Lack of cash and staff could defeat ambitious army war division plans

Ambitious army plans to establish a 40,000-strong war fighting division are at risk unless the Government delivers on funding and recruitment, a report has warned.

Plans for the new division formed a core part of the Ministry of Defence’s (MoD) 2015 strategic review and are “central to the credibility of the army”, said the House of Commons Defence Committee.

They feature two armoured infantry brigades and a strike brigade capable of deploying at speed to counter a military threat from another state.

However, the cross-party committee warned the successful completion of the planned restructuring “cannot be taken for granted” due to manning shortfalls and “unacceptably low” levels of financial resourcing.

Committee chairman Julian Lewis suggested the Government must consider increasing spending on defence from the Nato minimum target of 2% of national income to the levels of 3% or more seen until the 1990s.

The creation of the new division relies on the army maintaining manning levels of 82,000 regulars and 30,000 reservists, said the committee in its report.

However, it said the Ministry of Defence had failed to hit the “historically low” manpower target for the standing army, while there were “serious doubts” about it recruiting the necessary reservists by the target date of 2019.

It was “not clear” whether funding was in place to pay for the equipment needed by the new war fighting division, with numbers of main battle tanks at less than half the level available in 1997.

Further reductions would be “fraught with risk”, the report warned.

“The MoD must be clear that the financial settlement is sufficient to deliver this vital equipment – on time and within budget – without raiding other parts of defence expenditure,” warned the report.

Dr Lewis said: “As in many other areas of defence, the work of the army is constrained by the fact that defence expenditure has fallen to an unacceptable level.

“Until we accept the need to spend more than the 2% Nato minimum, the timely establishment of the war fighting division cannot be taken for granted.”

The army wants to have a specialist war fighting division.