The US wants Europe to up their military spending. But would hate it if Europe ever became militarily independent.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow 2 battalions? Are you over simplifying or just simple?

@LowBorn The UK military is a joke at the moment. At this point Canada probably is in better shape.

The army is the smallest it has been since before the Napoleonic Wars.

You have 3 carriers that cannot even leave port without engine failures.

The UK military looks better on paper and has done for awhile.

@LowBorn For context. There are equations for figuring out troop numbers. Assuming an agreement was made to establish a DMZ like in Korea. In Ukraine they would need about 80 000K troops to put between the Ukrainian and Russian armies. Literally no nation in Europe or even all of them combined could pull that off.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow The U.K. alone has 108,000 likely France has more.

@LowBorn the UK currently has 32 regular army Battalions and 16 reserve Battalions. I've no idea where he got those figures from.

@PicturesOfABetterTomorrow It was a forced dependency in the post war, it's merely a dependency out of convenience until very recently, the bet that we'll go down with America may very easily backfire on both Putin and Trump.

We have the know how and the economy to stand up on our own, what we lacked is the political will and the urgency, and Trump may have just provided both.

@Richard65 sorry armchair generals.

As of July 1, 2024, the British Army had 109,086 personnel, including: 74,296 regular full-time personnel, 4,244 Gurkhas, 25,934 volunteer reserve personnel, and 4,612 "other personnel”

@LowBornAnd the French have 270k troops.

You should be more worried about your southern border

@Richard65 It's a figure that is going around the internet.

@JimboSaturn No actually it’s an under estimate having check a British MOD website it looks more like 148k troops

@LowBorn Just a sanity check, I don't think its reasonable the Britain would only have 25 tanks.

@JimboSaturn right. We're not a global power by numbers, but to say we only have one Battalion is pure disinformation. I hadn't seen that figure online, but it's completely ludicrous. By the way, the Israelis recently said they were using the British SAS in certain operations because they could provide intelligence to the IDF that not even US Special Forces could obtain. I'm not happy about that (in fact, it pisses me off) but it's an example that it isn't always about the size of your military. The Russians were supposed to be able to defeat Ukraine in about a week.

@Richard65

Moscow

@Elessar Europe likes to pretend they are still relevant geopolitically but that dependence is very much intentional now too. And if anything Ukraine has proven the militaries of Europe are paper tigers.

@LowBorn Sorry but you have exposed yourself as an armchair general thinking absolute numbers are relevant to combat deployments.

Cooks, drivers, and warehouse clerks are not going to be deployed into a combat role. And your absolute number of war fighters also doesn't matter because the deployment number will always been smaller because you need to have reserves to cycle in and out of tours of duty.

Nobody sends all of their infantry and leaves them there till the end of the war anymore. Besides most armies don't have the support units to maintain a deployment of any large size.

@Richard65 I never said the British only had 2 battalions what I said is for a sustained deployment the current state of the army could likely only deploy a couple of battalions at any given time. Lets take your 32 battalions at face value. There is an almost zero percent chance the UK currently has the support and logistics in place to deploy 32 battalions in Scotland let alone anywhere farther afield.

When was the last time the UK has trained for a deployment of a unit larger than a handful of battalions?