Wanted: new soldiers for Europe’s shrinking armies

In 2013, just three months before Russia first invaded Ukraine and seized Crimea, Sir Nicholas Houghton, then chief of Britain’s defence staff, gave an unusually public warning about the problem the country faced as a result of troop shortages. The structure of UK forces risked being “strategically incoherent,” he said, at a lecture at the UK’s Royal United Services Institute: “Exquisite equipment but insufficient resources to man that equipment or train on it.”