Conflicted About Defence
Could the United Kingdom really be at war with Russia in two or three years?
Last month, Poland’s President, Andrzej Duda warned that Russia could have the capability to attack a NATO country by 2026/27. Given his country’s geography and history, it is unsurprising that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Poland increased its commitment to defence to 4 per cent GDP.
Since February 2022, the closer to Russia, the sharper governments’ focus on military readiness. With its 830-mile border with Russia, a year ago Finland joined NATO, becoming the 31st Alliance member. In Romania, the expansion of the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base on the Black Sea is being turbo-charged, while Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania announced in January the creation of the Baltic Defence Line to reinforce their borders against Russia and Belarus. Moldova’s breakaway enclave of Transnistria – an hour’s drive from Odessa and with its symbolic presence of a small unit of Russian forces – is back on radar of the media’s foreign desks.
NATO’s Article V is its cornerstone: an attack on one alliance member is an attack on all. Should Moscow go on the offensive against a member state (its forces, say, crossing the 120-mile land border and invading Norway), Britain would have to mobilise for conflict.
Although successive governments have been mustard-keen in the past three decades to take the post-Cold War peace dividend and cut defence to the bone, ministers are now scrambling to jaw-jaw about war-war. Defence Secretary Grant Shapps warned that we are in a ‘pre-war world’ and, during a visit to Ukraine last month, stated he ‘impatient’ to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent GDP (up from 2.27 per cent).
Shapp’s luggage reportedly included Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918-40 by former Army chief Richard Dannatt and historian Robert Lyman. An account of the perils of squandering professional military expertise and not preparing for confrontation, the book has lessons for today. In January, the Defence Select Committee’s Ready for War report invoked ‘storm clouds on the horizon’. The Ukraine invasion has fundamentally changed the threat, ‘demonstrating that Russia has both the capability and intent to prosecute a war in Europe.’ Despite the £50 billion being spent on defence annually, the Committee concluded that the Armed Forces – overstretched, undermanned, dealing with capability shortfall as well as stockpile shortages – ‘require sustained ongoing investment to be able to fight a sustained, high intensity war, alongside our Allies, against a peer adversary.’
Ready for War recognises the so-called moral component of fighting power, a crucial aspect of a military’s motivation to fight and win on the battlefield. One aspect of the component is civilian support for the Forces. Recent British campaigns in ‘Blair’s Wars’ (on Brown’s budgets) in Iraq and Afghanistan highlighted that this backing is not guaranteed. It was at best lukewarm, if not withheld, until Dannatt and his senior commanders consciously went on the warpath to rally it.
In the context of defence, Sweden is the news not only for its NATO membership, but for conscription, restored in 2018. Highly selective and gender neutral, some 5,000 teenagers a year are signed up. The Prime Minister reportedly told his country: ‘Citizenship is not [just] a travel document.’
We in Britain might beg to differ. Army Chief General Sir Patrick Saunders surely had ‘an interview without coffee’ when he mooted earlier this year that a ‘whole of nation undertaking’ is needed to make preparatory steps better to prepare for conflict. Shellshocked, No.10, the MoD and the head of the Armed Forces rapidly distanced themselves from anything that might hint at conscription – although the Swedish version seems to be a prestigious gap year with guns, giving those young people undertaking it a head start in the battle for the best jobs.
On Tuesday, Israel’s former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett stated on X that the atrocity on 7th October was the result of complacency. ‘We were cruelly reminded that Israel’s existence depends on our being constantly alert, vigilant, strong and very very tough.’ He called for his country, one of the world’s leading tech hubs, to be ‘a Silicon Valley in Sparta.’
Comparisons with an ancient militaristic state are likely to send Israel’s critics in this country into further meltdown. These keyboard warriors give the impression that conflict can be controlled by legal constraint. They refuse to accept that the fog of war descends and that military mistakes are made on the battlefield.