A different angle to difficult choices

First, a premise. I really hate the “difficult choices” refrain that is constantly brought up when talking about UK armed forces. It’s right up there with “sacred cows” and other rhetoric figures which 99% of the time are empty of actual meaning other than making the speaker sound real deep and wise. In the end, it seems to only ever lead to arguing in favor of cutting off everything but your pet project of the day. 

If there is something that years of cuts have made clear is that in the UK the problem is not making “difficult choices” (its Draconian acts of self-mutilation are "admired" worldwide), but making difficult choices that make sense in an integrated defence policy and not in isolation. 

What the UK constantly fails at is taking difficult decisions that adhere to one coherent vision. Again and again, Defence starts investing on one particular area, then eventually, when it is more or less ready to reap the benefits of decades of work and investment, ruins everything by going with another short-term knee jerk decision in the desperate attempt to save some money. Savings which are often ridiculous compared to the damage inflicted to capability.

I’ve already written some time ago a longer dissertation on the cyclical suggestion of “cutting the PARAs and Royal Marines”, and explained just why that makes very little sense, so I’ll just point you to that article, while repeating once more that the really difficult and key question the UK must finally find an answer to is what kind of country and military power it wants to be. 

You can’t separate ambition from how much you are willing to spend.

Once a level of ambition is defined, the new SDSR should completely ignore the empty rhetoric of sacred cows, which are mostly just the latest evolution of inter-service bickering, and assess instead what the UK absolutely needs to do, first of all, and immediately after determine what it can do well, and specifically what it can do with what it already owns. Instead of wasting capability that already exists in pursuit of nebulous new ambitions, it should ensure that the maximum possible output comes from what is already available, for once.

If it is not possible to do everything, you should stick to what you are good at. If your money is not enough to purchase all you’d need, at least start by using well what you already have, and have already paid. The UK is extremely well positioned to deploy a very competitive and powerful naval task force; and owns most of the equipment needed to field a powerful airmobile army capability. It would be absurd not to capitalize on strengths built up with much effort and expenditure over decades.  

When you are “poor”, the last thing you should do is waste what you do have.

Instead of trying to convince the world that tanks are no longer needed; that wheeled APCs are the future; that air manoeuvres are now unfeasible and amphibious capability does not require landing craft and surface manoeuvre, and getting offended when the world does not agree; the UK should use a bit of actual realism and go for the real soul searching.

There are unpleasant questions that I never hear asked but that are staring us all in the face. One is about the wisdom of sinking so much manpower and money into 1^st Division, which has more than half the Army’s infantry under command but that will have absolutely zero supports once the last set migrates to 3^rd Division to enable the second STRIKE brigade. 4 Royal Artillery, 27 RLC, 2 REME, 2 Royal Signal and 32 Royal Engineer are the last CS and CSS resources that remain to enable the “Vanguard Light Brigade” that is organized rotationally from the 4 brigades that make up 1^st Division (4^th, 7^th, 11^th and 51^st).

All of those regiments, and indeed presumably one of the brigade HQs as well, are going to be taken out to create the second STRIKE brigade, leaving 1^st Division as truly nothing more than a container for spare Light Role infantry battalions that support Public Duty and Cyprus rotations and the “regional stand-by battalion” commitment at home, which has been expanded all the way to a 5 battalion requirement in recent times.

One actual difficult question to be asked is whether this use of precious finite resources is in any way efficient and wise. Over half of the Army tied down in “fake” brigades with no combined arms capability for complete lack of Combat Supports and Combat Service Supports is, to me, a complete folly, regardless of how many battalions you intend to justify by committing to penny packet presence projects all over Africa, or sandbag filling in the UK during floods.

And this brings me to an even harsher question that needs to be formulated: are 16 Reserve infantry battalions in any way justifiable?

Army 2020 hoped to squeeze more useability out of the Reserve. At one point, it literally cut down several infantry battalions from 3 to 2 companies each with the hope that Reserves would be sufficiently available to fill the gap.

