The Army’s organisation and ethos has changed to reflect this, the doctrine and training for mass armoured warfare of BAOR giving way, over the past twenty years, to a focus on lighter operations in small wars and counterinsurgencies in remoter areas. This pattern commenced with the Gulf War of 1991 and continued with recent action against jihadi terrorist groups in the Middle East since 2014, but was dominated by the decade-long campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were operations ‘out of area’ during this period, most obviously the Falklands War of 1982, but these were few and far between and often involved small and select parts of the Army not preparing for the projected ‘real’ war in Germany, such as The Parachute Regiment, or the Royal Marines, part of the Royal Navy. An important secondary role, which continued for almost a decade afterwards, was containing the prolonged insurgency in Northern Ireland, necessitating training and organisation for urban counterinsurgency and aid to the civil authorities. The BAOR trained and organised for Second World War-scale armoured battles also, it was presumed, involving the use of battlefield nuclear weapons by both sides and chemical weapons by the enemy. The four armoured divisions of the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) were deployed under North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) command in northern Germany as a contingency against a Soviet invasion which would precipitate a Third World War.
Before the early 1990s that core mission was to prepare, literally, for Armageddon. First is a change in the fundamental role of the British Army and its core mission set. The Integrated Review and Command Paper are potentially seminal documents in the history of the British Army, and, indeed, fall at the intersection of several historical processes. Before doing this, however, it will be helpful to situate the Integrated Review and Command Paper in the context of the recent history and current state of the UK’s land warfare capabilities.
There are signs, however, that some of these aspirations may be problematic, as will be explained throughout the paper.
It is most likely to be in the land domain that decisive military outcomes are achieved if deterrence fails.’ So, whatever the reorientation of British strategy towards maritime operations and the Asia-Pacific, credible land warfare capabilities must remain a key part of the UK’s defence setup if it is to meet the aspirations laid out in the Integrated Review. Beyond this are the eternal fundamentals of land warfare, presented very clearly in Future Soldier: ‘It is only on land that ground can be held, populations sufficiently reassured and adversaries physically deterred from aggression.
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