How will the army's new Gurkhas fight without any guns?
I am absolutely in favour of raising more Gurkha units. The Nepalese warriors have been first-class soldiers in British service for 210 years, and, while most of the British Army has fallen consistently short in terms of recruitment over the past years, in 2023 the Brigade of Gurkhas recruited 204 candidates from 20,000 applicants.
The commanding officer of the King's Gurkha Artillery, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Fletcher, said all the right things, that he and his soldiers are 'incredibly proud and honoured that His Majesty The King has approved the regimental badge' and that they 'look forward to an exciting future'. It seems wholly positive: the army's full-time trade-trained strength on 1 January 2025 stood at 71,151, its smallest since the 1770s. As Senator Sam Nunn of the Senate Armed Forces Committee once said, 'at some point numbers do count'. We need more soldiers.
The truth is that the KGA is, at the moment, a characteristic piece of Ministry of Defence (MoD) legerdemain. It will not be combat-ready for several years, and it is an artillery formation without any guns.
In April, defence minister Al Carns announced 'the formation of the 400-strong King's Gurkha Artillery'. But that number of 400 – a welcome enough boost, although by comparison Russia loses more than that every day in Ukraine – will only be at full strength and readiness after four years of recruitment and training. We are talking about a unit of the British Army of 2029, not now.
Even the best trained gunners in the world will do us little good without guns. For nearly 30 years, a mainstay of the Royal Artillery was the AS-90 self-propelled howitzer, of which a total of 179 were procured. At the beginning of 2023, 30 were donated to Ukraine, but further transfers in 2024 and this year took that to 68, which, in addition to those already phased out, means that the British Army no longer operates the AS-90.
The only conventional artillery now in British service (that is, setting aside rockets and missiles) is the Swedish-made Archer Artillerisystem 08. Like the AS-90, it has a 155 mm calibre, but with a longer range and a higher rate of fire. The problem is that the MoD only bought 14 Archers, as an 'interim replacement' for what was at the time the loss of 32 AS-90s, not the whole fleet. They are currently deployed by 19 Regiment Royal Artillery in the UK-led battlegroup in Estonia, part of Nato's enhanced forward presence to deter Russian military action.
We are reminded again and again that Archer is an interim capability. The Royal Artillery is waiting for the RCH-155, a self-propelled gun based on the Boxer infantry fighting vehicle hull. Designed by Krauss-Maffei Wegman (now KNDS Deutschland), the RCH-155 will be built in the UK and in Germany. As of May, however, the MoD said that it was 'currently in the assessment phase' and 'it is not possible to provide a total figure [to be procured] at present'.
Ministers hope it will enter service 'this decade', which will mean 2029 at the absolute earliest and refer to initial operating capability. Realistically, the RCH-155 will not reach full operational capability until 2032 or 2033, yet it was previously anticipated that it would replace Archer by 2030.
In short, the KGA will not be an operational unit until 2029, and when it is, the Royal Artillery may still have little more in terms of close support than 14 Archers due to be phased out, and perhaps a small number of newly delivered RCH-155s. This is not increasing the army's capability; it is barely maintaining it. It certainly will not deliver what the Strategic Defence Review called'a tenfold increase in lethality'.
This encapsulates the alternative reality the MoD currently seems to inhabit. Defence spending will rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP in 2027, most of which will be swallowed up by existing shortfalls. Ministers have pledged to reach the new Nato target of 5 per cent by 2035, a timescale long enough to be meaningless. The British Army is too small, understrength, poorly equipped and operating a stance of defence by IOU. Our allies know that, and our enemies know that. Ministers must know that too. The King's Gurkha Artillery will be a useful addition to the army's strength – but that is five years away, and yet the MoD frames it as a fait accompli. Five years may be more than we have.
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