That project never worked out, and eventually the Army has rebuilt the missing companies thanks to the manpower removed from the Specialised Infantry Battalions (which are just 267 strong and thus have released quite a few soldiers back into the system).

The Army Reserve was supposed to relieve the regulars of a number of those standing commitments that absorb so much manpower, but the results have been frankly far from stellar. Reserves have in a few occasions provided much of the Falklands Islands Roulement infantry company; and in February this year “history was made” by building up a Company group, 240-strong, with reservists from 7 RIFLES and 5 RRF for a six month UN peacekeeping turn on the Cyprus Green Line.

I know I will bring even more hate upon myself for posing this question, but I think it can no longer be avoided: is this output actually enough to justify 16 reserve Infantry Battalions?

I don’t blame reservists: they should be rightly praised and thanked for offering their spare time to their Country and I couldn’t respect them more. But the Reserve must be re-assessed for overall value for money, and for functionality. The problem is easily understood: a volunteer who depends on a civilian, full-time job cannot, no matter how well meaning he might be, be available often for long deployments and operations. It’s just unfeasible, unless the volunteers and employers are supported in a whole different way, which however would make the Reserve a whole lot less cheap. It is not an easily solved problem.

But if Regulars cannot be relieved in a meaningful, enduring and assured way from the variety of secondary, enduring tasks, what is the point?

Resilience and Regeneration in times of major crisis is the other big reason for having a Reserve, but again there is an enormous and majorly unpleasant question that no one is considering: is it really feasible, for the UK, to Regenerate combat mass in a crisis in this era?

What magnitude of crisis would make it conceivable?

What would the timeframes look like?

Could it realistically be done in any scenario short of an existential struggle?

If the UK was to be involved in a large scale operation abroad, which required a Division in the field for more than the 6 / 12 months at most that 3^rd Division could sustain, is there any realistic chance of rebuilding enough mass to relieve the deployed Division with another, for example?

Obviously, 1^st Division would have to be rebuilt into a formation capable of actual Combined Arms Operations. What it would overwhelmingly need, however, would be the CS and CSS units it does not possess, not 16 Reserve Infantry Battalions. The Division already has regular infantry, it is everything else that it lacks.

What level of capability could be regenerated, beyond the lightest and most barebone of formations? There is not any significant amount of equipment in storage that could be brought out and issued to Reservists. For example, even assuming the Challenger 2 LEP goes ahead, which in the current budget climate is in no way a given, the number of vehicles being mentioned wouldn’t even be enough for fielding the Royal Wessex Yeomanry in the field, no matter how dire the situation. The regiment has been uplifted to have the capability to put into the field complete, formed crews, but the UK would extremely quickly run out of tanks to give to those formed crews. Do the math by yourself: we have been told numbers that range from around 140 to 167. Even if every single vehicle was issued for operations, it still wouldn’t suffice for a third Type 58 regiment to hit the field.

Warrior CSP, assuming it goes ahead, also will deliver barely enough vehicles for the Regulars, if that. There is zero margin built in into any purchase, and the UK, unlike other countries, has the habit of getting rid of the fleets it removes from active service, to avoid having to spend on its storage and upkeep.

I’ve quoted the heavy armour bits, but the situation does not in any way change by looking at lighter AFV fleets, or other major bits of equipment.

The cupboard is literally empty, there is nothing behind the glass to be broken in case of emergency. What is in storage is needed to equip the regulars, and considering that just four facilities held the majority of the stores, vehicle fleets and munitions, it is hard not to think that in a major, existential crisis the enemy just needs to land good long-range hits on Ashchurch, Monchengladbach, Kineton and Donington to not only knock back any regeneration effort but to maim the regular force itself into near paralysis.

If we are not prepared to imagine a scenario in which an enemy will try to hit those targets, by default it implies we are not prepared to imagine an actual existential scenario / new major war. With all what descends from this.

I always struggle, as a consequence, to imagine Regeneration actually happening, regardless of whether the Army Reserve ever hits its 30.000 trained personnel target (in the near term it won’t, by the way).  

