British Army identifies land forces imperatives

A British soldier using a UAV during Exercise ‘Hedgehog 2025' held in Estonia on 9-24 May 2025, where elements of Asgard were tested. (UK MoD/Crown copyright)

UK Chief of the General Staff (CGS) General Roly Walker identified British Army imperatives during the keynote speech opening the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) land warfare conference held in London on 23-24 June.

He said the UK needs land forces generated by the British Army that can dominate the new zone of what he called ‘the near surface' and manoeuvre in the electromagnetic spectrum, increasingly focusing lethality in a zone 40-400 km from the frontlines that air forces could do but can now be done from the land..

NATO plans

Recalling that the UK's 2025 Strategic Defence Review called for increasing fighting power tenfold by 2035, CGS identified five imperatives for the British Army. The first imperative is NATO war plans and Supreme Allied Commander Europe's (SACEUR's) priorities. Gen Walker said British and Five Eyes (Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, UK, and US) intelligence are identifying Russian strengths, weaknesses, and vulnerabilities in Ukraine and where SACEUR would probably employ the British Army. He referred to the process as the Land Targeting Enterprise, led mainly by UK special operations forces in the UK and on NATO's eastern flank.

Gen Walker said this employs the same methodology that the Ukrainian armed forces are using: “you start with the operational problem, you define the effect that precisely defeats the mechanism around that vulnerability, and then you choose the means to it, and that's what's driving the investment decisions too. This is where human judgement is now meeting the data about where we apply our effort, and that data is increasingly meeting the machines that are going to do the damage.”