The last half century has seen society, technology, the character of conflict and the British Army itself all change greatly. From a low point in the 1970s, the Army’s war fighting capability increased in the 1980s in the face of a prospective war with the Soviet Union. This capability was then tested on operations from Kuwait in 1991 through to Afghanistan in 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There followed two decades of descent from this high plateau of military achievement. Mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a decline in support for military deployments. Cuts to defence funding and botched equipment procurements also meant the British Army of 2021 was only half the size of that of 1970, and with much key fighting equipment either obsolete or approaching obsolescence.

About the speaker
Ben Barry is a Senior Fellow for Land Warfare at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Before this, he served in the Army, where he commanded an armoured infantry battalion and a multinational brigade on United Nations and Nato operations in Bosnia. He is the author of the acclaimed book ‘Blood, Metal and Dust: How Victory Turned into Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq’.