Army’s brigade plans at risk
AMBITIOUS Army plans to establish a 40,000-strong warfighting division are at risk unless the Government delivers on funding and recruitment, a hard-hitting parliamentary 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, such as Russia.
But the cross-party committee warned that the successful completion of the planned restructuring “cannot be taken for granted” due to manning shortfalls and “unacceptably low” levels of financial resourcing.
Committee chair Julian Lewis suggested that 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.
But, 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.
It was “deeply concerning” that the National Audit Office spending watchdog had identified an additional £24.4 billion worth of spending commitments in the MoD’s equipment plans and that a programme for new mechanised infantry vehicles is “uncosted”, said the committee.
“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.