United Kingdom: Headquarters set up in Paris for troop deployment in Ukraine

Defense It is a rare and remarkable feat in the annals of statecraft to build a war machine that possesses everything except the ability to fight.

Yet, as of early 2026, the British government appears to have achieved exactly that. While the public was busy navigating the mundane inconveniences of a crumbling domestic infrastructure, a 70-person coordination cell was quietly birthed at Fort Mont-Valérien, just outside Paris.

This is the nervous system of the Multinational Force Ukraine (MNF-U)—a strategic headquarters that boasts a French three-star general, a British two-star commander, and a working language of English. It is, by all accounts, a magnificent brain. It is only a pity that the body attached to it has the structural integrity of a damp biscuit.

The bureaucracy of a conflict Britain can neither afford nor physically sustain is now fully operational. It has a budget of £200 million for "preparedness," a prestigious address, and a name that sounds like a mid-tier insurance conglomerate. What it does not have, unfortunately, is an army.

The Secretary of firsts and the magic of symbolic gestures

Defence Secretary John Healey has made his ambitions clear. He wants to be the "first" to send British troops to Ukraine, a milestone he seems to view with the same professional zeal one might apply to being the first to trial new office software.

His logic, shared in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph, suggests that putting British boots on the ground would mean the war is "finally over." It is a charmingly optimistic view, though it fails to specify whether the war ends because of a Russian retreat or because the British "Ghost Army" has been successfully integrated into the Ukrainian soil.

Not to be outdone in the realm of creative strategy, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently informed the BBC that there is "no logical reason" not to send troops immediately. His goal is to "flip a switch" in Vladimir Putin’s mind.

In the world of high-stakes geopolitics, this is a revolutionary approach: the "Mind Palace" school of warfare. It assumes that an adversary who has spent twenty-six years responding exclusively to cold, hard battlefield realities will suddenly be paralyzed by the sight of a 70-person coordination cell in Paris. It is a strategy that treats the Kremlin like a temperamental light fixture rather than a nuclear-armed state that has increased its artillery production elevenfold since the festivities began.

The Coalition of the Willing (to watch)

The so-called "Coalition of the Willing" comprises 34 countries, all standing together in a display of solidarity that is as wide as an ocean and as deep as a puddle. Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovile Sakaliene, perhaps the only person in the room willing to check the inventory, recently pointed out the obvious: if this coalition cannot muster even 64,000 troops, it doesn't just look weak—it effectively functions as a polite suggestion.

The British contribution to this grand endeavor is a "deployable fighting force" of approximately 10,000 soldiers. To find a time when the British Army was this small, one has to travel back to the era of Oliver Cromwell—a man who, for all his faults, generally made sure his soldiers had pikes that worked.

The ratio currently stands at two soldiers for every 1,000 civilians, the lowest in British history. The Royal Navy, once the "Wooden Walls" of the nation, has been reduced to ten warships. One Type 45 destroyer spent eight years in port, presumably waiting for the "Global Britain" slogan to be translated into actual steel.

The RAF, meanwhile, possesses 140 fighter jets—roughly a tenth of its Cold War strength—and a 2024 assessment confirmed it is currently unequipped to stop a drone swarm, let alone a ballistic missile.

The ledger of the imaginary billions

While the military is shrinking, the rhetoric is expanding at an inflationary rate. Defense chiefs warned the government in late 2025 of a £28 billion shortfall in the budget—a gap roughly the size of a small moon. This hasn't stopped the pledging of £21.8 billion to Ukraine, including £3 billion a year until 2030. It is a masterclass in fiscal theater: spending money we don't have to replace stocks we haven't bought for an army that isn't there.

The human element of this ghost story is equally haunting. In 2024, 15,000 personnel left the armed forces, while only 12,000 joined. This net loss of 3,000 occurred despite the "largest pay increase in 22 years," which left soldiers a staggering 1.9% better off than they were in 2011.

For comparison, junior doctors received a 13.4% increase over the same period. It appears that the government believes the honor of being a "symbolic gesture" in a Russian artillery zone is compensation enough for a stagnant wage.

General Patrick Sanders, the former Chief of the General Staff, has been uncharacteristically direct, stating that the British Army is simply "too small to survive a war." Japan has even begun referring to Britain as a "phantom ally," which is perhaps the most polite way of saying "imaginary friend."

The enemy who failed to follow the plan

The most inconvenient part of this narrative is the Russian economy’s refusal to die on cue. The strategy was predicated on a collapse that never arrived. Instead of the predicted ruin, Russia recorded GDP growth of 4.3% in 2024. The IMF—hardly a Kremlin subsidiary—ranked Russia’s growth above that of the UK, Germany, and France. In July 2024, the World Bank upgraded Russia to a "high-income" country, with real wages rising by 8.7%.

While the British public was told that sanctions were a necessary sacrifice for the "rules-based order," the result has been a masterclass in self-inflicted irony. We traded cheap pipeline gas for American LNG at three times the price, successfully diverting Russian energy exports to India and China. The companies that profited were American; the workers who paid were European; and the British, as ever, led the pack in paying the highest price for the privilege of being the most "willing."

The strategy has been a resounding success, provided the goal was to upgrade the Russian economy to "high-income" status while reducing the British Army to a 70-person office in France.

The English have historically overthrown kings for less than this level of strategic incompetence. They have set fire to parliaments for smaller betrayals of the national interest. That tradition of resistance hasn't disappeared; it is simply waiting for the moment the "Ghost Army" is asked to manifest in a real world governed by physics rather than press releases.

One can only hope that when that day comes, the 70-person coordination cell at Fort Mont-Valérien has a very good exit strategy.