Even if Reservists were called out en masse and were to be actually available for operations, the ability to kit them out for a meaningful operation is next to inexistent.

I am not in a position to know whether Telford and Merthyr Tydfil could possibly be able to start producing whole new vehicles in a hurry in a major crisis, but output and timeframes, if not overall feasibility, are doubtful at best. Even if equipment could be sourced from the US (the only Ally which might be in a position to help, thanks to the huge number of items it keeps stored and its active production lines), a lot of precious time would still be needed to actually train and prepare units.

When it comes to “difficult decisions”, instead of looking at chopping the best manned and best recruiting regular units in the Armed Forces, I’d recommend looking at how the Armed Forces actually plan to fight, and at their true resilience.

A majorly unpleasant decision to be taken might indeed involve the Army Reserve, because those 16 infantry battalions look like a true white elephant. 

The SDSR might want to reassess Reserve numbers and, even more importantly, roles. 

Excellent results come through reservists contributing their specializations to the Army (medical units being just the most visible of examples); but the outcome from the infantry units seems hard to justify.

Moreover, Resilience / Regeneration should be approached in a more systemic and realistic way. A good way to start could be to try and provide 1^st Division and its Brigades with the supports they lack, using Reserve or Hybrid formations. 

If even that proves unfeasible because of low availability, the future of the Reserve might be smaller and more niche. 

No matter how comparatively “cheap” the Reserve is, if it can’t deliver a meaningful output outside a few specific areas, it might still not be worth its cost.

Challenger 2 numbers: don't waste time on the wrong ones

The Times, almost certainly thanks to someone “leaking” from within the Army, has thrown the bombshell news of the British Army sinking even lower in the global league by preparing to see another massive reduction in the numbers of MBTs at its disposal.

The news is unfortunately not surprising in the slightest: for years we have known that there is a very real possibility that only around 150 MBTs will go through the Life Extension Programme (LEP). It has become an almost foregone conclusion as soon as Army 2020 Refine came out, inclusive of plans to convert 1 of the 3 remaining tank regiments into an “imaginative” Medium Armour formation equipped with AJAXs. I do not think the AJAX idea, and STRIKE in general, in its current form, are good ideas, but i've already made that plenty clear in other occasions.

The Army currently still has 3 tank regiments, with a fleet of 227 “operational” MBT remaining after the earlier round of cuts in 2010 and 2011, but the King’s Royal Hussars are still scheduled to begin converting to Ajax as soon as next year.

The Times report has caused a predictable eruption of discussions around the numbers and their meaning. Is mass important? Absolutely, it is. Is “mass” clearly defined and easily compared? Not quite. How should we read the numbers? It is pointless to compare MBT numbers with Russia, or Turkey, or the US. It is even arguably pointless to compare with nations with more comparable mass (France, Italy, Germany to a degree), because the british situation is, as often happens, particular. The numbers that matter in order to understand what the British Army can or cannot do are others. In this short article I will provide a few key information needed to have a clearer idea of how many tanks the British Army is actually able to field.

Challenger 2 weaknesses do not stop at numbers. Non NATO-standard and obsolescent 2-piece ammunition and arguably underperforming powerpack are the biggest problems of the tank. Yet, the LEP might address none of the two problems. Rheinmetall has proposed a whole new turret, with smoothbore L55 cannon and NATO-standard ammunition, including latest high-tech programmable rounds and long-rod anti-armout capability. One has to hope the funding allows the selection of this solution. (in the photo, Rheinmetall's unmanned firing trials of the new turret in late 2018) 

At the moment, the british tank regiment is known as Type 56 because it has a total of 56 tanks. Of these, 2 sit in the Regimental Headquarters, leaving the others spread on 3 squadrons of 18 tanks each. Each squadron is indicatively structured upon 4 Troops, each with 4 tanks, plus 2 MBTs in the Sqn HQ.

These are the paper numbers: manpower shortages already mean that some Troops might be understrength, while changes in the ORBAT are always possible. A smaller Troop of 3 tanks is a possibility, in order to form additional troops from within the regiment, for example.

