Troop numbers have nose-dived in the past four years despite the Ministry of Defence spending £40million on recruitment drives.
And MPs fear that time is running out for Britain to put in place the military it needs to counter a range of international threats.
The Army had a target of recruiting 8,220 people in 2022-23 to non-officer ranks but only 5,560 started training.
Last week, politicians warned of a “recruitment crisis”. It came as the Defence Committee said that while the MoD admits for every eight service personnel who leave it recruits five people, the “situation may have deteriorated further”.
This is despite the department spending £39.7million on recruitment campaigns since 2020-21.
Former Armed Forces minister Mark Francois described the situation as a “total shambles” and turned his guns on Capita, which provides recruitment services.
The MP said: “The MoD remains in complete denial about the dire state of both recruitment and retention in the British Army.
“Capita, who have been screwing up Army recruitment for over a decade, should have been sacked long ago – except the senior civil servants and a few generals simply cannot admit they got it horribly wrong. It’s now a total shambles.”
The failure to fill existing vacancies comes amid widespread concern about plans to cut the size of the regular trained Army to just 73,000 soldiers. The number has crashed from 102,758 in 2012 to only 75,983 last year.
Tobias Ellwood, a former Conservative defence minister, said: “Russia’s occupation of Ukraine marks the beginning of another dark chapter in European history.
“With China increasingly propping up Russia, the prospect of further conflict in Europe is real.
“This moment – the calm before the storm – is the time to be strengthening our resilience rather than dismantling it.”
He added: “Only by increased defence spending can we retain the world-class, professional fighting force our nation is traditionally known and respected for. Time is running out to bolster our defence posture.”
Former security minister Sir John Hayes said that there should be a recruitment campaign based on patriotism, with a “strong emphasis on national service and duty”.
And Luke Pollard, Labour’s Shadow Armed Forces Minister, called for a halt to Army cuts.
“The Conservatives have spent millions on recruitment while failing to hit their targets and cutting our Army to its smallest size since Napoleon,” he said. A spokeswoman for Capita said a “tightening of the global labour market” has “impacted recruitment across major military nations”.
But she added the firm is “now focused on delivering a significant increase in recruitment in 2024-25”. She said that “applications are at a six-year high”.
An MoD spokesman said: “With one of the largest defence budgets in Europe, the Army continues to meet all of its commitments, including deploying 16,000 troops to a NATO exercise this year.
“We have put in place a number of measures, including improved career opportunities and making it easier for people to rejoin, on top of the largest pay increase in more than 20 years. Headline numbers of regular personnel do not define the Army’s operational effectiveness.”
