伊朗冲突使英国武装力量暴露无遗，给首相基尔·斯塔默带来了巨大压力，要求其兑现投资国防的承诺。此前，多位军事将领已多年警告英国军事能力萎缩的问题。
今年3月，当英国位于塞浦路斯的军事基地遭到无人机袭击时，英国海军竟然花费了三周时间才向东地中海部署了一艘战舰。相比之下，法国、希腊和意大利在几天内就派遣了军舰。英国军事能力的下降引起了美国总统特朗普的关注，他将英国的两艘航空母舰斥为“玩具”，美国国防部长皮特·海格塞斯也对皇家海军表示了嘲讽。
斯塔默周三为其防务记录辩护，称其执政近两年来实施了冷战以来最大规模的持续军事开支增长。然而，目前的英国军队规模仅为冷战时期的一半，陆军人数处于19世纪初以来的最低水平。以下是衰退的具体规模和现状：
EuropeBy Sarah Young and Andrew MacAskill, Reuters Apr 16, 2026, 01:34 PMCrew members board the HMS Dragon in Portsmouth Harbour, Britain, on March 4, 2026. (Reuters/Carlos Jasso/File Photo)LONDON — The Iran war has left Britain’s armed forces exposed, heaping pressure on Prime Minister Keir Starmer to act on his promises to invest in defense, after years of warnings from military bosses about the U.K.’s shrinking capabilities.When a British military base in Cyprus was hit by a drone early on in the Iran conflict in March, Britain, whose navy was the largest in the world at the start of World War Two, took three weeks to deploy one warship to the eastern Mediterranean.France, Greece and Italy sent warships to Cyprus within days.Britain’s diminished military capacity has registered with U.S. President Donald Trump. He has dismissed Britain’s two aircraft carriers as “toys” while his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, mocked what he called the “big, bad Royal Navy.”Defending his record on the armed forces, Starmer said on Wednesday his government, in power for nearly two years, had put in place the biggest sustained increase in military spending since the Cold War. Britain’s military now is about half the size it was then and its army is the smallest it has been since the early 19th century.Below are details regarding the scale of the decline and the country’s current capabilities.Royal NavyBritain’s Royal Navy has 38,000 personnel. It operates two aircraft carriers and a combined fleet of 13 destroyers and frigates.This has shrunk from about 62,000 personnel, three aircraft carriers and about 50 destroyers and frigates in 1991.The delays in sending a warship to Cyprus prompted criticism of the navy’s available surface fleet.HMS Dragon, a Type 45 air defense destroyer, arrived in the eastern Mediterranean on March 23, while the Royal Navy has said since the outbreak of the Iran war that it is upgrading RFA Lime Bay to improve its mine-hunting and autonomous tech capabilities.That deployment compares to the Gulf War in 1990-91, when the Royal Navy sent 21 surface ships and two submarines plus 11 Royal Fleet Auxiliary ships to the region.The smaller fleet comes after decades of cuts to defense funding since the early 1990s, when about 3.8% of gross domestic product was spent on the military compared to the 2.3% spent in 2024.Britain until December 2025 had a warship present in the Middle East for decades but that ended when HMS Lancaster was decommissioned in Bahrain just weeks before the start of the Iran war.The Royal Navy’s aging frigates need to be retired before replacements become available, while its destroyers are undergoing maintenance work. A fleet of 13 new Type 26 and Type 31 frigates is due to enter service in the coming years.The Royal Navy is also being stretched by Russian threats closer to home, with British warships recently spending a month in the North Atlantic tracking Russian submarines.About a fifth of Britain’s defense budget is