Defence digest: Gurkhas, veterans, Taiwan
A new Gurkha unit for the British Army, more support for UK veterans and America's Pacific commander warns China is gaining ground in any struggle over Taiwan
As I now frequently do, I wanted to stick a pin briefly in a few stories without flogging them to death, but these three are all defence-related so it is thematic, for once. I should try to make this look completely deliberate and planned rather than subject to the buffeting wind of news headlines and the gentle breeze of pre-selection delivered by my reading habits. But I may have given the game away.
Mountain gunners
Last week, a Written Ministerial Statement by the Minister for Veterans and People, Alistair Carns, announced the establishment of a new unit, the King’s Gurkha Artillery, within the Royal Regiment of Artillery. It will be based at Larkhill Garrison in Wiltshire, the Royal Artillery’s regimental headquarters and site of the Royal School of Artillery. The process of setting up the new formation will take four years, eventually providing a strength of 400 drawn from serving Gurkha personnel and new recruits. The first transfers of Gurkhas will take place “this spring”, and the unit will expand the opportunities and career prospects for new and serving Gurkhas.
The existing Brigade of Gurkhas has more than 4,000 serving personnel but they are primarily in infantry regiments and their initial training is as infantry. Its current components are:
The Royal Gurkha Rifles (1st and 2nd Battalion, plus 3 companies of The Ranger Regiment)
The establishment of the King’s Gurkha Artillery will be the first time Gurkhas have served in the artillery role in the British Army, thereby widening the skills they can develop and careers they can pursue. The unit will play a key part in the modernisation of the British Army’s artillery strength.
The first Gurkha unit in British service was formed 210 years ago, in 1815. During the Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814-16, the senior officers of the East India Company’s military forces had been highly impressed by the fighting ability and martial spirit of the Nepalese soldiers and sought to recruit them to the EIC’s own service. In April 1815, they created the First Nusseree Battalion as part of the Bengal Presidency Army, one of the EIC’s three presidency armies; it became the 66th Goorkha Regiment in 1850, the 1st Goorkha Regiment in 1861, the 1st Goorkha Light Infantry in 1886, the 1st Gurkha (Rifle) Regiment in 1891, transferred to the British Indian Army in 1895 when the presidency armies were dissolved, became the 1st Gurkha Rifles in 1901, the 1st Gurkha Rifles (The Malaun Regiment) in 1903, the 1st Prince of Wales’s Own Gurkha Rifles (The Malaun Regiment) in 1906, the 1st King George’s Own Gurkha Rifles (The Malaun Regiment) in 1910, the 1st King George V’s Own Gurkha Rifles (The Malaun Regiment) in 1937, transferred to the Indian Army in 1947 and became the 1st Gorkha Rifles (The Malaun Regiment) in 1950. It is now the senior Gorkha regiment in the Indian Army.
I say all of that to emphasise the long history of the Gurkhas in British service. When India and Pakistan became independent in 1947, four Gurkha regiments were transferred from the British Indian Army to the British Army, while the other six became part of the Indian Army. Traditionally, Gurkha units consisted of soldiers recruited from Nepal serving under British (and later Commonwealth) officers; although Gurkhas are expected to learn English, UK and Commonwealth officers who train at Sandhurst before joining the Brigade of Gurkhas are also given an intensive course in Nepali. There are also some Nepali officers recruited from the ranks, and in 1995 Lieutenant Colonel Bijaykumar Rawat became the first Nepali to command a Gurkha battalion when he became commanding officer of 1st Battalion, The Royal Gurkha Rifles.
There are some observations worth making. The first is that the expansion of the Gurkha element in the British Army makes sense from the Ministry of Defence’s point of view. The Army has suffered chronic recruitment and retention problems for some time, and last year the armed forces a whole were losing 300 more personnel each month than they could recruit, in response to which the government is investing £1.3 billion in recruitment. The Royal Regiment of Artillery is currently about 700 below strength. Conversely, the 2025 intake for the Brigade of Gurkhas has seen 16,000 potential recruits competing for 274 places; the formation is regularly and massively oversubscribed, and the British Army should have no difficulty in attracting the recruits in needs for the King’s Gurkha Artillery. The Gurkhas remain male-only; in 2018 the Defence Secretary, Gavin Williamson, announced that women would be eligible to apply to the Brigade of Gurkhas from 2020, undergoing the same selection process as men, with the intention of recruiting 800 women. In 2019, however, this was suspended at the insistence of the International Relations Committee of the House of Representatives in Nepal.
