Tory MP Penny Mordaunt is calling on Brits to be “more resilient” to support the armed forces which comes after there has been calls for some sort of a new national service to be introduced.
Mordaunt who was in the Royal Navy Reserve has previously said she is “incredibly proud of a armed forces.”
The Conservative MP said that by Brits being more resilient does not mean to step forward a “pick a rifle.”
Last week General Sir Patrick Sanders Chief of the General Staff (CGS) warned, “Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars, citizen armies win them,” he said.
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Lord Hague warns the ‘blunt truth’ is the UK must create a 21st century national service
“We need an army designed to expand rapidly to enable the first echelon, resource the second echelon, and train and equip the citizen army that must follow.
“Within the next three years, it must be credible to talk of a British Army of 120,000, folding in our reserve and strategic reserve. But that’s not enough.”
Speaking to GB News Mordaunt said, “We need to be a resilient nation, and that doesn’t mean stepping up to pick up a rifle.
“What it means is on anything that might happen to us in the future we want our communities to be able to respond to that.
“When I re-wrote this nation’s resilience strategy, setting up a civil defence force to be able to deal with some of the things that currently we ask our armed forces to do was part of that suggestion.
“We can take pressure of our arm forces by becoming more resilient to ourselves.
“And that is something important that we should do.”
The former Foreign Secretary Lord Hague has said that British citizenship is “not a travel document” and the “blunt truth” is that the UK must create a 21st century national service.
Lord William Hague has said that the UK must create a Scandinavian-style national service which comes as army chiefs have warned that the UK is not prepared for war.
Writing in The Times Lord Hague wrote, “The blunt truth is that the chances of getting through the next couple of decades without a dangerous world crisis are small.”
Lord Hague said that the old fashioned ideas of national service are not seen “as compatible for our hyper-individualistic age.”
The former Tory leader said that the UK could create a Norwegian style of their national service where 18-year olds are selected for an interview after completing a form, some 17% will then serve for a year or longer.
Tobias Ellwood, the former chairman of the defence select committee, said, “We must get into a mindset that the world is moving dangerously in the wrong direction and it is now impacting on our economy, first in the Black Sea, now in the Red Sea.
“The post-Cold War period of instability is over, a new chapter has begun where a new alliance of adversaries are testing the West’s timidity.
“Britain has done well to rekindle its Cold War statecraft, but we can only continue to do that if we upgrade our defence posture.”
