Tony Blair's Paper Army

An army document leaked to the Sunday Times shows the dramatic and thus far unreported extent of equipment shortages across the army. The dearth of everything from tanks to radio sets is caused by lack of funding for spares and replacements for kit destroyed on operations or too broken to repair. “This is Tony Blair’s paper army,” one senior officer said. “We just don’t have the equipment to train our men. It is all down to the ghastly Gordon Brown. We’re absolutely dreading him taking over as prime minister.”

No area of army equipment is unaffected by the shortages. There is so little kit for training that it is now merely an aspiration to provide troops preparing to go to Iraq or Afghanistan with a third of the equipment they need to train properly. But even this “will take time to be fully in place”, the document says. The author of the document, Brigadier Simon Levey, who is in charge of equipment at the Army’s Headquarters Land at Wilton in Wiltshire, points out the potential problems this could cause, not just in the way it prevents soldiers training properly for operations, but in terms of morale.