three times its size,” Walker said.
“My vision for the British Army is to field fifth-generation land forces that set the joint force up for that ‘unfair fight,'” Walker said. The phrase “unfair fight” refers to having confidence that the army’s strength will deter any adversary and that any fight that took place could be quickly won.
Walker said that these fifth-generation forces will use “advanced technologies,” such as artificial intelligence.
The threat facing the British army and NATO countries will be more acute by 2027 because of a “convergence” of factors, the British army chief said.
In a few years, there will be more pressing threats from Iran and its nuclear weapons development, from China with its belligerence toward Taiwan, from North Korea and a battle-scarred Russia, Walker said.
“If we are to deter an increasingly aligned axis of upheaval, we need to apply all strengths as a strong democracy against the weaknesses of their rigid, autocratic regimes.”
Regardless of the outcome of the full-scale war in Ukraine—which Moscow has been fighting since it launched its February 2022 invasion—Russia will be “very, very dangerous” in the late 2020s and will be “wanting retribution for the support given to Ukraine.”
“When you think they’re down, they will come roaring back to get their vengeance,” Walker said.
A deadline of 2027 will also coincide with a round of NATO military drills known as Steadfast Defender 27. This year’s Steadfast Defender 24 exercises were NATO’s largest since the Cold War.
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