The army can’t be deployed for every crisis

Last week, the government published its blueprint for how it intends to remodel the army. According to the plan, it won’t matter that the number of regular troops is being reduced to the smallest size since the Napoleonic wars because the remaining forces will be more ‘agile, integrated, lethal and expeditionary’. A strange theme is emerging in Boris Johnson’s government: the Prime Minister sees the army as the solution to any given problem — yet he is cutting it back to a record low size.

Like Tony Blair before him, Johnson likes to deploy troops — but to help him win battles against his own government machine. He announced this week that the army will be helping out with a speeded-up vaccine booster programme.

His ministers like the responsiveness of the military. Troops do not complain about their working hours. They work weekends if they have to. They are being drafted in to drive ambulances to make up for a shortfall in NHS staff and, in October, they were called up to drive petrol tankers. This winter, the military will be on flood watch. The list continues.

Yet in recent decades governments have calculated that they can get away with slashing our largely uncomplaining armed forces. As far as the public finances are concerned, the military is considered a soft target. The Defence Secretary and his protests are easily outgunned by the demands of more public-facing departments like health and education.

The armed forces have been stretched both abroad and at home. We may have withdrawn our troops from Afghanistan, but still the signs of strain are unmistakable. This week, Liz Truss was happy to pose in a flak jacket riding in a tank in Estonia as she praised Nato’s operation in eastern Europe, yet initially we sent just ten soldiers to help out Poland with the critical situation on the Belarus border.