Fireside Chat with Ben Barry
The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975 – 2025
Wednesday 25th March at 18.30 | The Drawing Room and Zoom | £15.00 per person*
*Includes one glass Prosecco
*£10.00 for those joining via Zoom
As book titles go “The Rise and Fall of the British Army 1975 – 2025” is one that will turn heads and provoke discussion. The author, Brigadier (Rtd.) Ben Barry OBE, suggests that, from a low point in the 1970s, the Army’s war-fighting capability increased in the 1980s in the face of a prospective conflict with the Soviet Union, and capability was then tested on operations from Kuwait in 1991 through to Afghanistan in 2001, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Yet there followed two decades of descent from this high plateau of military achievement.
Join Brigadier Barry for the March Fireside Chat to consider his assertion that the last half century has seen society, technology, the character of conflict, and the British Army itself all change greatly. To him, mistakes made in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a decline in support for military deployments. Moreover cuts to defence funding and botched equipment procurements also meant the British Army of 2021 was only half the size of that of 1970, and with much key fighting equipment either obsolete or approaching obsolescence.
As well as joining Brigadier Barry, a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, for conversation in the Drawing Room, add your name to a select table for supper afterwards in the Coffee Room to consider further this matter and the wider situation regarding the military. In both parts of this evening, he will draw on Army service from 1975 to 2010, often in key staff appointments, and working closely with the Army thereafter. His research draws not only on personal experience – Germany, France, Cyprus, Canada, Portugal and New Zealand, and operational service in Hong Kong and Northern Ireland, as well as commanding both an armoured infantry battalion and a multinational brigade on UN and NATO operations in Bosnia – but also on a very wide range of written sources and interviews. The ultimate overview will surely be the source of engaging discussion both at the fireside and supper table.