We are, of course, talking about the Regular formations. The British Army’s only MBT Reserve Regiment has been expanded to 5 squadrons, but is not meant to be equipped and operated as a tank regiment in the field. It trains individual crew members and crew replacements in favor of the regular regiments and, following recent uplifts, can prepare formed crews as well, ready to be put on a tank and sent out on operations. The Royal Wessex Yeomanry regiment, in other word, is unlikely to ever see a whole regimental park of tanks and is not counted as a 4^th Type 56 regiment.

Rheinmetall's new turret being inspected by Williamson at RAF Brize Norton during the recent meeting with his german counterpart. The new turret would solve the obsolescence of optics, electronics and main weapon system. The powerpack could really do with a change, too. 

Each regular tank regiment is assigned to an Armoured Infantry Brigade, in support to 2 battalions of armoured infantry, mounted on WARRIORs.

In the field, regiments and battalions typically end up splitting in sub-units that are then combined into Combined Arms Battlegroups which are the actual unit of manoeuvre you want to employ during an operation. The ORBAT of said BGs can vary pretty wildly, but I will use the most orderly of the base BG schemes to help you visualize what might happen: the 2 infantry battalions might form the basis for 3 battlegroups, each one with 2 Companies of WARRIOR IFVs and infantry. In turn, the single Tank regiment will split its Squadrons into “demi-squadrons” of 9 tanks, assigning one demi-squadron to each infantry company.

The result is a “square” battlegroup of 2 tank and 2 infantry companies. These are the real measure of the fighting power of the Brigade, as you pretty much never want armoured infantry to operate without intimate MBT support. There was a time in which it would have been normal to have a 1:1 ration between MBT and IFV in the battlegroup, but in the british army that is no longer feasible and hasn’t been for a while.

The issue of numbers gets more complicated when geography and Whole Fleet Management come into the picture. I apologize if the numbers in this section get speculative, but the Army does not like to reveal its workings in the detail, or keep information up to date, so what follows can only be indicative.

The British Army, many years ago now, adopted the so-called Whole Fleet Management approach, which is supposed to reduce costs, spread wear and tear from usage across the whole fleet and ensure there are always vehicles “ready to go” when the call for a deployment comes. WFM hasn’t been exactly a success and it is a source of endless debates in itself, but that is a story for another time. 

For now, what you need to know is that British Army regiments are no longer assigned a whole fleet of vehicles. A formation has, instead, daily ownership of a greatly reduced portion of equipment, the Basic Unit Fleet (BUF). The make-up of a BUF can vary a lot, but for tank regiments I believe it is something like 20 tanks. Aka, 1 Sqn plus RHQ, the bare minimum needed for sub-unit level training (Collective Training level 1, CT-1).

When the time comes to train the regiment to an higher level of Collective working, the unit moves out to a training area (Salisbury, or Sennelager, all the way up to BATUS in Canada) where it “borrows” additional tanks from the resident Training Fleet. At the end of the exercise, said tanks are handed back to the TF depot, and wait for the following formation to arrive.

The rest of the vehicles sit in Controlled Humidity Storage, preserved for assignment to formations deploying for operations. In theory, said vehicles are meant to come out of storage in perfect material state and ready to go, but this has often not been the case.

Whole Fleet Management and geography are two factors to consider when reading the numbers

What does this mean, in practice? Well, the Times suggests that just 148 Challenger 2s might be updated and life extended. This is even less than expected (168 was a number that circulated for quite a while). In theory, it is plenty for an army with just 2 Type 56 regiments, so with an active fleet of, in theory, 112 tanks, (more or less as many as were deployed in Operation TELIC).

However, the Whole Fleet Management approach and simple considerations about geography, training needs and logistics mean that 148 are not “plenty”, not even for an army with just 2 MBT regiments.

The 2 regiments might have on-site Basic Unit Fleets of 20 tanks each, for a total of 40. Then there should be a Training Fleet allocation at Warminster, for use in exercises on Salisbury Plain. I have no clue how many tanks might be part of it, but at the very least I’d expect enough to equip at least a second squadron. Maybe enough to bring a visiting regiment up to full ORBAT, which would mean as many as 46 (without considering any spare). If we are anywhere near the true figure, we have already allocated 86 tanks out of 148.

