Britain’s strategic reserve is being called up for the first big war-readiness drill in years

UK veterans to be called for new military exercise in major mobilisation

Some veterans will be called up as part of a major government exercise testing the UK's resilience for war, the BBC reports.

The drill is set to challenge the Ministry of Defence "on a scale that we haven't seen for a very long time" and how it would react in the event of a conflict, according to armed forces minister Louise Sandher-Jones.

It is a striking piece of housekeeping for a country that has spent decades assuming its retired soldiers, sailors and air crew were a line on a spreadsheet rather than a resource anyone would ever need to actually find, contact and kit out.

Who is in the strategic reserve

The exercise will involve an as-yet unspecified number of the military's strategic reserve, but estimates 95,000 retired regular and reserve officers.

After warnings of a workforce retention crisis, the mobilisation forms part of an MoD plan for a "real step change" in how that pool is used.

Sandher-Jones, having served as an intelligence officer in the British Army before becoming an MP, is in the strategic reserve herself.

She told the House of Lords national resilience committee on Monday that "when I left the Army and found out I was in the strategic reserve, I just filed it away and never thought about it again."

She added: "We are definitely no longer in that space, the strategic reserve is a real commitment for those who are in it, and they will be exercised as part of our exercise programme next year."

The 2027 exercise will "go through measures to call out, to use and equip" the procedures needed to mobilise retired troops at scale.

Why the strategic reserve is suddenly interesting

Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, chief of the defence staff, warned in January that there was no effective system for engaging them.

Covers the Army, Navy and RAF, ministers raised the age limit for the reserve, from 55 to 65, and lowered the threshold for being called into service early in the year.

Taken together, those two changes do something fairly significant: they widen the pool by a decade at the top end, and they make it easier to reach into.

The 2027 exercise is the first real test of whether any of that machinery works in practice, or whether it only exists on paper.

The retention warnings sit underneath all of it.

If the regular forces are struggling to keep people, the 95,000 who have already left become considerably more valuable, which is presumably why the MoD now wants them exercised rather than filed away.

Tinned food and 3% of GDP

It lands with the government under pressure to lift defence spending to 3% of GDP by the end of the decade, up from an estimated 2.4% last year on Nato figures.

Since Wes Streeting on taking the defence job the brief has not got any quieter, not least after Russia's warning of 'catastrophic consequences'.

A major public awareness campaign is also planned for the coming months, hinting at a military gap-year for men and women under the age of 25.

Briefings have suggested it could include advice on stockpiling tinned food and bottled water in the event of extreme weather and cyber attacks.