Sarah Ingham is author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
Could the United Kingdom really be at war with Russia in two or three years?
Last month Andrzej Duda, the Polish ppresident, 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 has increased its commitment to defence to four per cent GDP.
Since February 2022, the closer to Russia, the sharper governments’ focus on military readiness. Finland, with its 830-mile border with Russia, became the 31st member of NATO last year. 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 and its breakaway enclave of Transnistria – an hour’s drive from Odessa, and sporting a symbolic garrison 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, Britain would have to mobilise for conflict. But could we?
Although successive governments in the past three decades have been mustard-keen to bank the post-Cold War peace dividend and cut defence to the bone, ministers are now scrambling to jaw-jaw about war-war. Grant Shapps has warned that we are in a “pre-war world” and, during a visit to Ukraine last month, stated he is “impatient” to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent GDP (from 2.27 per cent currently).
Shapps’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 not preparing for conflict, the book has lessons for today.
In January, meanwhile, the Defence Select Committee’s Ready for War report invoked “storm clouds on the horizon”. The invasion of Ukraine highlights 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 our overstretched, undermanned Armed Forces “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. Civilian support for the Forces can boost this; on the other hand, recent British campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan (dubbed Blair’s Wars and Brown’s Budgets in one academic paper) have highlighted that public backing cannot be guaranteed.
In the context of defence, Sweden is in the news – not only for its NATO membership, but for conscription, restored in 2018. Selective and gender neutral, some 5,000 teenagers a year are signed up; the Prime Minister reportedly told his country that: ‘Citizenship is not [just] a travel document.’
We in Britain might beg to differ. Army Chief General Sir Patrick Saunders surely had, in military parlance, an “interview without coffee” when he mooted that a “whole-of-nation undertaking” is needed to make preparatory steps better to prepare for conflict. Ducking for cover, Number 10, the Ministry of Defence, and the head of the Armed Forces rapidly distanced themselves from anything that might hint at conscription.
(Although we should note that the Swedish version seems to be a prestigious gap year with guns, giving those undertaking it a head start in the battle for the best jobs.)
On Tuesday Naftali Bennett , Israel’s former Prime Minister stated on X that the atrocity on 7 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, a leading global tech hub, to be “a Silicon Valley in Sparta.”
From this reference to the ancient world’s most militaristic state, it can be inferred that the ex-PM is not going to be offering to share a peace pipe with Hamas or its supporters any time soon; those attention-seekers spraying the MoD building in red paint should take note.
As personnel from Israel Defence Force battle their enemies, Britain’s valiant keyboard warriors have been in the trenches of social media. Exonerating Hamas, erroneously invoking genocide, they seek to stop any retaliatory action in Gaza, the wellspring of 7 October. (For all recent their noisy clamour to halt UK arms sales to Israel, they somehow fail to mention how small the contribution is – perhaps just 0.1 per cent of purchases.)
War is a brutal, bloody business, as too many soldiers on Ukraine’s frontline can testify; the World Central Kitchen incident in Gaza a fortnight ago also highlights that military mistakes, made in the fog of war, can also have lethal consequences.
The UK’s current #BeKind mindset must change if as a society we are ever to reach the level of military readiness aspired to by our NATO partners. Lawfare – the encroachment into the battlespace by m’learned friends (who often seem to be on the side of the King’s enemies) – must be rowed back; diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives – even less useful to the Armed Forces than to civilian firms – must be dumped.
The late Alan Clark MP was a defence minister in the Thatcher and Major governments. Famous for his diaries, he also wrote military history, including Led By Donkeys. What he would have made of a Conservative MP handing over colleagues’ contact details because he was “scared”?
Back in the early 1990s, England’s football supporters were often up for a ruck in Europe; today, it is unlikely any minister would observe, as Clark did, that they manifested their nation’s historic martial spirit. But in war, this spirit would need to be rekindled – and respected.
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Author: Dr Sarah Ingham
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