The Staff Captain, Captain Tom Mountain, inspects every detail during the inspection of The Queen’s Own Gurkha Logistic Regiment, 2019, MoD photo.
Currently, around 4,000 Nepalese Gurkhas serve in six dedicated units across a range of roles in the British Army, a time-honored and unbroken tradition that dates back to 1814.
Those units include the Queen’s Gurkha Signals, the two-battalion (and three separate companies attached to the Ranger Regiment) Royal Gurkha Rifles, the Queen’s Gurkha Engineers, the 10th Queen’s Own Gurkha Logistic Regiment, the Gurkha Allied Rapid Reaction Corps Support Battalion, and the British Gurkhas Nepal (BGN).
Stemming from the PM’s promise to raise defense spending to 2.5% of GDP, the MOD announced the new King’s Gurkha Artillery (KGA), the first new British Gurkha unit in 14 years.
The 400-member unit will start filling slots in November, and recruits will likely be easy to find. Approximately 10,000 to 20,000 Nepali men eagerly compete for a position in the British Army’s Brigade of Gurkhas every year. Only a few hundred, typically between 200 and 320, are selected to begin training. That’s usually 30 or so candidates for every slot. They have an extremely low wash-out rate.
As noted by MOD:
As part of the new offer for Gurkha soldiers, and in recognition of the demands of modern warfare, personnel who join the KGA will be trained on advanced equipment, including the Archer and Light Gun artillery systems. In the future they will also train on the remote-controlled Howitzer 155 artillery system.
The Gurkha Museum points out that the cheerful little warriors from Nepal have long had arty units, and of course, the RGR has integral “foot artillery” in the form of L16A2 81mm mortars and NLAW, et. al.