Then there is BATUS. Considering the difficulty and cost of carrying tanks from the UK to Canada, the near totality of the vehicles used during Battlegroup exercises in BATUS are kept in a Training Fleet held on site. There are probably only enough MBTs for a 2-squadrons BG, but that means as many as 40 vehicles, still. And that would bring us to 126, leaving just 22 other tanks to allocate.

Sennelager? The Army is withdrawing from Germany, but does not want to vacate the Sennelager training area and will maintain a permanent presence there, to support exercises by visiting units coming from the UK. However, having tanks on site as Training Fleet risks being impossible. The numbers are merciless. Moreover, the British Army intends to continue using the Controlled Humidity Storage site of Ayrshire Barracks in Mönchengladbach. This depot is arguably ideally placed to ensure there are stored MBTs already on the continent, so that crews can pick them up and swiftly drive east if it ever becomes necessary.

The problem is that 148 tanks are nowhere near enough to have tanks everywhere. WFM, if done well, has merits, but those do not include reducing the overall fleet requirement, because geographic spread complicates things terribly.

With 148 tanks, the British Army will not be able to have stored tanks ready to deploy and appropriately sized and well placed training fleets. The whole concept will have to be reworked, and since the numbers are merciless, there is probably no real way to fix it. Ahead of any deployment, the British Army will have to literally collect its tanks from a multitude of different locations, raiding all training fleets to be able to put the 2 regiments in the field. And with virtually zero possibilities of ever rushing the Reserve regiment onto the field as a formed unit.

This only adds to the already numerous doubts about the Army’s ability to ever realize its ambition of being able to resource a Division-level deployment with 100% of its armoured brigades. The British Army claims that, in the future, it will be able to deploy 3rd Division for a complex operation with 2 armoured and 1 strike brigade, out of a total of 2 and 2. Respectively 100 and 50% of the total component, deployed at once.

The possibilities of it ever being feasible are very slim. And even if the ambition is realized, there will be literally nothing behind the deployed division. It will be a silver bullet that can be fired only once. After 6 months or so, if the need for Armour in theatre has not ceased, some other country will better show up, because the British Army does not have any other armoured formation to rotate. 

All that remains is a bunch of Light Role infantry battalions (with no supports) coming from the semi-imaginary “1^st Division”. I say semi-imaginary because a Division which will include literally zero Artillery, Signals, Engineers and Logistic assets is not a division. It's an administrative construct, and nothing more. 

The British Army does not need just to reassess the number of MBTs to maintain. It needs, as I will repeat to the end of times if necessary, to reassess 1^st Division, and the best use of the manpower and resources it currently absorbs.

As useful as Infantry Battalions are, I don’t think that maintaining 27 infantry battalions is wise, when it is painfully evident that the Army is horribly imbalanced and completely unable to provide them with communications, logistics, MBTs and artillery support.

Note: the number 27 is due to me leaving out of the total the 5 tiny “specialized infantry battalions”, including the newly formed 3 Royal Gurkha Rifles, as they are literally Company-group sized and have a completely different role). 

16 of those battalions are small Light Role formations (or at most Light-mechanized with some Foxhounds) and are undersized even when fully manned (and they definitely aren’t fully manned, due to the 6+ % manpower deficit in the army). Britain loves its infantry battalions, but reality doesn’t.

It is time to admit that, if the resources do not increase, the army needs to rebalance its priorities and structures.   

Or change its ambitions and settle sights on a different mission. The tiny light role infantry battalions are okay for securing the rear lines and fill gaps between manoeuvre formations fielded by allies. They are also good for a variety of stabilization tasks and “other-than-war” commitments. Is this what the British Army wants to be? Because it is what it will become if the current force structure and equipment choices carry on. 

