Quote:
Originally Posted by Adak
Let history be your guide here. We were weak before WWI, and we lost a lot of soldiers because we were unprepared, and our soldiers were horribly under trained when they arrived at the front.
After the "War to end all wars", we naturally let our military disband largely, and stopped looking like a first class military nation. Other nations, like the UK, did the same thing.
Shortly thereafter, Hitler came to power, and Germany started rebuilding it's military. We were weak, the UK was weak. Poland was terribly weak, and the French had actually gone back to using HORSES for some of their army transport! Russia with Stalin, had just killed off most of their top military leaders, because Stalin feared them. They were woeful at that time.
With that weakness all around of course Hitler felt encouraged to bully and bluster, and finally, go to war with them!
We couldn't believe it! Neither could most of the people in the UK. They were kicking the dead peace horse, waiting for it to run again and carry us all to a lasting peace.
But that horse was really dead. 
Thinking that we'll have little need for a strong foreign policy, and the ability to project military strength today, is just lunacy. There is a LOT of instability in the Middle East. North Korea is a chronic hot spot, as is the recent squabbles with China and Japan over some islands that lie between them.
And then there's Al Qaeda and their several associated groups, that are quite active in Mali, Sinai, Syria, Libya, Tunisia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, etc.
With the UK so very weak - NO aircraft carriers for now, and the French being headed by a Socialist, We need to be alert, and not knocking down the number of ships in our Navy. |
Couple of points:
The disestablishment of large chunks of the armed forces after a conflict is pretty much the way Britain has always done things. We only stopped passing the annual Mutiny Act (for governing the size, budget and purpose of the army) in 1879.
Cultural unease over large standing armies was only just starting to pass out of the national consciousness by the time of the first world war.
It is standard for Britain to allow herself to become militarily weak during peace time and then have to scrabble around furiously recruiting and training up soldiers when large scale conflict erupts. It's one of the key reasons that Britain often does very badly at the start of a conflict. Not only is a large proportion of the army still green when they begin, but the structural integrity of regiments and battalions has often been shattered by large scale disestablishment and the need to move men around by, for example, combining the remnants of different battalions into a new whole, or using homebased battalions as a recruitment filter for overseas regiments.
Over the course of the conflict they become skilled and experienced and gel into an effective fighting force. Then when the conflict ends numbers are again slashed, and regiments stripped down or removed from active service altogether.
Rinse and repeat :p
Second, whilst Britain is weak now relative to its historic strength (in terms of military and naval reach) it is still the fifth in Global Firepower rankings. Given the size of our land and population, that's still way overpowered.
The lack of aircraft carriers is a problem. For all that I am generally anti-war it grieves me to see our navy so depleted. We don't even build ships anymore. Naval power has been a factor in English and British identify since the 10th century. The closure of the shipyards felt like a part of that was being ripped away.
Back to the disestablishment of regiments though: now that the dust is beginning to settle on our recent military ventures, the government has announced a large scale reorganisation of the army, along with massive budget cuts. Some regiments are being disbanded atogether, others are being absorbed into surviving regiments.
truly there is nothing new under the sun.