Land: the MOD's "burning platform"

Lessons of May 1940 show that, to have a say in NATO doctrine, UK needs to need to invest in land warfare today

Soldiers of the Royal Ulster Rifles on the beach at Dunkirk. Source IWM.

“The Germans were in Poland and in no time, [with] all the Stukas and all that kind of thing. And we [were] still fighting World War One. You see the Bren gun had just come in then, and these old sweats, reservists who came back, had never seen a Bren gun.”

That’s how Major Toby Taylor, of the 1^st Battalion the East Surrey Regiment, described the British Army on the eve of its retreat to Dunkirk in May 1940.

When the Germans attacked two recently-formed reserve battalions of the Queen’s West Surrey Regiment, on the river Eschaut, their brigade intelligence officer reported they had received no plan or guidance on what to do:

“The German use of the MP 38 machine pistol in close quarter fighting tactics had taken the British by surprise, a factor that may have adversely impacted on the British troops, who had no little or no experience of automatic small arms fire.” *

No knowledge of their own automatic weapons and no experience of the enemy’s: that’s the real story of May 1940. Though the British Army’s retreat to Dunkirk was heroic, the scale of their unpreparedness was a scandal.

You only have to dip in to the regimental history books of the units involved at Dunkirk to find the anecdotal evidence: Britain sent its army into battle against the Nazis, under-equipped, untrained and lacking any doctrine that could have prepared them for the fight they were in.

And given this week’s headlines, that is a history we need to learn from.

Warnings abound

Today, finally, we’re seeing it dawn on the Conservative party – which has been in power for 14 years – that Britain’s armed forces are woefully unprepared for the kind of conflict that would take place if Vladimir Putin decided to launch an aggression against a NATO ally.

James Heappey, who has just resigned as Armed Forces minister, writes in the Sunday Telegraph that the UK is “a very long way behind” where it needs to be. He calls for an immediate uplift of defence spending to 2.5% of GDP, and for a national resilience plan – after it was revealed this week that the UK is the only NATO country without a comprehensive National Defence Plan.

Above all Heappey wants a change of mindset: he reveals that Whitehall officials asked to take part in a command bunker exercise, to simulate wartime contingencies, declined to do so. That anecdote is a microcosm of what needs to change.

This year we’ve seen growing calls to expand both the armed forces and the reserves. Sir Patrick Sanders, in his controversial IAVC speech in January, mooted an army of 120,000 including reserves – which would mean reversing cuts made during the past decade. We need, he said…

“…an army designed to expand rapidly to enable the first echelon, resource the second echelon, and train and equip the citizen army that must follow”.

In other words, we need something that can do what the Army of 1938-40 were ordered to, but could not. He added:

“Modernisation is non-discretionary, and it is urgent – a burning platform. Its absence is felt in our recruitment numbers. The army’s size always generates headlines, but the real story is about capability and modernisation.”

[The burning platform metaphor, drawn from the oil industry, dramatises the need for urgent decision making even when the consequences are unknown]

This week, Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, called for the UK to introduce a Swedish-style selective conscription system to boost the numbers available.

Yet amid this flurry of alarm calls, there is official paralysis: no National Defence Plan; an “aspiration” to lift spending to 2.5% of GDP that is not backed by action; numerous glaring capability gaps; and - as a result - a series of impossible quandaries for senior commanders.

As readers of this newsletter know, I favour an immediate uplift of UK defence spending to 3% in 2025-6, financed through borrowing, and urgent preparations to make both the armed forces, civil resilience and the defence industry capable of expanding beyond that in time of need.

As to what we should spend that money on, it should be a matter for a professional judgement based on the discipline of “net assessment”: a calculation of what the adversary is capable of, what our allies are capable of, and where the UK needs to focus as a nuclear armed P5 power. Hopefully there are people currently beavering away in the “Secretary of State’s Office for Net Assessment and Challenge” on exactly this.

In the absence of any public output from SONAC, however, we have an excellent guide to “how not to do it” from a recent book by Richard Dannatt and Robert Lyman, entitled Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-1940

Dannatt is former CGS and Lyman a military historian who served as a major in the Light Infantry. As we will see, what they write about the pre-Dunkirk period has direct relevance for today.