When was the last time the UK wasnt involved in any armed conflict?
One of the problems with having an empire is that you’re going to be more or less constantly involved in armed conflict – people tend to be extraordinarily ungrateful and very often don’t like being dominated by a foreign power.
Of course for pragmatic reasons empires are no longer feasible, so wealthy and powerful nations like Britain, now engage in neocolonialism, which among its many benefits often involves the subjugated people fighting each other – with obviously one side hopefully fighting on our behalf.
This is hugely beneficial to us as it requires us to have minimal involvement other than perhaps bombing the crap out of a country, and also maybe supplying a minimal amount of heavily armed soldiers on a few months tour – they’re usually back in Good Ol’ Blighty in no time out all.
The result is very little casualties for us in wars that actually result in tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of deaths.
The British navy does particularly well out of this, despite it still being of the largest navies in the world it can go years with incurring any loss of life, as all that is usually required of it is to fire missiles at targets often hundreds of miles away. They also often supply aircraft which usually come back in one piece.
Occasionally things don’t quite go like they should and it ends being a bit messing with substantial lose of British lives. In the Falklands War, British Forces were faced with hostile aircraft, artillery, navy, etc, resulting in the deaths of several hundred soldiers, sailors, and airmen, in a short space of time. Mercifully Britain very rarely gets involved in “proper” wars and the Falklands War was over fairly quickly.