In his new book The Rise and Fall of the British Army, 1975–2025, Ben Barry analyses how the British Army evolved over the last half century. He shows how the Army’s combat capability increased throughout the 1980s in the face of a prospective war with the Soviet Union. The Army was tested on operations from Northern Ireland, the Falklands War, the 1991 Gulf War, through the Balkans and Sierra Leone to Afghanistan in 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There followed two decades of descent from this high plateau of military success. Mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a decline in support for military deployments. Cuts to defence funding and botched equipment procurements left the British Army of 2025 less than half the size of that of 1975, with much fighting equipment either obsolete or approaching obsolescence.

There are lessons for the future from this half century of combat, continuity and change. The book identifies success factors for strategic leadership, innovation, adaptation and Army change programmes, as well as lessons from the Cold War relevant to the Army’s challenging new role in NATO.

Brigadier Ben Barry

Ben Barry is a Associate Fellow, Defence and Military Analysis. He joined the IISS in 2010, before which he served in the British Army. As well as training in Germany, France, Cyprus, Canada, Portugal and New Zealand, and operational service in Hong Kong and Northern Ireland, he commanded both an armoured infantry battalion and a multinational brigade on UN and NATO operations in Bosnia. He was director of the British Army Staff in the UK Ministry of Defence and author of the Army’s lessons learned analysis of post-conflict stabilisation of Iraq.

He is a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and the author of Harsh Lessons: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Changing Character of War (IISS, 2016), The Road from Sarajevo: British Army Operations in Bosnia, 1995–1996 (The History Press, 2016) and Blood, Metal and Dust How Victory Turned into Defeat in Afghanistan and Iraq (Osprey, 2020).