On the way to the SDSR

It is quite depressing and alarming to be navigating towards an uncertain election with even greater uncertainty about what will be left of the armed forces afterwards, even while the events in the world most certainly signal that the assumptions of the SDSR 2010, and the belief that State on State warfare was (kind of) no more, were both wrong.
It is also quite embarrassing, and there can't be another word for it, that the UK seems set to miss the 2% defence spending target barely months after rightfully and wisely campaigning for the NATO members to strive to achieve that level of investment. Not the Tories nor Labour are giving assurances about maintaining the 2% line, and they aren't even giving real assurances about sticking at least to a flat in-real-terms budget with a 1% increase on equipment spending, which is the absolute minimum level of spending the MOD was promised when Future Force 2020 was devised. With the extremely significant caveat, by the way, that the flat-in-real-terms budget has to be calculated, of course, starting from a base amount. And the base MOD budget has been falling significantly each year since 2010. Depending on which fiscal year serves as base for the calculation, the budget over five years changes by several billion pounds.
Even worse, there seem to be almost certainty that there will be new, vast cuts to the budget. Something that, inexorably, would entirely wreck Future Force 2020, changing yet once more the plans, imposing new cuts even before the last ones are completed. And putting a very big nail in the coffin of Britain's role as a military power. If not the final nail, close to it.

The british GDP has been growing at a rather imposing rate, so the 2% budget target would indeed equate to a significant increase in defence spending, something that is supposedly not doable due to the need for more austerity. Curiously, the same isn't said of the 0.7% target for Aid Budget. In 2013 aid spending soared above 13 billion pounds, and it will keep growing. While the armed forces will be gutted to save a few billions. Effectively, more than closing the deficit, part or all of the money removed from the armed forces will just head completely out of the country, spent in "aid".
I think it is nothing short of criminal, but you are free to think whatever you want. Just, please, don't say that Britain can't afford to keep its soldiers employed. It could. The money is there. It is just going to be used in other ways. And not even at home. Not for education, or the NHS, or even welfare. No. For aid programmes which, often, don't even work, and at times are actually counterproductive.


The 2% target's greatest importance is in its serving as a sort of rock bottom. For decades it has been the barrier supposed to prevent the complete dismantling of the armed forces. What i fear the most, is what happens when even that "rock bottom" is smashed through. There is no anchor left afterwards. The risk is that it becomes a true free fall. Especially because there most evidently isn't the maturity to set out a strategy, articulate what the minimum range of capabilities needed are, and stick to it for more than a few months. Future Force 2020 is already an exercise in a definition of the bare minimum force which can still serve the political purpose of keeping Britain militarily relevant. It is a very bare minimum target in some ways, something that many do not understand. The current level of ambition requires, for example, the ability for Britain to deploy a brigade-sized force enduringly. It takes five brigades taking 6 months tours to do that without completely wearing out men and equipment, and Army 2020 delivers those five brigades. Just. In theory. In fact, already as it is, the last two brigades of the 5 are pretty weak, very light in terms of vehicles and protection and firepower, and somewhat bare of the support elements needed. There is a recognized shortage of Logistic support and, even more, of Signals support. All Light Role Infantry battalions now are understrenght by design, and need a company's worth of reservists trained and available for deployment just to achieve a complete, standard structure on three rifle companies of three platoons each.

And there are other rather dramatic capability gaps as well. The most unacceptable is the lack of a maritime patrol aircraft, ASW capable. The SDSR also badly damaged CBRN resilience dismantling the Joint CBRN regiment and withdrawing the Fuchs recce vehicles from service. A very bad decision, which i questioned from the very beginning (and i wasn't alone in doing so, i'm sure) and which eventually was reversed. 9 Fuchs are being returned to active service, albeit with significant challenges to be faced still, due to lack of money and loss of skills and knowledge. They haven't been gone for a very long time, but i'm told that the dismantling of the Joint Regiment resulted in a severe loss of know how in several ways.