The principle of the British Army recruiting soldiers from a very poor country in Asia which has never been subject to British rule makes some people uncomfortable. The legal situation has been made clear by successive governments: Gurkhas are not classified as mercenaries under Article 47 of Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, being exempted under clauses 47(2)(e) and (f). They are regular uniformed soldiers of the British Army who have volunteered freely, and their association with the United Kingdom goes back almost to the formation of the UK itself: the first Gurkha unit was established less than 15 years after the Acts of Union 1800.
Gurkhas who have served since 2007 generally receive the same pay and pension rights as other British Army personnel, though there is an ongoing dispute about the pension entitlements of Gurkhas who served before that date. The 1948 Gurkha Pension Scheme, which applies to those pre-2007 personnel, provides a smaller sum than for British veterans, but the Minister for Veterans said in answer to a Written Question in February that it “continues to provide a good income for our Gurkha veterans living in Nepal, in accordance with the original scheme design”. Whatever view you take, this is purely an historic issue, and applies only to Gurkha personnel who currently have 18 or more years’ service.
There is a philosophical question which can be posed of whether, in theory, there is or should be any upper limit on the number of Gurkhas serving in the British Army. Currently Gurkhas make up about five per cent of the total strength, and the differences in terms of recruitment are enormous, so there is no reason to think that there would be any shortage of personnel of the Brigade of Gurkhas was doubled or tripled. Not only would this alleviate a major part of the Army’s overall recruitment difficulties, but it would do so without in any way compromising the standards required of British Army personnel.
The Gurkhas have an outstanding reputation worldwide for valour, determination and skill in fighting, individual and collective discipline and rigorous application and attention to detail. Gurkha soldiers have won 26 Victoria Crosses since 1858, and over the last 110 years all but three of those have been awarded to Nepali soldiers. Two Gurkhas, Naik Nandlal Thapa and Lance Naik Chitrabahadur Gurung, won the George Cross in 1935.
With five per cent of the total strength being Gurkhas, it does not seem to ask any existential or definitional questions about the nature of the British Army. Would that change if it rose to, say, 10 per cent? I would say not. 15 per cent? Again, probably not. Yet to approach it from the other direction and ask if we would be comfortable if the British Army was composed 75 per cent of Gurkhas, the answer would, I think, be different. Yet finding the line between 15 and 75 per cent and explaining why it is where it is strikes me as almost impossible. I don’t suggest for a moment that anyone anticipates Gurkhas becoming numerically dominant, but the question is the ultimate destination of the journey which begins by recruiting more Gurkhas to compensate for poor recruitment among British citizens.
The other point to note is the mission of the King’s Gurkha Artillery. The first recruits to the new unit will undergo initial training on the L118 105 mm light gun, a venerable artillery piece that has been in service for half a century, then will progress to the Swedish-made Archer 155 mm self-propelled howitzer. The latter was procured recently as a temporary measure to fill the gap left by the donation of nearly all of the British Army’s AS-90 155 mm self-propelled guns to Ukraine. The AS-90 is now effectively no longer in service with UK forces. The intention in the long term is for the King’s Gurkha Artillery to be equipped with the Boxer-based RCH 155 Wheeled Artillery System, but the current estimate is that it will not achieve initial operating capability until 2029, and full operating capability by 2032. In the meantime, the L118 and the Archer are both expected to be withdrawn from service in 2030.
The arithmetic is simple enough. Even if everything runs on schedule—and in defence procurement it never does—then at least between 2030 and 2032, the only weapons available to the Royal Artillery and the King’s Gurkha Artillery will be the first examples of the RCH 155 and the existing inventory of 61 M270 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems, to which the government hopes to add an additional 15 platforms (although “no final decision” has been taken).
