On the twenty-second of November 2024, I released a video with a provocative title: could Russia attack Britain, and what might a conventional strike actually look like? A fair number of viewers dismissed it as scaremongering, and I understood why the framing could upset people. But I think many of them missed my actual point. I was not suggesting that Moscow would launch an unprovoked assault on the United Kingdom in isolation, because that would almost certainly trigger a full NATO response and invite total ruin.
My argument was narrower and more uncomfortable. I was exploring how Russia could cripple the United Kingdom if NATO, Britain included, were already at war. In that scenario, I argued that a combination of precision cruise missile strikes and coordinated cyber attacks would quickly overwhelm our unhardened transport hubs and power generation facilities, along with many of our military bases. The result would be chaos across the country almost immediately.
The food supply chain would be particularly fragile, ports and bridges would become unusable, and power stations could be disabled with relative ease. Telephone networks would go down, and civil unrest would follow as surely as night follows day. Now, it appears that those warnings, and the warnings of many other commentators over the past few years, have finally started to be heard. The current government and the Ministry of Defence are taking steps to launch the largest civil defence resilience exercises since the end of the Cold War in 1991, designed to test how the country would cope with conventional and cyber attacks.
That is encouraging in one sense, but I am not convinced that Britain, with an army that is very small and chronically underfunded, could do much in the face of a truly multidimensional attack designed by Russia or any other foreign adversary. One of the key questions being examined by the Ministry of Defence is how the British Army could be expanded rapidly in the face of such threats, or in the event that war actually broke out. A great deal of nonsense has been written in the newspapers over the past couple of years about conscription, or the return of national service. But the last thing the army would want in a time of crisis is to try to train reluctant young men and women, forced into uniform against their will, from absolute scratch.
In this programme, I want to look at how the Ministry of Defence could actually expand the army quickly without the government imposing conscription, and, if they did attempt to impose it, what that might realistically look like. The argument that politicians often make these days is to call for the reinstatement of national service. That was the compulsory military service for young men that existed in Britain between 1948 and 1963. I will show you a clip from a film in a moment that gives you an idea of what national service actually involved.
The uniform and the weapons may have changed over the decades, but the fundamentals remain the same. The goal is to transform an eighteen-year-old civilian into a disciplined, physically fit, sharp-eyed fighter within a few short weeks, before sending him off to serve his country in a useful role and then return him to society. And, crucially, for any future emergency, national service created a huge pool of trained former soldiers who could be recalled to the colours if necessary. That is something we simply do not have today.
The training begins with general military instruction over five intense weeks. On the parade square, the sergeant takes charge. The recruits have already listened to the company officers and the commanding officer. They know why they are here and what is expected of them, and any concerns their families might have are dismissed.
But now the sergeant tells them plainly, you have to listen to me. The platoon snaps to attention. Move to the left in threes. Turn left.
To the right, turn right. Quick march. And so begins the first stage, five gruelling and relentless weeks designed to lay the foundations of discipline, basic knowledge, and physical fitness upon which everything else is built. The transformation that takes place in these men over just five short weeks is genuinely remarkable.
Standing tall and alert, they begin to develop a new confidence in themselves. They learn to cooperate, to follow orders instantly, and to understand their place within the larger machine. Britain abolished compulsory military service in May 1963. Before that, between 1948 and 1963, all able-bodied young men were required to serve for eighteen months in one of the armed forces.
And before that, compulsory military service had only been imposed twice, during the two world wars. Britain has always relied on a professional volunteer army, and that model has continued from 1963 right up to the present day. This raises an obvious question. With a British Army so small that a former army chief famously stated it would struggle to hold a small town in the event of war, what would happen if the British government decided to commit the United Kingdom to a large-scale war with any of its potential adversaries?
How would the army, the nation’s primary combat force, be expanded to provide a force large enough to make a real difference in that kind of conflict? Well, the government would not start by calling up ordinary civilians. Instead, it would first exhaust its stock of reservists and retired personnel before moving on to untrained civilians. This is because the army is actually backed by two groups of trained individuals who can be legally mobilised in an emergency.