Even scarier is, i believe, the awareness of just how much more capability seems to be hanging by a thread due to budget shortages and aging equipment which might go out of the door without being replaced. The defence spending stories that appear on the press are often not taken seriously due to how they seem to talk of imminent war against Russia, or other major crisises that do not sound realistic, that get downplayed easily. I've already written about this problem, and about the not very helpful input of defence top brass which only seem to speak once they are retired.
I was often warning people about Russia in discussions already back at the time of the war in Georgia, if not earlier. Unlike too many others, i do not undervalue Russia. And i think it must return to be a serious element to consider in strategic planning. But i wouldn't suggest using Russia in a too direct way to write stories which otherwise end up almost ridiculed as scare tales. Besides, there is no need to. Hard realities, numbers and facts are more than enough to sound the alarm. Actually, they do it better.

I think it is pretty scary that the Royal Navy has a young LPD tied up in port, in controlled humidity seal-down, because there are not enough men and pennies to let it sail while her sister ship also serves. But this isn't the worst. It is scarier that much of the army's mechanisation still depends on the FV432 vehicle, which dates back to the late 50s and early 60s and has an official out of service date set for 2030. And the worst part is not even the 70 years career of this vehicle, but the fact that it could go out of service earlier than planned, and anyway without being replaced. The army has a programme (kind of), the Armoured Battlegroup Support Vehicle (ABSV) to replace it by removing turrets from surplus Warriors and convert them in APCs, mortar carriers, ambulances and other sub-variants needed. But uncertainty and shortage of money rules supreme, and who knows what will actually happen. Even in the best case, ABSV will replace the FV432 Bulldog just from the armoured infantry battalions. A number of other FV432s will keep soldiering on, as ambulances in Armoured Medical Regiments, in HQs of other mechanised units such as brigade and division HQ, but also command battery of 12 Regiment Royal Artillery, for example. Their replacement will be a problem once more left for later. In the uncertainty. And this, as of today, is assuming that ABSV can be funded and delivers.
Challenger 2 Life Extension Programme, another one up for much uncertainty. There are 227 tanks left, enough for 3 decent regiments plus training fleet. But the number could fall further, or anyway only a part of those might get the LEP. And even the best case scenario left on the table, anyway, has long lost any ambition of fixing the rifled gun issue, or replacing the engine.
The Warrior CSP programme itself has not reached the point of contract signature yet, so is quite exposed as well. And the numbers circulating regarding how many vehicles get the upgrade are depressing, since they would suffice, at most, for 4 battalions plus training fleet allocations. So, on paper the british army has 6 armoured infantry battalions. In reality, it might soon enough have enough vehicles for four at most. Even before new cuts eventually happen.

Wherever you look, a little bit of scratching the surface reveals potential gaps just about to burst open. I will make some more examples. A very big one is the fact that both the major vehicle depots of the Armed Forces, Ashchurch and Ayshire Barracks in Germany, are heading towards closure in the coming few years. They have already appointed the company tasked with planning the redevelopment of the Ashchurch area. Very little is known, instead, about where the forces will be supposed to park their vehicles after the current depots close. In 2014 the army made it known that they envisage building a new "UK Vehicle Hub". Inevitable, really. The vehicles need a place where to stay, in controlled humidty storage, looked after, protected and maintained. They must be in a well organized depot from which they can pulled out quickly and efficiently, and carried, by rail or truck, or driven towards their parent units and the ports and airports from which they will move onwards to the crisis zone. The problem is that there is no MOD decision on how, when and where to proceed with such a new hub. No plan in motion. I don't even know how it is possible to plan for closure before setting out a plan for relocating the vehicle fleets in a logistically sound way.

