Name: Could the UK introduce conscription? | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-04-12T09:34:38.000Z
Duration: 5 min 49 s
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more money needs to be spent to modernise our armed forces, and I think there will always be questions about whether they're large enough, both in terms of the number of platforms the Navy and the Air Force have, but also the number of soldiers that the British Army have.

Is there a scenario where NATO will have to learn to live without America?

I mean, I think President Trump was absolutely right to suggest that Europe needs to do more to defend itself, and I don't think anybody would disagree with that.

And, of course, as a military officer and having been the Chief of Defence Staff, I would entirely concur that we need to invest in our own security.

And I think that how does that play into NATO is a very interesting question.

And, of course, NATO has always been underpinned by the idea of Article 5.

In other words, an attack on one member is an attack on the whole alliance.

Now, interestingly, the only time that Article 5 has ever been tabled was after 9-11, the terrorist attack on New York.

And I'm not sure that I've ever heard anybody in the current administration mention that because, of course, we all then, you know, loyally followed the orders and we all fought America's wars for her for the next 10 to 15 years and spent a lot of money doing it.

I mean, I think, you know, the UK alone spent some 35 billion.

So the big question for all of us is does Article 5 still apply?

And, you know, if it doesn't apply and you haven't got that US security guarantee, which is so important to NATO, then it does beg questions about NATO's strength in the short term.

Now, there is no reason to suppose that if Europe gets its act together over the course of the next five years, probably, but maybe as much as 10, then the European economy is nearly as big as the American economy.

There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to afford this.

Difficult choices will have to be made, but it should be possible.

But what if there is a test before then, before Europe is ready?

And that is a really interesting question.

And of course, what none of us know, because we are not inside President Trump's mind on this, is whether he would still provide the support that we would expect of the United States.

But the reality, of course, is if the United States is not there for us, then it's a very challenging position for Europe to itself in.

I mean, we all know that we've struggled to find the wherewithal to be able to support Ukraine without the United States' support.

I mean, of course, when you fact check some of the comments about the amount of money that's being spent, Europe has, of course, spent, you know, around 135 billion euros, where the United States has probably spent about 110 billion euros up until March this year.

So the answer is that Europe's got the money there.

But of course, European defence industry doesn't have the resilience that the US defence industry has.

And therefore, it would be challenging in the short term for Europe to be able to provide what the United States has provided to Ukraine.

How would you characterise the current state of the British Armed Forces?

I mean, I think the important question one always has to ask oneself is what you want them to do.

If you think about that, then, you know, in certain circumstances, they are perfectly capable of doing what you require of them.

We also need to remember that they would fight alongside NATO allies, which, of course, brings with it a whole load of a scale that, you know, is much harder for you to conceive purely from a national perspective.

No, I mean, but the fact of the matter is going back to the conversation about defence expenditure, more money needs to be spent to modernise our armed forces to make sure they've got the capabilities that we're learning are necessary from some of the wars that we've been observing over the last three or four years.

And I think there will always be questions about whether they're large enough, both in terms of the number of platforms the Navy and the Air Force have, but also the number of soldiers that the British Army have.

I think it's important to consider how the nation as a whole, as we've seen demonstrated very much in Ukraine, gets behind the effort.

So I think there are some interesting questions about national resilience, which need to become a matter of public debate, which would be good to have.

And with that, the whole idea of reserves and how reserves play into the big question are necessary as well.

And I think you could see people constructing a British military that works from what its mobilised organisation and strength might look like back to where we are today, which would be an interesting question.

And one, of course, that our forebears very much understood in 1940.

Again, I think one has to be careful about this, because, you know, if you're a frontline state in NATO, like Finland or Sweden or the Baltic states, you've got something you can get conscripts to do on a daily basis.

Now, we could do that when we had national service up until the late 50s, because we had an empire to police and there was something to send conscripts to go and do.

It would be harder for us now to employ them on a daily basis.

Now, what I think for us is probably a better model is to avail ourselves of the 150,000 to 200,000 retired regular military who have a statutory liability to be available to be mobilised.

Now, I think you could, you know, to use the military term, operationalise that much better than we do at the moment.

Indeed, in the way that we used to in the Cold War, you've got to be my age probably to remember that.

And I think that's probably a better way of thinking about it.

But what I do think is I do think that some form of national citizen service would be good, because I think trying to build that sense of national resilience, but how you use the people who do that service, I think you wouldn't depend upon the military for that.

I think you'd find another mechanism for doing it.