The Royal Artillery has 14 Archer platforms, all of which are committed to Operation Cabrit, the forward deployment to Estonia and Poland. King’s Gurkha Artillery personnel will only be able to train on Archer, then, when they are rotated into the Operation Cabrit deployments. Otherwise, the British Army effectively has no medium- to long-range artillery capability. So it is recruiting this new artillery unit of (eventually) 400 Gurkhas, but for a significant period of time, they will have no primary weapons. Even setting aside the terrifying conclusion that the Army has virtually no artillery, this situation, unless it is somehow changed quickly and extensively, does raise doubts as to the true value and credibility of the King’s Gurkha Artillery. Perhaps the Strategic Defence Review will explain everything, whenever it is finally published…
A land fit for heroes
One of the most important and difficult tasks for any government is to provide support, help and care for those men and women who have risked their lives to serve the country. It is something at which Britain has traditionally been very bad: for many years the Royal Navy relied on the poorest and most desperate of society to fill its ranks and treated them accordingly when they had outlived their usefulness. Soldiers were no better regarded, in or out of uniform, and the sanctimonious hypocrisy in which the British are capable of excelling was captured brilliantly and stingingly by Rudyard Kipling in Tommy:
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute”
But it’s “Saviour of ’is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool—you bet that Tommy sees!
Even when we have meant well, we have often fallen down on the job. Days after the armistice which saw the end of the fighting in the First World War, the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, gave a speech in Wolverhampton just before Parliament was dissolved for the 1918 general election. He stressed the government’s responsibility to make the peace worth the sacrifices which had been made to win it.
What is our task? To make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in.
This was, after all, in the wake of the biggest, bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen, in which the United Kingdom had lost 887,858 sailors, soldiers and airmen and 16,829 civilians, and the wounded numbered 1,675,000. Yet the government failed those who returned, their families and society, as well as the memory of all of those who did not return. There was a chronic shortage of housing, the financial costs of the war began to take their toll on the British economy, the country experienced widespread industrial unrest and by 1922, 1.5 million of the adult population were unemployed. So much for heroes.
The issue of our responsibilities, our debt, to those who have served in the armed forces rose high on the public agenda again in the 2000s, as the armed forces were heavily committed to deployments in Afghanistan (Operation Herrick) and Iraq (Operation Telic). The military actions themselves might have been deeply controversial, Iraq particularly so, but there was a widespread admiration and sympathy for service personnel and a sense of a debt owed to them. This was particularly the case in terms of medical and social care; one reason, I am sure, is that advances in medical technology meant that appalling battlefield injuries, including the loss of limbs, became much more survivable than they had ever been before. That of course meant veterans who are alive and who would previously have been dead, but it also left men and women horribly wounded, with what the media now primly calls “life-changing injuries”.
The House of Commons Defence Committee looked at the degree of support given to veterans in 2007/08 and I was in charge of managing its inquiry. I can honestly say, if only because I am simply repeating what some of the members of the committee said at the time, that there have been few projects of which I have been prouder than what became its report, Medical Care for the Armed Forces, published in February 2008. It was not a panacea, nor was the committee able to wave a magic wand, but it shone a light on a number of areas in which more work was urgently needed: rehabilitation, the potential for disjoined services because of devolution, identifying veterans and ensuring priority access to healthcare, provision for service families posted abroad and the enormous challenges of mental illness among veterans and the provision of accessible, appropriate, high-quality mental health care.
At the same time, there was increasing focus on the Armed Forces Covenant, the network of mutual obligations between service personnel and veterans on one side and civilians on the other. General Lord Dannatt, as Chief of the General Staff from 2006 to 2009, pressed this issue particularly hard, to his enormous credit, and at the beginning of 2007, not long before he left office, Prime Minister Tony Blair accepted the government needed to do more, and, crucially, spend more to make good its obligations.
Earlier this week, the Ministry of Defence announced a new “UK-wide veteran support system” it has dubbed VALOUR (the military adores capital letters). The essential idea, which is a good one, is to provide networks which connect support services in healthcare, housing and employment, to try to address some of the problems veterans most acutely face in a coordinated way. Support centres will be established across the UK and the MoD will deploy Regional Field Officers who will draw together access to services at a local, regional and national level. There is also room for the government’s longed-for technological panacea: “harnessing the power of data to shape better services”.
This concept addresses a key problem for veterans who face interrelated difficulties on several areas which then serve to exacerbate each other: finding employment is more difficult without good mental healthcare provision, a lack of employment adversely affects mental health and can lead to financial and housing problems, sometimes ultimate to homelessness, which then has an effect on mental and physical health and in turn makes it more difficult to find employment… it is one of the most vicious of cycles.
There are obvious caveats to be added to this. The whole VALOUR programme is backed by £50 million of public expenditure, which is not loose change but is also far from generous to “establish a new network of VALOUR-recognised support centres across the UK and and deploy Regional Field Officers to connect local, regional and national services”. Reading between the lines, VALOUR is more about attempting to connect and make more accessible services which are already in existence—“advice on how to book GP appointments, access welfare or support with housing issues”—than any significant investment in those services.
