As war returns to Europe and global tensions rise, Britain must confront hard questions about its ability to defend itself. Years of underfunding, recruitment failure and cultural complacency have left the Armed Forces dangerously hollow. Drawing on a century of military history, Dr Linda Parker warns that the UK is once again repeating the same costly mistake: assuming peace will last and someone else will do the fighting

When Britain declared war on Nazi Germany in September 1939, we entered the conflict from a position of alarming weakness. Years of underfunding, diplomatic wishful thinking, and the widespread belief that peace would hold had left our armed forces hollowed out and underprepared. We had the will to fight but not the means, and it took years to rebuild our strength. In the meantime, we lost ground, lives and allies.

Britain may have won the Second World War, but we did not win it quickly — and we did not win it alone.

Eighty-five years later, we are making the same fatal assumptions.

The world is becoming more dangerous by the month. Russia has invaded Ukraine and openly threatened NATO. Iran is destabilising the Middle East. China is testing the West’s resolve in the Pacific. The United States — our closest military ally — is increasingly looking inward. If Britain is called to act alone, or as part of a limited NATO response, we may find ourselves not just overstretched but fundamentally incapable.

Our armed forces remain, in the words of Parliament’s own Defence Committee, “consistently overstretched”. Recruitment is in crisis. Equipment stockpiles are depleted. Personnel deployed on constant readiness rotations are left with no time for full warfighting training. These are not fringe concerns. They are being flagged by military leadership and detailed in official reports. Still, the drift continues.

The government has pledged to raise defence spending to 2.6% of GDP by 2027. That commitment followed a £2.5 billion cut in 2024 — made during what the Ministry of Defence itself has described as a “pre-war world”. The proposed increase will take years to arrive. So did rearmament in the 1930s. And it came too late.

In my own academic work, I’ve spent decades studying the consequences of strategic delay. In the wake of the First World War, Britain convinced itself there would not be another. The military was dismantled, regiments disbanded, and budgets slashed. The so-called “Ten Year Rule” — a working assumption that no major conflict was likely within the next decade — became embedded policy. Between 1919 and 1932, the defence budget fell from £766 million to just £102 million. When the international situation deteriorated, Britain scrambled to rearm. It wasn’t enough. The cost was years of lost initiative and avoidable sacrifice.

The cycle repeated later in the century. After the Cold War, the “peace dividend” justified another round of cuts. It left Britain underpowered during the First Gulf War. In 1982, had the scheduled defence cuts already taken effect, we might not have been able to retake the Falklands.

Now, once again, the numbers are stark. The regular Army has fallen below 73,000 — the smallest since the 18th century. Recruitment times stretch up to 376 days. Ammunition and missile stocks are running low. NATO commitments are straining logistics, personnel and morale.

This crisis runs deeper than spreadsheets. A cultural shift is underway — and the parallels with the interwar years are striking.

A YouGov poll for The Times in February 2025 found that only 11% of Gen Z Britons — those aged 18 to 27 — would be willing to risk their lives for their country. Two-fifths said they would never fight. Only 42% said they were proud to be British. (Former Tank Commander and author Matthew Baldwin talks more about UK conscription in his excellent piece for The European here.)

This is not the first time young people have turned away from military service. In 1933, the Oxford Union passed the motion: “This House would not fight for King and Country.” Similar sentiments were voiced at Cambridge. Pacifist movements flourished. War seemed both abhorrent and unlikely. Then it came — and many of those young men were among the first to enlist.

That instinct to serve still exists. But it cannot be presumed. Nor will it emerge in a vacuum. One Gen Z respondent in the poll said: “With the way politics looks at the moment, I don’t have a lot of faith in our politicians… so I think I’d be unlikely to feel really convinced to fight for them or for the country.” That is not a fringe opinion. It is a rational reaction to a system that often feels remote, inconsistent, or dishonest.

Over the past decade, I’ve spoken to military professionals across the UK, Europe, and the United States. Their concerns are consistent: declining morale, outdated recruitment methods, and short-term political thinking that makes long-term planning impossible. The Armed Forces are not just struggling to attract new recruits. They are struggling to explain the value of military service in modern Britain.

Demographic changes are compounding the problem. The traditional recruiting base has shrunk. Ethnic minorities and women remain underrepresented. A tight labour market draws younger people elsewhere. Recruitment delays — some lasting nearly a year — deter those who might otherwise apply. For many, the process is too slow, too bureaucratic, and too unclear.

There is still time to act. But it requires more than promises and slogans. It requires leadership — political, military and civic — that speaks honestly about risk and responsibility. It requires a cultural reset: one that re-establishes national defence as a shared duty. It requires policy that matches rhetoric with real commitment.

Britain’s history is full of warnings. They have been written in letters home from the trenches, in the minutes of forgotten Whitehall committees, in the names on too many war memorials.

We ignored them before. We are ignoring them now.

And this time, there may be no one left to wake us.

Dr. Linda Parker is widely considered to be one of Britain’s leading polar and military historians. She is the author of six acclaimed books, an in-demand public speaker, the co-founder of the British Modern Military History Society, and the editor of Front Line Naval Chaplains’ magazine, Pennant, which examines naval chaplaincy’s historical and contemporary role.

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