The Rise and Fall of the British Army by Ben Barry
This detailed though eminently accessible and readable book demonstrates that without an extensive land-based war fighting capability the UK would not have been able to respond to the range and extent of challenges the country has faced over the previous 50-years. Yet those very same capabilities that have enabled the UK to defend its foreign and domestic interests in the half-century since 1975, including the defence of Europe from the threat of conventional attack by the armies of the Warsaw Pact and the long and successful fight against domestic terrorism, among others, have been so denuded in recent decades as to make our security against such threats today much less certain. In 2025 the UK no longer has the army it once boasted, certainly not in terms of scale. The beginning of the end can easily be dated to the early 1990s and the desire of politicians of all stripes to secure a so-called ‘peace dividend’ from the broad, sunlit uplands that beckoned as the Cold War ended. These sunlit uplands have not appeared, and yet the army has been stripped of its full warfighting capabilities by repeated reviews and their resulting financial contractions over the past 35-years.
The story Barry tells in this detailed portrait of the evolution of the British Army is in fact the danger a weakened army leaves the country. For example, an army that lacks the ability to deploy expeditionary forces at scale to fight a peer adversary on a prolonged basis, means that the government’s foreign policy tools are themselves limited. Moreover, a weakened army becomes one that is no longer able to deter our adversaries. That this is so today, at a time of considerable regional and global instability, should be of concern to all of us. Indeed, by the evidence Barry has presented in this comprehensive telling of the British Amy’s story over the past five decades, the UK has rarely been so poorly defended, perhaps not since the start of the Second World War.
As a result although the army still understands how to fight, and has the will to do so (unlike the armies of many of our allies, as Barry points out), it no longer has the tools to do so in any meaningful way. These crucial capabilities, built up over decades of application and experience have disappeared into history. Will the army rise again? Those who love the army will hope that it does so well before the metal starts to fly in any new war our country is forced to confront, alongside our allies in NATO or, as was the case with the Falklands War of 1982, on our own. This book appears to me therefore to be a multiplicity of clarion calls: first, for the country to take the business of preparing to fight far more seriously than governments have, over the past quarter century demonstrated they are willing to fund; second, for governments to lift their eyes from the tactical and the prosaic to see and appreciate the army for what it can offer as a tool of deterrence, not merely as a fire brigade to be used for casual exigencies; third, for the army to continue to focus relentlessly on what has made it over time a first class tool of warfighting, and which it has not yet lost; and finally, for the country to embrace the army as a reflection of what it means to be British, as it seeks with shockingly limited resources to protect our hard won liberties in an increasingly fractious and unpredictable world.
Dr Robert Lyman MBE FRHistS served with the author in Belfast in 1983. His life, and that of his ‘brick’, was saved by one of the ECM devices described in this book.