The government is also relying on a combination of public services and private-sector, including charitable, provision. It aims to “foster the enterprising spirit of veteran charities”, and the Regional Field Officers “will bring together charities, service providers and local government to provide more evidence and feedback driven support for veterans”.
I don’t say this straightforwardly in a spirit of criticism. The best of the service charities are excellent organisations doing outstanding work: most obviously the Royal British Legion, but also SSAFA, Help for Heroes, Combat Stress, the Army Benevolent Fund, Blesma and many others. I’m a great believer in small government, individual liberty and self-sufficiency; I’m one of the few people who thinks that David Cameron’s Big Society, if it had received the attention and resources it needed, could have triggered a revolution in how we care for ourselves and others; and I absolutely reject the left-wing notion that state provision is somehow more virtuous and ethically pure than charitable assistance delivered often on a very local and therefore direct scale.
According to research, the British public gave £15.4 billion in charitable donations in 2024, and 5.6 million people undertook some kind of volunteer work. Although we have fallen back in recent years, the United Kingdom is still the 22nd most generous country in the world in terms of charitable donations and volunteering, and it is only six years since we were third, so the will and the public spirit is undoubtedly there.
My caution is about expectations and presentation. The VALOUR network (I will stop capitalising it after this essay) is a worthwhile action and a potentially useful enabler and coordinator of services, but it is not some act of largesse on the part of the government or some great increase in public funding for veterans’ services. It should not be presented as one nor should we as voters expect it to be one and potentially find ourselves disappointed if its effects are not transformational. At this time of shattered and consistently low public trust in politics, politicians and political institutions, it is vital that the government and voters stay on the same page.
John Healey, the Defence Secretary, generally a sensible, pragmatic and straightforward man, may well be correct when he describes VALOUR as “one of the largest ever Government funding commitments to veterans”, and the political imperative behind saying that is obvious; no government ever undersells its achievements. Nevertheless, it is striking that even in the government’s own press release, the ministerial effusions contrasted with the cautious remarks of the Director General of the Royal British Legion, Mark Atkinson, who “welcomed” the new programme, noted that “improved coordination” was one crucial part of “helping veterans lead successful lives”, but also fired a warning shot which was audible from miles away:
We look forward to working closely with government and partner organisations to help turn these commitments into meaningful change.
That is cautious rather than lukewarm, I would say, but its inclusion in the press release means it was the most positive part of Atkinson’s remarks which the MoD could find. He is, of course, quite right: this is good and welcome, but it has a lot to prove and is not going to make problems disappear overnight. No doubt the Opposition and others will watch the situation and hold the government properly to account.
Is the balance of power over Taiwan changing?
I have written about Taiwan several times over the last year or so. I can make no claims to be a great Sinologist, but it seems clear to me, where others seem for whatever reason to prevaricate or obfuscate, firstly that President Xi Jinping of China intends at least to be in a position to menace the Republic of China (as Taiwan is formally named, remember) within a very short timescale, perhaps two or three years; and secondly, that if there is an all-out confrontation over the future of the island, the response of the West, and of the United States in particular, will be important not just for Taiwan but in wider regional and global terms.
Essentially my thesis is this: the United States does not recognise Taiwan’s independence, nor is it bound by treaty to undertake military action to defend the island if it is attacked. However, the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 does commit the United States “to provide Taiwan with arms of a defensive character” and “to maintain the capacity of the United States to resist any resort to force or other forms of coercion that would jeopardize the security, or the social or economic system, of the people on Taiwan”. America is bound by statute, therefore, to “make available to Taiwan such defense articles and services, articles and defense services in such quantity as may be necessary to availability to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability”.
If a US administration, whether this one or the next, were to see Taiwan annexed by the People’s Republic of China, whether or not it had technically been in breach of its legal obligations, the consequences would be very severe. America has a network of security agreements throughout the Pacific Ocean, most notably with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, all of whom face some kind of threat from China. If there was a sense that the United States had not fulfilled its obligations to Taiwan, either in the letter or the spirit of its agreement, then other countries with similar treaties would be forced to regard what they had thought were binding commitments as provisional and negotiable.