F-35, a major programme where uncertainty rules. Will there be 48? Will the hoped-for additional purchases ever happen? Or will even the meagre 48 number be slashed even further?
Tornado GR4 will be soon gone, and while i can only welcome with a huge sigh of relief the fact that there is now a contract to integrate Brimstone 2 on Typhoon (although just 2 launchers, for 6 missiles, at least for the moment), i must point out that any delay in integration (or a speeded up Tornado GR4 withdrawal, say) would still leave yet another gap. Moreover, there's at least two other areas where a capability loss is, at the moment, assured: bunker-busting, and tactical reconnaissance. With Tornado, both the RAPTOR recce pod and the Paveway III 2000 lbs bunker buster will be gone. And there is no recce pod in sight for Typhoon; while the bunker-buster variant of Paveway IV (which by the way, being a 500 lbs weapon, fails to convince me that there won't be a capability loss, even accounting for much more modern warhead design) is not yet on contract either.
Not to mention the ability to suppress enemy air defences: the ALARM anti-radar missile is gone from 2013, and with it much of the kinetic part of the RAF's SEAD capability. A key weapon, SPEAR 3, which is supposed to partially remedy to this weakness and also keep alive UK design and industrial capability in the sector of complex weapons, is another one of those bits at risk. SPEAR could be sacrificed to save the development money, settling for the US Small Diameter Bomb 2, which is cheaper but a glide-only weapon. SPEAR 3, having its own engine, can be launced from a greater distance and with less limitations due to weather, altitude, flight profile. All these things make a huge difference to the ability of SPEAR to serve as SEAD/DEAD weapon and destroy enemy missile batteries. With ALARM gone, it is important to have that kind of capability. 

Type 26: contract signature target date widely missed, a "demonstration phase" gimmick launched which contains long lead items for just 3 ships, leaving all the uncertainty about how things will progress. MARS Solid Support Ships: who the hell knows what the status of the programme even is. The equipment plan documents, as i've already explained, are deliberately bare of any detail and specific programme indication, so things can appear and disappear without proper tracking of changes. 

At times my warnings get played down by "what are you saying, we have 6 Type 45s, 2 carriers, best kit in the world, Typhoon...". And it is true. In part. But there is too much hype, and too little realism. The carriers aren't yet safe. Two are being built, but will both make it into service? Will they be blessed with a decent airwing? So much could still go wrong.
Type 45 is a great ship, but with its own very clear limits. Very single role due to missing equipment fits, which second-hand Harpoon (for 4 ships only) is only partially fixing. Harpoon itself hangs by a thread: it could go out of service in 2018, and the road to a replacement is a huge, floating question mark right now.
Sea Skua will go out of service with the Lynx MK8, in 2017, and it'll be at least three years before the replacement starts being available. Come 2018, the Royal Navy could be, at least for a few years, completely without anti-ship missiles of any type. Which is quite amazing, in a bad way.

On paper, Future Force 2020, especially after the 2014 U-turns and adjustements (Fuchs resurrected, Sentinel R1 and Shadow R1 extended to 2018, Reaper extended to 2019) is still a good force, with some world class capabilities. But much of Future Force 2020 exists only on paper and depends on key programmes which are almost always exposed to huge risks in the coming review. Other capabilities remain, effectively, tied to a time-bomb. For example, Sentinel R1, which is an immensely effective and precious bit of kit, is still at risk, only having gained a life extension out to 2018, not that far away.

Future Force 2020 is quite decent, and could be good if some major weaknesses in it were fixed (and i will write an article setting out such an "Adjusted Future Force 2020" as a second part to this piece). But Future Force 2020 is very much at risk of being torn apart by the new SDSR. A huge number of key components face risks and extreme uncertainty. Numbers which look decent now could be dramatically revised downwards, or anyway be badly compromised by the cancellation of some key programmes.
This is the big issue.

I wouldn't worry about the 2% per se, if there was a mature approach to defence and a firm committment to stick to the plan for once. But that maturity is nowhere to be seen, and so arbitrary spending levels must be advocated, so that at least there can be, finally, a bit of stability over which building is then possible.
Mind you, there is still room for efficiencies (the real ones), and more must be done to squeeze more buck out of the MOD's bucks, because the budget is indeed still sizeable, but quite often does not seem to deliver as well as the french budget, which is the most closely comparable. The MOD definitely has a role and a responsibility in spending better. The SDSR 2010 has introduced some welcome financial discipline and improved several habits and methods, and the good trend must continue.
But it is really, really important that the armed forces are given a stable and reasonable budget, if they are to stay effective and relevant.