The head of the British military has insisted he has not fallen out with the army’s chief over cuts, telling MPs the decision to restrict the latter to a two-year contract was made by the defence secretary without consulting him.
Adm Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff, was trying to defuse a row that broke out at the end of last week, when it emerged that interviews had begun to replace Gen Sir Patrick Sanders, the chief of the general staff, prompting allies to warn he was being forced out.
“The tenure of chiefs is very much something for the defence secretary, and when he appointed Patrick Sanders it was for two years,” Radakin said, adding that he had not been consulted about the decision made by Ben Wallace last year. He was speaking to MPs at a session of the House of Commons defence committee on Tuesday.
He then suggested that Wallace had taken the decision before his own appointment as head of the armed forces, although it was in fact announced in February 2022. Radakin started in post three months earlier, in November 2021.
There was also surprise among MPs on the committee, several of whom are former defence ministers, when Radakin said that Wallace would sometimes attend the committee responsible for making senior military appointments as a non-voting observer.
That amounted to a “huge constitutional change”, Labour’s Kevan Jones said. “If a Labour government had done this, in terms of ministers actually [being] in the selection process, then I can imagine the headlines in the Daily Mail.”
Army, navy and air force chiefs traditionally serve an initial two years that are often extended to a third. But Sanders, who has repeatedly warned about cuts to the army budget at a time when Russia invaded Ukraine, has only been in post 13 months.
“Patrick and I haven’t fallen out either,” Radakin said, adding: “We were surprised by the press reports and WhatsApped each other on Friday.”
Several media outlets, including the Guardian, said there were difficulties between the two ahead of the publication of a review paper in either July or September.
Since then, there has been a concerted push back. Senior MoD sources said Sanders was only given two years in the job because he had previously served three years as head of strategic command, responsible for the UK’s special and cyber forces.
But army sources complained that the force has born the brunt of cuts while last week Sanders warned that Britain should “never again be unprepared as our forebears were in the 1930s”. Britain could not rely on its geography “to minimise investment on land”, he added.
In Ukraine, Radakin said the “full counteroffensive still hasn’t happened” and that Kyiv was engaged in a strategy to “starve, stretch and strike” in an attempt to gradually prise open Russian defensive lines.
Although Ukraine had so far only made limited gains on the ground, he said “even in the last few weeks” that “Ukraine has taken more ground than Russia has taken in the last year” – and that Moscow’s forces had already been weakened to the point where they could no longer mount their own counterattack in response.