President Trump, because he is simplistically minded, narcissistic and boorish, cannot comprehend the importance of matters as intangible as trust and reputation, but they matter: if the United States continues to show itself utterly unreliable as a strategic ally, then its current partners will be forced to recalibrate their expectations and reexamine their relationships. In the Pacific, if the governments in Tokyo or Seoul or Manila decide that American guarantees are no longer enough to bear the weight of foreign policy, it is eminently possible that those countries will decide that reaching some accommodation, however unsatisfactory, with China now is preferable to finding themselves unsupported in any kind of conflict.
As I say, I’ve written about this a number of times. Two years ago I said that a crisis over the future of Taiwan was a matter of “when” rather than “if”, and I highlighted the enormous importance of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry to the rest of the world. I warned that accommodation with China in economic and foreign policy terms could only go so far and that Western countries had to decide where their red lines were, particularly in the case of President Biden, and I encouraged Japan’s growing military strength as a counterweight to Chinese power and as a security partner able to shoulder more of the burden currently borne by the United States. I suggested that Taiwan should be bound more tightly into the international community and advised that we should be clear-eyed about China’s intentions, as the evidence mounted up. I also argued recently that Trump’s nonsensical and damaging tariff régime could undermine existing relationships in the Pacific.
Last week came worrying news. Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM; I told you the military loves capital letters), gave a speech to the annual Sedona Forum at the McCain Institute of Arizona State University. In his remarks, Paparo said that if a conflict over Taiwan broke out now, the United States would defeat China, but that its advantage was slipping away and could not be guaranteed if there were no major changes in policy. He argued that America currently had the upper hand over China in terms of undersea capabilities, space assets and methods for countering hostile space assets, but that the People’s Republic was expanding and improving its military at a rate which would see America’s advantage disappear.
China builds two submarines a year for every 1.4 that the United States produces, and six warships for every 1.8 in America. “Our trajectory,” Papano warned, “on… really every force element that is salient is a bad trajectory.” Moreover, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been expanding and increasing its military exercises in the area around Taiwan, making preparations for the “entire range of military operations”, from a naval blockade or sustained cyber attack to a full-scale armed assault and invasion. China has also begun conducting exercises further and further afield in the Pacific, holding live-firing exercises off the south-east coast of Australia in February. The PLA was even ahead of schedule in some of its targets, particularly satellite systems and rocket forces.
Papano has been commander of INDOPACOM for a year and is due to serve another two years. When he was appointed, he asked his predecessor, Admiral John Aquilino, what advice he would give him.
He said… this could happen on your watch.
The timescale really could be that short.
This is primarily a matter for the United States and its regional allies, of course, and the United Kingdom’s involvement could be peripheral. Although the 2021 Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, Global Britain in a competitive age, talked about an “Indo-Pacific tilt” which was “critical to our economy, our security and our global ambition to support open societies”, the truth is we lack the assets and the capabilities to make much contribution to a conflict over Taiwan. That said, the AUKUS agreement with the United States and Australia which was concluded in March 2023, while its most prominent element is the cooperation on submarine constructing, contains commitments to a free and open Indo-Pacific region.
Moreover, it stipulates the creation of a joint naval deployment in the region; Submarine Rotational Force—West will see a Royal Navy Astute-class attack submarine, as well as up to four United States Navy submarines, based at HMAS Stirling near Perth in Western Australia. This deployment is scheduled to begin in 2027, though, as I have described, the Royal Navy is currently experiencing chronic problems with the availability of its attack submarines. Assuming we are able to overcome the problems, the presence of a Royal Navy submarine in the Pacific, as part of a tripartite American-British-Australian force, in the event of an outbreak of hostilities with China would certainly mean that the UK was involved.
Obviously neither the United States nor the United Kingdom is going to publish its contingency plans for an escalation over Taiwan. But the UK government needs to explore every possible outcome, and factor in as far as possible to unpredictability and unreliability of the current administration in Washington. It needs to know in broad terms how it would react to the most likely scenarios—a partial or total Chinese blockade of Taiwan, a major and sustained cyber attack on utilities, financial services and other sectors, some form of hybrid, “grey zone” military action or an all-out amphibious and airborne assault to seize control of the island—and what resources would be available for such a situation.
The points I’d make are these: this is (in my view) more likely than not to happen; it could happen within the next two or three years; the autonomy of Taiwan is important to the West because of its dominance in the semiconductor industry; and how the West reacts may have profound consequences for the geostrategic situation in the Pacific for decades. Even as bit players, the UK cannot ignore what happens, and it cannot afford to leave planning until a crisis erupts. We need to be preparing now.