Recommendation 42

All three witnesses in our first evidence session questioned the warfighting readiness of the UK Armed Forces.63 General Lord Houghton later told us that the “hollowing out” of the Armed Forces since 2010 had led to shortfalls in the UK’s warfighting resilience: one of the ways in which we were able to cope—take risk with less money— was to take risk against the warfighting consumables, or stocks, that we held for major warfare. Arguably, you could say that at the time—2010— that was a fair risk to take; clearly, in the judgment of the Government of the day, it was a fair risk to take. By the time I was writing my first letter on arrival to the [then] Prime Minister, from memory, I was warning him then that the threats of the possibility that we might be called on to cross the threshold of formalised warfare against an aggressive Russia were no longer latent but patent, to use my language. And they were acknowledged.64 General Sir Nick Carter noted that the reduction in the size of the Armed Forces undermined their resilience, with the lack of mass and scale meaning that in a peer-on- peer conflict, the Forces would have exhausted their capabilities “after the first couple of months of the engagement”.65 Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman told us that if we had to fight a come-as-you-are war, the Armed Forces would have difficulty given their current resilience in relation to equipment and stockpiles.66