Originally Posted by
Timelord
I must have misunderstood. I thought this “refresh” was something to do with, you know, a war going on in Europe but apparently not. Lots of words. Lots of new offices in MI5 and elsewhere, more teaching of Mandarin and a National Security College but nothing new that is anything to do with actually fighting a war.
The actual force structure and capability bit, the Command Paper, is not published until June. The Word in the bars of Whitehall that I frequent (I reckon it is anything up to 30% accurate most of the time) is that the delay is due to the Army submitting their "refresh" element that ignored Ukraine and did diddly squat for long range fires and AD apart from an order for 2 Regiments of Swedish Archers as interim replacements for the existing 2 Regiments of AS90 and that was it. Seemingly it was thrown back at them and they were told to "try again, only harder!"
Still no IFV for the Infantry, so the British Army will put it's infantry in harm's way armed and protected by nothing more than Boxer, armed with nothing more than a single machine gun, and in any case the vast majority of the current Boxer order being for various command and control variants. So most of the infantry will have to walk. Anybody who has seen any of the thousands of videos from Ukraine showing how effective 30mm and 40mm is on their IFV's knows that this lack of firepower would render the British Army combat ineffective in less than two weeks, and that is not taking account of lack of Air Defence (1 small Sky Sabre Regiment and 1 small Stormer/Starstreak Regiment). And that is not me talking, it was a quote on the BBC2 Politics Live from a recently retired CGS.