By: Jack Traideman
Submitted: 2012-02-09 05:33:30 | Word Count: 461
The British Armed Forces are made up of the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force. They are the government sponsored defence units for England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and it is their job to protect Britain and its overseas territories and Crown Dependencies and to help with international peacekeeping. They are overseen by the Defence Council (the head of which is the Secretary of State for Defence). The head of the British Armed Forces is actually The Queen and it is to her that all armed forces personnel swear allegiance.
The British Armed Forces came into existence on 1st May 1707 when the armed forces of England and Scotland merged. This meant that the army and the navy of both countries became one. The seat of control was. This change to the system came about because of the Acts of Union - parliamentary acts in both countries which put into effect the things that had been agreed in the 1706 Treaty of Union. The union was designed to bring together the two countries who were already sharing the same Monarch because King James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne from Queen Elizabeth I.
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The British Forces were deployed in America, Europe and Scotland from the late 17th century and as the British Empire expanded they also moved into the West Indies, North America and India. The first real world war though was the Seven Years' War (1755-1763) where Britain's main enemy was France. The battles were fought on both land and sea. Britain also took part in the American War of Independence (1775-1783), the Napoleonic Wars, and in later years the Boer War, Crimean War and the First World War.
The modern Royal Air Force was created on 1st April 1918 when an Act of Parliament was passed to merge the Royal Flying Corps (controlled by the British Army) and the Royal Naval Air Service (controlled by the Admiralty). The act also brought into being an Air Council.
Because of the outbreak of World War II in 1939, parliament passed the National Service (Armed Forces) Act which was designed to conscript all fit males between the ages of 18 and 41. More than 1.5 million men were signed up by the end of the year with the majority entering the British Army and the rest evenly spread between the air force and navy. An end to conscription came in in 1960.
These days the armed forces are being scaled down with redundancies taking places across the navy, army and air force. Since 1957 Britain has actually been scaling back and the British Armed Forces are entering a new era.
