Britain: Newer Weapons, Newer Technologies

From Shyam Bhatia

London, January 1, 2026. Unable to rely on the vast pool of Indian manpower that helped it survive the Second World War, Britain is scrambling for ways to shore up a fast-shrinking army, outsourcing recruitment, reviving short-term service ideas, and even experimenting with a military “gap year”.

The shift is no longer theoretical. After years of missed recruitment targets and mounting concern about the size of the armed forces, the Ministry of Defence has handed responsibility for recruiting soldiers, sailors and airmen to a private contractor called Serco. For the first time, a single company will manage recruitment across all three services.

Armed Forces Minister Luke Pollard defended the decision with unusual candour, admitting that “for too long we have seen keen and capable prospective recruits failed by an outdated system, full of delays and inefficiencies”.

Alongside the Serco contract, ministers have announced plans for a paid military “gap-year” scheme aimed at 18- to 25-year-olds, offering basic training and short-term service without requiring a long-term commitment. Presented publicly as a leadership and skills initiative, the scheme is more accurately an attempt to widen the recruitment funnel without reopening the politically toxic question of conscription.

The language is managerial, but the anxiety behind it is strategic. Britain is preparing for a more dangerous international environment with fewer troops, less public appetite for military service, and no obvious reserve of manpower to draw upon. European defence planning has hardened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with renewed emphasis on mass, endurance and mobilisation rather than short expeditionary campaigns.

NATO’s Secretary-General has warned that European societies must be ready to place themselves on a “war footing”. For Britain, whose Army is now the smallest it has been for centuries, manpower has once again become a strategic vulnerability.

What has changed is not the problem, but the absence of the solution Britain once relied upon.

In the two world wars, Britain confronted existential threats with resources it no longer possesses. Central among them was the manpower of empire  and, above all, from India.

During the Second World War, the British Indian Army expanded from roughly 200,000 men in 1939 to more than 2.5 million volunteers by 1945, becoming the largest volunteer force in history. Indian troops fought in North Africa, Italy, the Middle East and Burma, sustaining Britain’s war effort across three continents at a moment when Britain itself lacked the demographic depth to do so alone.

This was not a token or auxiliary force. Punjabis — Muslim, Sikh and Hindu — formed the backbone of infantry regiments; Gurkhas served as elite light infantry; and South Indians were heavily represented in engineering, logistics and medical services. British officers dominated senior command, particularly early in the war, but the manpower, endurance and casualties were borne overwhelmingly by Indians. Britain could fight a prolonged global war because it did not have to rely on British bodies alone.

Indian soldiers fought and died with distinction. Indians were awarded the Victoria Cross — Britain’s highest military honour — in both world wars, despite the fact that until 1911 Indians were not even eligible for it.

Acts of extraordinary bravery by men such as Khudadad Khan, Richhpal Ram, Yeshwant Ghadge and Kamal Ram were later absorbed into Britain’s martial mythology, even as political rights were denied to the population from which they came. Loyalty was demanded; equality was deferred.

That imbalance extended onto British soil itself. Indian soldiers wounded in Britain were treated under conditions of racial separation. At the Royal Pavilion, converted into a hospital for Indian troops, care was meticulously organised along racial and religious lines: separate kitchens, separate wards, closely supervised observances.

At the time this was presented as cultural sensitivity. In practice, it reassured a domestic population unused to large numbers of non-white soldiers in uniform.

After the wars, remembrance followed power. Britain took decades to acknowledge publicly the scale of Indian sacrifice. A central national memorial to Indian and wider Commonwealth war dead was not erected until 2002, with the opening of the Commonwealth Memorial Gates, more than half a century after the Second World War ended. By then, the empire for which these men had fought had dissolved, and the country they had helped save had largely moved on.

As the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has since stated, “Undivided India contributed the largest number of volunteers of any country to the Allied cause in the Second World War.” This is not a retrospective grievance but a statement of record by the body charged with commemorating Britain’s war dead.

Britain’s wartime dependence on Indian soldiers was total; its post-war gratitude was minimal. They were indispensable when empire was at risk, and dispensable once it was secure.

That history matters because Britain no longer has access to anything like that reservoir of manpower. The demographic, political and moral conditions that made imperial mobilisation possible have vanished. What remains are improvised substitutes: outsourced recruitment systems, short-term service schemes, and a military gap year designed to lower the psychological barrier to enlistment without acknowledging how severe the manpower problem has become.

There is an additional irony in how Britain is now compensating for this loss. As defence spending is set to rise under pressure from NATO commitments and the war in Ukraine, Indian companies are increasingly positioning themselves within Britain’s defence and security ecosystem.

Firms such as Tata Group (through its aerospace and advanced manufacturing arms), Mahindra Defence, Larsen & Toubro, and Bharat Forge have expanded their defence portfolios and expressed interest in overseas partnerships, joint ventures and supply-chain roles. Where Britain once drew on Indian manpower to fight its wars, it may now rely on Indian capital, technology and industrial capacity to sustain rearmament. The direction of dependence has changed, but the historical symmetry remains striking.

The one surviving echo of the imperial manpower system is the Brigade of Gurkhas, recruited from Nepal under long-standing arrangements described by Parliament as “special and unique”. For decades, Gurkhas served Britain without the right to settle in the country they defended. Only after sustained political and legal pressure did the government accept that service created a moral claim to belonging.

The Gurkha case is instructive precisely because it shows where foreign soldiering ultimately leads: to questions of rights, residence and citizenship that cannot be postponed indefinitely.

The legal position today is explicit. Those applying to join Britain’s armed forces must be citizens of Britain, the Commonwealth or Ireland. Gurkhas remain a special case, recruited abroad under state agreement. For those who complete service, eligibility for settlement follows. Military service, in other words, creates obligations that extend beyond the battlefield.

No serious political figure proposes recruiting those who arrive illegally in small boats across the Channel into Britain’s armed forces. The point here is not advocacy, but contradiction. Britain faces a shrinking army and a more dangerous security environment, while simultaneously struggling to decide what to do with tens of thousands of predominantly young men who arrive by boat each year and cannot be removed.

Right wing politicians  such as Nigel Farage have built political careers portraying these arrivals as an existential threat to national cohesion and security. Yet even as the state searches urgently for manpower, the idea that service might impose obligation — or confer belonging — is never raised. The migrant is framed exclusively as a burden or a danger, never as a potential participant in the state whose borders are being defended.

It is also relevant — and rarely acknowledged in Britain’s defence debate — that a significant proportion of those arriving in small boats come from South Asia and its immediate neighbourhood. Among them are nationals of Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and other states shaped by long wars, sanctions and political collapse in which Western military intervention has played a role.

Many are young men with experience of conflict environments, displacement and survival under extreme conditions. They are discussed almost exclusively through the lens of border control and deterrence, not as human capital shaped by the very security crises Britain now says it must prepare for.

Britain can outsource recruitment systems. It cannot outsource history. Nor can it escape the legacy of an empire whose soldiers fought, bled and died for an alien king and country, only to be segregated in British hospitals, excluded from equal honour, and remembered generations later. As Britain once again worries about who will fight its wars, it would do well to remember who already did  and how it chose to repay them.