BRITAIN is at risk of forgetting how to fight wars, a commander has warned.
Major General James Martin said the Army was “in the process of losing the skills” to mount an all-out campaign.
Decades of fighting insurgents in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan have diverted focus from big state-on-state conflicts.
Maj Gen Martin, head of the Army’s 3rd Division, told The Sun: “After 20 years of counter-insurgency campaigning, we were losing this war-fighting capability.”
He said urgent training and doctrinal changes had put the Army back on track.
But cuts have left it at its smallest for 300 years.
And the era of fighting insurgents, who had no heavy artillery or tanks, let governments slash ammo and spare parts.
Both are vital to keep troops in wars on the scale of Ukraine.
Asked if the Army was big enough to field a war-fighting division — a measure of Britain’s might, and a core commitment to Nato — Maj Gen Martin said: “It depends what you mean by a war-fighting division.”
A division is 3,000-5,000 men and usually consists of three brigades. But 3rd Division has been cut to 1½.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies think tank warned that before the Ukraine war it was “highly likely a Russian tank division would overmatch this much-weaker British formation”.
Maj Gen Martin said: “By Nato standards we can put a war-fighting division in the field.”
But he admitted: “There are areas where it would be less resilient. That’s why you have partners.”
General Randy George, head of the US Army, recently warned gaps in the UK armed forces cannot be plugged by allies.
British troops were known as “the borrower” by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Maj Gen Martin, who led the 2021 Kabul Airlift saving thousands of Afghans, insisted British soldiers remain the best in the world.
But keeping them armed and equipped in a drawn-out war “still requires a lot of effort”, he added…..S££ MOR£
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