How long Britain could really fight for if war broke out tomorrow
9 December 2025
Featured in BBC News
UK Defence
I think it's a cultural thing within the UK," says Ed Arnold, senior research fellow at Rusi. "So if you look at the states that are now looking towards [military service] - like Sweden, Germany and France - they are states who culturally still have an institutional memory of when they had that system. We haven't had national service since the 1960s and attempts to have that national conversation around it have pretty much backfired."

