Three of the UK’s most senior military figures have backed a bold new blueprint for a volunteer army reserve involving retired ex-service personnel to bolster the Armed Forces in the event of war.
The plans, which are being considered by Chief of Defence Staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, would see 20,000 former regular Army and reservists form 400 units – known as cadres – around the UK.
The ultimate goal of the proposal, revealed by i yesterday, is to seek 200,000 volunteers from the public to create what internal defence documents call a “Mass Citizen Army”. It would bolster the full-time regular Army and the Army reserve, previously known as the Territorial Army.
A Ministry of Defence (MoD) source said the proposal was one of several options under consideration.
General Lord RichardDannatt, who led the British Army as chief of general staff from 2006-09, welcomed the plans and urged the MoD and the Government to back them.
“I think this is an imaginative idea that I hope will be given serious consideration by the MoD,” said Lord Dannatt, who currently sits on Parliament’s National Security Strategy Committee. “As a volunteer force, it avoids unpopular compulsory conscription but would serve as the basis of a rapid expansion of our forces if the need arose.”
The former British Army and Nato commander Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon told i that he supported the plan, which comes from former Army reserves commander Lord De Mauley and existing reserve officers.
“I believe the veterans community is so underused at the moment and there are so many of us.
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“There are so many people out there who want to be more involved. You’ve got tens of thousands of trained men and woman with vast amounts of experience, and many of those would leap at the chance to serve their country again.
“At the moment we’ve got [Russian President Vladimir] Putin looking at us and he is not deterred. I think if he sees there are 200,000 reservists being stood up, he’ll think again. That sends such a powerful message, almost more than anything else.”
Mr Putin has made several threats to attack the West if he considers Nato nations are directly involved in the war in Ukraine. In March he warned the West that Russia was technically ready for nuclear war.
Colonel de Bretton-Gordon said: “If we put these 20,000 former personnel in place to run a mass Citizen Army of 200,000 then Putin would sit up and take notice. I’m certain around 100,000 of that mass force would come from former servicemen, so I really cannot see how it cannot work.”
Urging the Government and the Labour Party to back the plan, he added: “We’ve been very slow to realise that defence is the number one priority, especially with Putin making progress in Ukraine.
“Whoever forms the next government should take this idea very seriously as it’s something they can do very quickly and it has a huge impact. This is an easy win.”
Admiral Lord Alan West, who was the First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff from 2002 to 2006, said of the plan: “I like the thought of using people who want to look after our nation to do exactly that.
“We are living in a very dangerous world and anything that brings patriotic people who recognise the risks we face into some kind of new force like this has to be good news.”
While the Army Reserves are paid a salary for their part-time roles and can be deployed anywhere in the world, the new volunteer force would receive only expenses in peace time and would be used, primarily, to defend the UK’s skies and critical infrastructure in the event of an attack.
The plans are based on the structure of the Home Service Force (HSF) of the 1980s and early 1990s.
The HSF was launched at the height of the Cold War in 1982 and comprised ex-regular, ex-territorial and ex-uniformed service personnel, but was disbanded in 1992 following the collapse of the Berlin Wall.
Earlier this year, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps said the world had moved “from a post-war world to a pre-war world”, and named Russia, China, North Korea and Iran as “belligerent autocratic states” that, alongside their proxies such as the Houthis in Yemen, are currently threatening Britain and its Nato allies.
How a new ‘Citizen Army’ would be formed
The Citizen Army would supplement the British Army’s existing personnel (Photo: Jonathan Brady/PA)
Each member of the 400, 50 person-strong, cadres would have a war time leadership role and a training specialism, such as weapons/ranges, fitness, signals, first aid, fieldcraft and role-specific tasks.
Across each cadre, these specialisms would need to cover the full range of training requirements of a unit.
In addition to their primary tasks, each cadre will also be able to provide watchkeepers and other leadership or specialist functions to assist with national resilience tasks.
This would help the Regular Army and Army Reserve to continue to focus on current tasks and training, especially where the Army Reserve is orientated towards more demanding roles that require increased knowledge and competency, such as tank crews and other complex systems where there is a challenge of what is known as “rapid skills fade”.
Each cadre would consist of:
1 x commanding officer (Lieutenant Colonel) 1 x second in command (Major) 1 x ops/training officer (Rank ranged Captain/ Major) 1 x adjutant (Captain) 1 x quartermaster (Rank ranged Captain/ Major) 1 x medical officer (Rank ranged Lieutenant/ Major) 1 x signals officer (Rank ranged Lieutenant/ Captain) 1 x intelligence officer (Rank ranged Lieutenant/ Captain) 1 x Regimental Sergeant Major (Warrant Officer Class 1) 1 x Regimental Quarter Master Sergeant (Warrant Office Class 2) 4 x sub-unit commanders (Major) 4 x sub-unit seconds in command (Captain) 4 x Warrant Officer Class 2s 4 x Quarter Master Sergeants 12 x minor unit commanders (2nd Lieutenant/ Lieutenant) 12 x Sergeants
Army recruitment
The Regular Army loses around 10,000 recruits or all ranks each year, while the Army Reserve loses around 3,000.
Around 78 per cent of this annual “outflow” are considered “good leavers”, meaning that over the past 25 years around 252,000 trained people have left the army.
Only 8 per cent of these people would be required to fill the 20,000 requirement for 400 cadres consisting of 50 personnel each.
If a serious threat to the UK’s national security did occur, the cadres could train and command 200,000 troops from the general public.
The plan assumes those aged 20 to 60 would be able to volunteer for service. There are 35 million people in this age group, meaning a mass Citizen Army would need to attract 0.6 per cent of this sector of society.
