It was a force which went hand in hand, charge to charge in support of the greatest empire the world has perhaps ever seen, but now Britain's armed forces are a hollowed out shadow of their former selves.
Reeling from decades of cuts, the once mighty British Army fields less than 76,000 persons and that number's due to decline to 73,000 by 2025. Of these, one all-arms battlegroup of 25,000, one division, is fit to fight. Except that they aren't, because Whitehall's mandarins have given all their ammo to the Ukraine.
According to the Daily Express, the UK's singular combat division would "run out of ammunition within a few days if required to fight."
Within a few days. Still, not to worry, money's been allocated to rebuild the 2.5bn GBP worth of armaments given to Zelensky's regime by London. But guess what, thanks to asset stripping, aka industrial off-shoring, ammo replenishment will take around a decade to get to the troops.
What does this mean? Most obviously, a grievous security threat, and with it a gamble on several levels. Viz. Never again will we have to fight an industrial peer-to-peer war, allowing save a lot of money by adopting high-end, high-tech, smaller defense/offense solutions.
Gone are the days when we needed actual factories producing hundreds of thousands of shells when one smart bomb will do. In short. We will never, ever have to fight another major war in Europe or, for that matter, anywhere else.
The second wager is like unto the first. If we're called to fight a real war, we'll supply our proxies with arms and destroy our enemy economically until we win, which won't take long.
You can almost picture nameless, unelected bureaucracies shaking hands on a budget well kept, after all, that welfare vote doesn't come cheap, and then... those dam Russkies arrive out of the East, firing thousands of shells a day, every day, going full WWI but with drones and hypersonic glide bombs.
What then, your hand's been called and found wanting, your bluff's been called. So what next? You, the FORPOL reader, be the judge.
Arma Virumque,
LSP
