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By Dominic Nicholls, Associate Editor 20 June 2023 • 10:08p
Britain is only “just holding on” to its influence in Nato because its Army is too small, the alliance’s deputy commander has warned.
Gen Sir Tim Radford, the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (DSACEUR), the second-in-command of Nato’s military arm, said Britain’s position as one of the organisation’s leading nations could be in doubt after years of defence cuts.
The Army currently has 76,000 serving troops, 21,000 fewer than a decade ago and less than a third of the total when Gen Sir Tim joined the military.
In the past decade, the number of regular soldiers has fallen from 97,000 and is to come down further to 73,000.
“I think we [the British Army] are too small,” Gen Sir Tim, 60, told The Telegraph. “We do need to grow.”
He warned that the country’s position of influence, “hard fought” for by Second World War commander Gen Bernard “Monty” Montgomery, risks being lost.
Speaking from Nato’s military headquarters in Mons, Belgium, Gen Sir Tim said: “We’re in danger of not holding on.
“It would be wrong to say [we’re] living off the past, but we’ve got to be really careful that we don’t slip too low.
“We’re in a fortunate position here. We’ve got a position of influence right across Nato. I worry that if we don’t invest and we don’t build up our industrial base and we don’t lead as we should, we might lose that position.”
Troop numbers are to drop to 73,000, with further cuts announced in the last defence command paper, published in 2021.
Gen Sir Tim, who retires next month after 38 years’ service, lamented the shrinking numbers, arguing that Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine shows technological advancement cannot be at the expense of personnel.
“Equipment is only as good as the people that are managing and operating it. We have lost the numbers that we should have,” he said.
“I think we’ve had a slight awakening after Ukraine, but we need to do a twin track approach. We need to stay at the leading edge of innovation and technology and lead on that as much as we can.
“But at the same time it needs to be underpinned with hard fighting power.
“If someone comes toward you with a tank, you can’t cyber it away. You can’t cross a bridge with cyber. It needs to be balanced.”
Army reduction ‘beggars belief’
Gen Sir Tim’s comments were echoed by a former head of Britain’s armed forces.
Giving evidence to the Commons Defence Select Committee on Tuesday, Lord Houghton of Richmond, who was Chief of the Defence Staff between 2013 and 2016, said: “It beggars belief that we have a reduced size of Army.”
He said the war in Ukraine had demonstrated the need for troop numbers, adding: “We don’t have a properly functioning reserve. To me it’s a national embarrassment but they don’t appear to want to do anything about it.”
Lord Houghton said there has not been a step change in defence funding since 2010, but rather “a series of bungs from the Treasury to bail out a series of in-year dramas about keeping the major programmes going.”
He added this was “no way to run a 20-year defence equipment programme.”
An MoD spokesperson said: “The UK is a major leader across Nato, contributing to every Nato mission and underpinned by the largest defence budget in Europe.”
Gen Sir Tim, an Afghanistan veteran, works daily from the desk bequeathed to the headquarters by Viscount Montgomery, the first DSACEUR, but as he prepares to leave, it is the war being fought in Europe today that demands much of his attention.
He said he has been “hugely impressed” with Ukraine’s performance, but warned Russia is “not going to go away”.
“They’re going to be back as a major threat [in] between three to five years. They’re not short of people or mass,” he said.
“From a Western perspective, we need to make sure that we prepare ourselves for that.”
Gen Sir Tim has been central to Nato’s preparedness for when the “sleeping bear” wakes up.
'We need to grow’
The West has forgotten what high intensity combat looks like, he said. Distracted by the counter insurgency operations after 9/11, such operations have been ignored.
“The industrial base is not in a position where it should be, right across Nato, all the allies and the partner nations. We need to develop the industrial base to be better prepared,” he said.
“There’s a lot of areas that we need to grow that quite frankly, we’ve let go over the last 20 years, as we’ve all been in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
He declined to say how big the Army should be, but warned Britain’s Nato influence is in danger of waning as a result, partly, of swapping personnel for new innovations like cyber warfare which, he said, should be in addition to, not instead of, “good people”.
Talk of structural reorganisation comes easily to Gen Sir Tim who has spent three years heading the first root and branch reform of Nato since 1967.
The 31-nation alliance has changed markedly since it was created in 1949. Sweden is expected to join soon, once diplomatic wrinkles with Turkey are smoothed over.
As such, the plans, structures and modus operandi of old are no longer relevant.
Gen Christopher Cavoli, Nato’s current supreme commander, signed the strategic plan, which is the blueprint for the organisation’s future.
Gen Sir Tim has worked within that framework to help guide the redesign of its military plans, forces and command and control.
Speaking from his office in the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (Shape), which were set up in 1951 by US army general Dwight D Eisenhower, he said: “Shape is emerging as a proper military strategic headquarters that can, for example, turn up the rheostat in the Baltics and turn it down in the Balkans and pose strategic dilemmas to any enemy that wants to take us on.”
Nato calls the resultant plan Deterrence and Defence of the Euro Atlantic Area.
It was agreed by defence ministers in June and will be formally adopted at the alliance’s summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, next month.
Gen Sir Tim, who has been in post since April 2020, said the work has been a three-year journey, but will finally bring coherence to Nato’s defence against state threats, primarily Russia and those in the Euro-Atlantic area and terrorist groups that threaten the alliance’s southern flank.
As for the future, is Nato likely to become a champion for democracy, perhaps welcoming other states outside Europe?
“I don’t think there’s a desire to pivot east in any way. What we’re trying to do is welcome friends coming west rather than us going east.”
He quickly pointed out that “there’s no intent by Nato to confront China in any way”, adding that “what’s really important to us is to make sure we protect the area of responsibility that we have”.
‘Every day, I think about the soldiers I lost’
The area immediately adjacent to, and irrigated by, the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan was known to British troops deployed there as the ‘green zone’. And it was, compared to the dusty beige desert and scrub further out. Even with the river though, the summer heat was oppressive, brutal even.
As he nears retirement after 38 years service, Sir Tim, said the summer of 2009 was the “lowest ebb” of his career and brutal for another, altogether tougher reason.
As commander of 19 Light Brigade he had 76 soldiers killed and 300 wounded over a six-month tour. The memory of command and of the people lost, will never leave him.
“Any commander is going to feel that deeply,” he said. “It was a high professionally to have commanded 10,000 people on operations. But like everybody who served in Afghanistan, particularly commanders, it was a blend of highs and lows continually.
“I still have a book with all the names and pictures in which I read occasionally, just so I don’t forget the sacrifices that have been made,” Sir Tim said.
“You feel every death strongly and every injury very acutely. And even now, which is 14 years on, I still think about it every day.”
That’s the price to be paid, he said, for the huge privilege of command.