Reducing the scale of the military "beggars belief", a former head of the UK armed forces has mentioned.

Lord Nick Houghton, who was chief of the defence workers between 2013 and 2016, criticised the choice to chop common troop numbers throughout an look earlier than the House of Commons Defence Committee right now.

He additionally branded the shortage of "properly functioning" reserve forces as a "national embarrassment".

Lord Houghton instructed MPs: "It beggars belief to me that we have a reduced size of army.

"We have witnessed the primary actual formalised warfare above the edge of battle in Ukraine and Russia and inside weeks each side have kind of run out of troops.

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"They have mobilised their nations, they have had to call on reserves and yet we as a nation have no strategic methodology for mobilising the reserves.

"We do not have a correctly functioning reserve. To me it is a nationwide embarrassment however they do not seem to wish to do something about it."

The size of the British Army has been an ongoing source of contention after cuts were announced in the last defence command paper, published in 2021.

In the past decade, the number of regular soldiers has fallen from 97,000 to 76,000 and is set to drop to 73,000.

Lord Houghton, who spent 40 years in the army and served in Northern Ireland and Iraq, said the UK's military capability had not been "eroded to the purpose the place we must always fear".

But he acknowledged there were problems, including with recruitment and equipment.

He said: "There's little doubt about it that the Royal Navy is present process a maritime renaissance, however its scarcity of accessible vessels is deeply disturbing.

"The amount of things that actually work in the Royal Navy is quite disturbing."

In August 2022, the navy's new £3 billion plane service HMS Prince of Wales broke down off the Isle of Wight and the ship stays underneath restore.

Lord Houghton added that the RAF was affected by a pilot scarcity, whereas the armed forces generally had been "struggling" within the "global battle for talent".

The committee, which is conducting an inquiry into armed forces readiness, additionally heard that shares held for "major warfare" had been impacted by austerity in 2010 and, though Lord Houghton had warned concerning the potential for battle with Russia in 2013, little had been completed.

He mentioned: "One of the ways in which we were able to cope with less money was to take a risk against the warfighting consumables or stocks that we held for major warfighting.

"Now, arguably, you can say that on the time - 2010 - that was a good danger to take. Clearly, within the judgement of the federal government of the day, it was a good danger to take.

"By the time I was writing my first letter to the prime minister on arrival (as chief of the defence staff), from memory, I was warning him then that the threats of the possibility that we might be called upon to cross the threshold of formalised warfare against an aggressive Russia had been not latent however patent... and so they had been acknowledged.

"Was something completed about it? Not actually."

Lord Houghton said one of the reasons was that the British defence industry was not run as an "cooperative enterprise" however on the idea of fastened contracts, that means corporations didn't preserve the capability to provide extra shares at quick discover.