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1st Regiment Royal Horse Artillery
Honorary Colonel’s Foreword Major General Jez Bennett CBE
We have all been following how the world has become less and less stable over the past year.
The situation in Ukraine remains tensely poised and the new Secretary of State recently said at RUSI that ‘if Putin wins he won’t stop at Ukraine.’ The government are also making the right noises about investing in the nation’s defence and security, and CDS stated at the same conference that he is ‘more excited about the army’s modernisation than about anything else across defence.’
However CGS was keen to observe that there will be a period during which we will need to blend the old with the new, exploit- ing emerging technology to bind the two together. This to achieve his aim of doubling, then trebling our lethality as an army as the new capabilities come online at scale by 2030.
The two biggest messages from this are that we need to remain at the cutting edge of experimentation and tech exploitation in our training and in our connectivity to maximise the capabilities that we have now. And secondly that we need to be ready for a return to fighting artillery at scale, where our problems will switch from ‘too little’ to ‘too much’ unless we train & educate ourselves to anticipate this.
I also believe that we are a bit too ‘self limiting’ at the moment in how we apply policies and direction. In a sense we are apply- ing a peacetime mentality to preparation for non-discretionary war. Being ultra ‘safe’ reduces our exposure to criticism but also means we probably aren’t exploiting all the freedoms to use our resources - money, time, people, policies – to make the most of what we have. So my advice would be that we should push and challenge the boundaries – taking more risk without ever being cavalier – if doing so could yield exponential increases in our capability.
Commentators are now referring to us as being a pre-war gen- eration and we can connect today to the 1930s, during which both UK and Germany separately concluded that war would be less than 10 years away and therefore required immediate, urgent preparation. At the start of this period the German army wrote its ‘blitzkrieg’ doctrine – ie lightning war – whilst training to execute this on bicycles & horses, while the tanks were being built.
In other words they were conceptually miles ahead and prac- tised the new theory in any way they could until all the pieces fell into place. So therefore we must look both to the future of our fight, while we learning from the past – from the 1930s, but also from the Cold War where the British Army of the Rhine regularly rehearsed how and where it would defend at corps and army level to defend Europe against the Soviets.
As the famous Mark Twain saying goes: ‘history may not repeat itself but it certainly does rhyme.’
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