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The UK must embrace reserve forces to build affordable military mass, attract specialist talent, and meet defence needs in an era of constrained budgets.

With significant military demands on a stretched budget, now is the time for Defence to look to reserve forces to build credible affordable mass and win the war for specialist talent. 

Against the backdrop of a Strategic Defence Review, policymakers face difficult decisions about what programmes to support and what to let drop as they struggle to balance requirements with budgets, and promises made to allies with reality. Recently, senior officers from across the services – regular and reserve – gathered for a conference at 61 Whitehall to discuss calls for reenergising the reserves as an option to meet the UK’s defence needs.

Mass and Reconstitution in War

The way to deter an adversary is to signal that one is prepared to endure punishment  and maintain a combat advantage conferring greater punishment on one’s adversary. The UK and its allies need to develop a theory of victory which sends a signal to their adversaries that they can take the pain of an enduring conflict. 

After two years of war in Europe, it has become evident that mass matters. The sheer scale of the violence in Ukraine posits that boutique armies have limited utility in modern peer-on-peer warfare. 

To date, it is believed that the Russians have sustained over 700,000 casualties in Ukraine since their full-scale invasion began. This is over eight times the size of the British Army. As noted by the Minister for Veterans and People, Al Carns MP, at the rate of casualties sustained, the UK’s army would be expended in ‘six months to a year’.

The requirement for militaries to be big early on in war is clear. Armies need to be capable of taking casualties, resting worn out units, reconstituting and remaining in the fight by producing new echelons of troops capable of following weeks behind the regular forces, followed by further echelons as the war develops. This process of constructing a second echelon in peacetime and putting in place processes for generating further ones must no longer be seen as an optional redundancy but as a critical capability. 

The principal challenge for achieving combat mass in land forces is the cost of recruiting, training and retaining men and women in uniform. Wartime levels of defence spending would bankrupt a country at peace; it therefore seems logical to create a military policy wherein a force can get big quick to capitalise on an uplift in spending at the start of a conflict.

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