DEFENCE spending needs to increase in every branch of the armed forces, according to the former chief of the Royal Air Force.

Sir Michael Graydon told GB News that implementing planned future cuts would mean the British Army would be completely ineffective.

“All the armed forces, in my view, are at far too low a mass,” he said.

“An army of 70,000 or 72,000, whatever it is, would not be able to keep going.

“It’s a fact I believe that if we were engaged in the sort of war that Russia is engaging in in Ukraine, and have sustained the losses that it would appear Russia has – now those figures are questionable – if they were the figures that Ukraine is saying are the Russian lost, we’d be out of business, we couldn’t continue the war.

Sir Michael made his comments during an appearance on the GB News breakfast show with Eamonn Holmes and Isabel Webster this morning (21 March).

He added: “We only had six or seven frontline [RAF] squadrons – for the Gulf War we had over 30.

“Our navy has far too few combat ships, our army has very few tanks and certainly not enough personnel.

“And over the years we have chipped away at the mass so that we are down to 1920s sort of figures.”