What's the current state of the UK's armed forces?
The Briefing Room
BBC
4.8 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2026
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
As contemporary hi-tech wars rage - Russia and Ukraine and the US-Israel war with Iran - The Briefing Room takes a hard look at the UK's armed forces. After telling his allies - including the UK - that he didn’t need them, President Trump called for them to help him open up the Strait of Hormuz, which has raised not just the question of should we, but could the UK do this? David Aaronovitch asks when it comes to big military operations what have we got? In this dangerous 21st century what do we need? Can we get it? And what about closer co-operation with other European countries?
Guests: General Sir Richard Barrons, Senior Consulting fellow with the International Security Programme, Chatham House. Dr Jack Watling, Senior Research Fellow, Royal United Services Institute Shashank Joshi, Defence Editor, The Economist Ruth Harris, Executive Director for National Security and Data Science, RAND Europe
Presenter: David Aaronovitch Producers: Caroline Bayley, Nathan Gower, Kirsteen Knight Production Co-ordinator: Maria Ogundele Sound Engineer: Neil Churchill and James Beard Editor Richard Vadon
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:08.8 | After telling his allies, including the UK, that he didn't need us, |
| 0:14.5 | the US president called for help to open up the Strait of Hormuz, |
| 0:18.8 | which has raised in the sharpest terms, not just the question of |
| 0:22.1 | should we, but could we? When it comes to big military operations, what has the UK got? |
| 0:30.7 | In this dangerous 21st century, what do we need? And can we get it? And what about closer cooperation with other European countries? |
| 0:40.4 | Step into the briefing room and together we'll find out. |
| 0:46.9 | First, I'm joined by General Sir Richard Barron's, |
| 0:49.7 | who's senior consulting fellow with the International Security Program at Chatham House |
| 0:53.9 | and co-author of the |
| 0:55.4 | most recent Strategic Defence Review commissioned by the government. |
| 0:59.5 | Richard Bairns, what's happened to the size of the British Armed Forces since the end of the |
| 1:03.5 | Cold War? When the Cold War ended in 1990, nobody in the UK could point to the sort of existential threat that was going to justify |
| 1:13.2 | retaining the sort of large armed forces nearly already all the time that you needed during the |
| 1:18.6 | Cold War. So over the succeeding 35 years or so, the army has, broadly speaking, halved in size |
| 1:26.2 | from around 150,000 and 73,000 reserves to today |
| 1:31.5 | about 70,000 regulars and a reserve of only 23,000. The Air Force in 1990 had 850 combat jets, |
| 1:40.6 | and today it's got 160, though we need to recognize they're much |
| 1:45.4 | better than the Cold War era ones and the Navy had 50 major surfeit combatant |
| 1:50.9 | ships destroyers and frigates and things in 1989 and now it's got 13 and it |
| 1:56.8 | can't even get all 13 to see at once. The conundrum that we live with today, and it is profoundly important, |
| 2:04.9 | is we've now entered a very new era in global affairs of much greater risk, |
... |
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