Yes. An apple is not an orange, Usain Bolt shouldn’t get into a fight with Oleksandr Usyk, and there is no plausible scenario where Britain’s army would want to fight a grinding battle of land based attrition in the style of the Ukraine war. And if we look at the map of Europe below something is immediately obvious.

Britain is an island and protected by sea. So Britain invests in its navy to prevent invasions. The strength of the regular army under the Tories dropped from around 110,000 in 2010 to 75,000 now. Because there is no plausible scenario under which Britain’s army is going to face trench warfare. Instead Britain’s army is small and either the core if we need to go to militia or primarily an expeditionary and peacekeeping force. It just isn’t set up for battles of attrition.

Meanwhile the Russian army is not very good away from Russia’s borders and has bad logistics but a grinding battle of attrition right on Russia’s borders is the one thing it is effective at. In order to invade Britain Russia would need to overcome the British Navy – and of their two most important ships in 2021 the Ukrainians have promoted the Moskva to submarine (and managed to defeat the Black Sea fleet while not having a meaningful navy themselves) and Russia, after eight years, has given up trying to fix its only aircraft carrier (the one that needed the tug escort).

Yeah, but probably because they only need a month to trash Putin’s army. Then they’ll be home for tea.

More seriously, every single time someone thought that the British armed forces is a pushover, they were soon proven wrong dramatically. True, they don’t have much in terms of equipment—but then again, so do most of the world that is not “United States of America” or “People’s Republic of China”. And what equipment they have are still very advanced compared to most of the world.

In terms of training or willingness to fight, there’s never any question about it. Unless you really know what you’re doing, you don’t want to fight the average British squaddie. And we haven’t even gone to the higher end units yet…

Gurkha vs any unit in the Russian army? Unless the Russians seriously outnumber and outgun them, the Gurkhas.