Britain says it is preparing for war. So why are soldiers shouting ‘BANG’ because there’s no money for blanks?

At some point, somebody in Whitehall will have to explain how all of those things are supposed to fit together.

Last week, we learned that major Army training was being scaled back because there simply was not enough money in the pot to pay for it. Exercises involving company-sized groups of soldiers were being curtailed, larger exercises were being cancelled or postponed, and training was increasingly being prioritised only for those preparing to deploy.

I have even been told of soldiers running around Salisbury Plain shouting “BANG” because there was no money for the blanks they would normally use. And this would be funny, because I think this actually happened in an episode of Dad's Army if the consequences were not so serious.

Then came the announcement that Britain intends to exercise its strategic reserve of former service personnel next year, testing how veterans can be recalled, equipped and used in a crisis. Ministers are openly talking about putting Britain on a greater war footing and preparing the country for the possibility of major conflict.

Now, barely a day later, Army reservists are being told that savings have to be made from their budget too, with the number of days some are able to serve being cut.

You could not design a more perfect example of the contradiction at the heart of British defence policy if you tried.

We are apparently preparing for war while simultaneously trying to save money on the people who would have to fight it.

Over the past few weeks I have spoken to serving personnel across the Armed Forces, both regular and reserve, from different ranks and different services.

What they have told me has been shocking.

The consistent message is that training is being squeezed. Exercises are being cancelled. Activities that would once have been considered routine are increasingly being questioned because of cost. Commanders are being told savings need to be made, and those savings inevitably work their way down until they reach the soldier, sailor or airman who is supposed to be maintaining the skills Britain might one day urgently need.

This matters because military training is not an optional extra that can be switched off for six months and restarted when the Treasury feels a little more generous.

Readiness is perishable, skill fade is real.

You cannot spend years reducing training opportunities and then suddenly announce that everyone is ready because the geopolitical situation has deteriorated.

A reservist who loses several days of training does not simply lose several days standing around on a barracks square. They lose opportunities to practise weapons handling, communications, fieldcraft, medical skills, cyber work, logistics, command and, most importantly, operating as part of a larger formation.

A regular soldier whose major exercise is cancelled cannot recreate that experience by doing another session in the gym.

Modern warfare requires units to work together. It requires commanders to make mistakes in training so they do not make them when people are dying. It requires logistics chains to be tested, radios to fail, vehicles to break down and plans to fall apart.

That is the point of an exercise.

And yet we have reached the extraordinary position where Britain talks constantly about increasing readiness while reducing the very activity that produces it.

Some of the service personnel I have spoken to believe the problem goes deeper than the immediate budget.

Again and again, they point towards the extraordinary extent to which functions once carried out by the military have been outsourced to contractors.

That does not mean every contractor is bad or every outsourced service should be brought back inside the Armed Forces. There are perfectly sensible reasons for using civilian companies in some areas.

But there is a growing feeling among those I speak to that the system has become bloated, expensive and increasingly detached from the people it is supposed to serve.

Ask service personnel about contractors, and you will get a lengthy answer.

Ask them about military food contractors, and you may need to clear your diary.

After military accommodation, food is probably the single most consistent complaint I hear from serving personnel.

For years we have been told that outsourcing brings efficiency. But if the end result is soldiers living in poor accommodation, complaining about the food they are being given, watching training exercises disappear and then being told there is not enough money for ammunition to simulate firing their weapons, it is reasonable to ask exactly where those efficiencies have gone.

Yet Britain is not short of defence announcements, we have spending commitments stretching years into the future. We have new submarines, new aircraft, new frigates, drones, missiles and ambitious plans for the future battlefield.

Many of those programmes are necessary, but as I have written before, many are massively expensive military boondoggles designed to fight previous wars and do not take into account the changing nature of warfare.

But a military is not just a collection of equipment programmes. You can have the finest next-generation fighter aircraft in the world on a PowerPoint presentation, but that does not help the infantry company whose training exercise has just been cancelled.

You can announce billions for future technology, but that does not make a reservist more deployable today if they are being told they cannot serve the days they expected to.

You can tell veterans that Britain may need them again, but you cannot simultaneously hollow out the training of the people still wearing the uniform and expect nobody to notice the contradiction.

British defence policy has a dangerous habit of treating readiness as something that exists automatically because we have Armed Forces.

Readiness has to be purchased. It has to be practised. It has to be maintained. And, maybe most importantly, it has to be funded.

For decades successive governments have enjoyed the political benefit of saying Britain remains a major military power while repeatedly asking the Armed Forces to do more with less.

The regular Army is now only around 70,000 strong. Reservists increasingly fill roles that the regular forces simply do not have enough people to cover. They support operations, specialist capabilities, national resilience and critical infrastructure. They are not a box of soldiers kept in a cupboard marked “break glass in case of Russia”.

Yet those are precisely the people now being told to reduce their activity to save money. And that sends a message, not only to the reservists themselves, whose employers and families already make sacrifices to allow them to serve, but to anyone considering joining.

Britain's enemies are not sitting in Moscow, Beijing or Tehran poring over Ministry of Defence press releases and congratulating us on the size of the spending commitments announced for five or ten years' time.

They will be looking at what Britain can actually put into the field today: how many soldiers we really have, how often they are able to train together, whether the equipment they rely on works when they need it, whether we can move people and kit quickly enough when a crisis comes, and whether all those increasingly muscular promises being made from Whitehall are actually backed up by a military capable of delivering them.

And that is what makes the conversations I have been having with serving personnel so concerning. There are plenty of good people inside the Ministry of Defence and across all three services desperately trying to make an increasingly difficult system work, often finding ways around problems that should never have existed in the first place, and the regulars and reservists I have spoken to, from junior ranks through to senior officers, are certainly not asking for sympathy.

They’re asking for something much more basic: the time, money, equipment and training needed to do the job the country keeps telling them it may soon need them to do. But all they want is the ability to do their jobs properly.

If the Government genuinely believes that the international situation is becoming more dangerous, if it genuinely believes Britain must prepare for the possibility of war, and if it genuinely believes that veterans may once again have to be mobilised on a significant scale, then defence cannot continue to operate on the basis of finding another few million pounds of savings by cancelling exercises and shaving days off reservists' service.

Because eventually you run out of things to cut and you end up with the situation we are in, and there is something profoundly absurd about announcing that Britain needs to prepare its citizens for war while the soldiers already serving are running around Salisbury Plain shouting “BANG”.

The joke stops being funny when somebody starts shooting back.

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EJ Ward is LBC's Investigations Editor and covers intelligence, defence and security topics.

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