The British army would be wiped out in as little as six months if it was forced to fight a war on the scale of the Ukraine conflict, a defence minister has warned.
Alistair Carns said a rate of casualties similar to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine would lead to the army being “expended” within six to 12 months.
He said it illustrated the need to “generate depth and mass rapidly in the event of a crisis”.
In comments reported by Sky News, Carns, a former Royal Marines colonel, said Russia was suffering losses of about 1,500 soldiers killed or injured a day.
“In a war of scale – not a limited intervention, but one similar to Ukraine – our army for example on the current casualty rates would be expended – as part of a broader multinational coalition – in six months to a year,” he said in a speech at a conference on reserves at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in London.
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