Today, the regular British Army numbers roughly 74,000 soldiers, representing around thirteen combat brigades and divisions, and it maintains two divisions ready for deployment. The first group of trained personnel that could be called up in an emergency is known as the Regular Reserve. This consists of former regular servicemen and women who, upon leaving the army, retain a legal obligation to serve for a set number of years after their regular service has ended. My maternal grandfather faced this situation in 1950.
He had been a regular soldier between 1930 and 1946, and became a civilian after the Second World War. But he was called back into service from the Regular Reserve for the Korean War because of a shortage of experienced veterans. He ended up serving until 1960 after deciding to stay in the army following the war. Unfortunately, the current size of the army’s Regular Reserve is not publicly announced.
The last available figure dates back to 2014, when the regular army was significantly larger, and the Regular Reserve was recorded at 30,030 personnel. To be cautious, I will discount that 2014 figure for a 2026 estimate and assume roughly 15,000 Regular Reservists. Calling them up would raise the army to around 89,000 personnel. The next stockpile of trained soldiers that could be drawn upon is the Volunteer Reserve, formerly known as the Territorial Army, or weekend warriors, because they are part-time soldiers who are civilians in uniform.
The Army Reserve would be immediately integrated into the regular army in the event of war, exactly as happened with the Territorial Army in 1939. Its members and units would be distributed wherever they were needed. The Army Reserve currently numbers 25,700 men and women. Although, in reality, some would be considered medically unfit or would be exempted for various reasons, such as the nature of their civilian jobs.
But the vast majority would likely be mobilised. That would increase the army to 114,700 personnel, bringing it up to the strength of the regular army in the late 1990s. With that number, you could probably secure three market towns. After that, the trained workforce would, of course, be exhausted.
The Ministry of Defence has pushed for what is called a strategic reserve call-up, which would bring former soldiers back into service up to the age of 65. That would fill the ranks, but with older and less fit personnel. Finally, civilian mobilisation would be the last resort. It might begin with a national campaign calling for volunteers to join the army, reminiscent of Lord Kitchener’s famous your country needs you poster.
But I believe such a campaign would struggle to succeed. People today are far less patriotic than they once were, and far more aware of what is happening in the world than the generations of the two world wars. Since the army already finds it extremely difficult to persuade people to join in peacetime, it is unlikely that more people would want to join in wartime with all the associated risks. The last resort, then, would be conscription.
Whether that takes the form of a reinstatement of the national service that existed in the forties, fifties, and sixties, the call-up arrangements of the Second World War, or some kind of lottery system borrowed from the Americans during the Vietnam War, who knows. We also do not know whether the same exemptions would apply as in previous conflicts. If a major conflict occurred, the army would need a great deal of manpower quickly. In 1939, men aged between twenty and twenty-three were the first required to register.
Reserved occupations were legally protected. For example, men working in essential industries, such as coal mining, agriculture, engineering, and medicine, were generally not called up, although they could volunteer for service if they wished. Today, of course, reserved occupations would not be the same. We no longer have a coal mining industry.
Agriculture no longer depends intensively on mass labour, having shrunk to essentially one farmer per farm in many areas. So that entire category of civilian labour no longer exists to be protected. The conscientious objector category might well be reintroduced. There would likely be a system of tribunals, as in the Second World War, to determine who held genuine moral convictions against fighting and who could be conscripted or imprisoned for refusing to serve.
Those classified as conscientious objectors would be given non-combatant roles or civilian work that supported the war effort. Would women be subject to military service alongside men this time around? These are all interesting questions that I do not believe the government has yet answered. The first stage would be this limited conscription.
In 1939, as I mentioned, 240,000 men registered for service. However, this was later expanded to full conscription of men aged between eighteen and forty, with exceptions for the medically unfit and certain essential workers. Later, conscription was extended to age fifty-one for the army, and in some civil defence organisations up to age sixty. For example, in the police, fire services, civil defence work, and the Home Guard, and so forth.
Britain is not the only country contemplating a return to conscription. The United States recently ordered young men to register for the draft. Germany is seriously studying the reintroduction of national service. Russia is attempting to mobilise up to half a million reservists.
So what do you make of all this? It is certainly an interesting trend across many nations today. Thank you very much for watching. Please subscribe and share, and visit my channel for the audiobooks, war stories with Mark Felton.
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