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2024-01-29 Britain
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Why it may already be too late for the West to avoid war
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| Britain has been choosing butter instead of guns for several generations. |
[Yahoo] For the first time in generations, Britain has been gripped by the fear of a third world war. It began when the Norwegian commander-in-chief Eirik Kristoffersen predicted that the West had “two, maybe three years” to prepare for war with Russia. He was echoing similar warnings from other Nato chiefs. Then Donald Trump triumphed again in the New Hampshire primary, thereby rendering a Biden-Trump rematch next November a racing certainty. This raises the spectre of chaos in Washington, with dire consequences for Ukraine, for Europe and the cause of democracy. And the week ended with the ominous appearance of Vladimir Putin himself in Kaliningrad, Russia’s fortified exclave between Poland and Lithuania. Putin’s presence there is a stark reminder that if Nato leaves Ukraine in the lurch, Russia is ready to move against the Baltic states too.
| After the latest round of cuts the Army will have a total strength of only about 70,000 combat troops. |
For some time our blood has been chilled by a series of philippics from senior military officers about the woeful state of our armed forces. Last month the Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, spoke of living in “extraordinarily dangerous times” and asked: “Is the machinery and thinking deep within the British state truly calibrated to the scale of what is unfolding?”
Then, this week, a speech at a military conference in Twickenham by the head of the army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, was leaked to the media. He called for a new “citizen army” to be trained and equipped for the worst case scenario of a war with Russia.
Continued from Page 4
Meanwhile, a powerful voice from Washington weighed into this debate within the British defence establishment. Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, the US Secretary of the Navy, Carlos del Toro, urged the UK “to reassess where they are today given the threats that exist”.
Del Toro is the most senior figure in the Atlantic alliance to have openly expressed his dismay at a decade of defence cuts that have left the army and the Royal Navy smaller than at any time since the Napoleonic Wars.
For at least a year, American and European top brass have been privately telling their British counterparts that the UK is no longer a top-level fighting force.
These warnings were the driving force behind a letter to The Times last Thursday from General Sir Richard Shirreff, a former deputy supreme commander of Nato, suggesting that Britain must “look carefully” at the reintroduction of conscription.
“To most professional soldiers (myself included), conscription is anathema,” he wrote. “However, if deterrence is to be effective, Russia deterred and catastrophe averted, it might be necessary.”
One huge obstacle to conscription is the lack of willingness to fight, especially among millennials. A GB News poll this week found that just 17pc of Britons say they would “willingly fight for my country”, while 30pc (almost twice as many) agreed with the statement: “I’d do whatever possible to avoid fighting for my country.”
In a dictatorship, such as Russia must surely be regarded, men can be conscripted by force. But in a democracy there must be broad consent, especially among the recruits – otherwise any government that proposed to reintroduce national service would not remain in office for long.
How big an army might we need to defend our allies and ourselves? James Heappey, the Armed Forces Minister, has spoken of the need for up to half a million troops, including reservists, to be deployed if Nato were called upon to fight a full-scale land war against Russian aggression.
Yet such numbers have not been seen since national service was abolished in 1960. After the latest round of cuts the Army will have a total strength of only about 70,000 combat troops.
The 20,000 personnel who have been committed to Steadfast Defender, the largest Nato military exercise since the Cold War, represent the maximum force that the UK is currently capable of deploying on the front line in Eastern Europe.
This number is in part dictated by the paucity of equipment. The Army has only 213 Challenger 2 main battle tanks and 625 Warrior armoured fighting vehicles altogether. How many tanks do the 90,000 soldiers in Steadfast Defender have between them? Just 133, plus 533 infantry fighting vehicles.
By comparison, both sides in the Russo-Ukrainian war are believed to have suffered staggering losses – more than 300,00 Russian casualties and 70,000 Ukranian – and are running out of men.
Both have been forced to rely on conscription and are now recruiting both older and younger soldiers than previously. At least half of Ukrainian troops are thought to be aged over 40.
But it is the attrition of equipment that is having the most direct impact on the conflict. According to US intelligence, the Russians have lost at least 2,200 tanks in two years of war, but they still have well over 1,000 in the field.
By contrast, the small numbers of modern tanks supplied by the UK, the US, Germany and other Western countries were insufficient to enable Ukraine to succeed in its counteroffensive last summer. The West is either unwilling or simply incapable of responding to this rate of attrition on the battlefield.
A comparison with the two world wars is illuminating here. In August 1914, a British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was sent to France and Flanders, consisting of seven divisions of infantry and one of cavalry – initially some 84,000 men.
Adopting the Kaiser’s insult to this “contemptible little army” as a badge of honour, the Old Contemptibles played a significant role in stopping the German advance on Paris. However, not many of the original contingent made it to the end of the year: though steadily reinforced, by the end of November the BEF had sustained 90,000 casualties.
The BEF that was dispatched to France in the Second World War was larger: some 390,000 men by May 1940. It was also more fortunate, in that its casualties were “only” 66,000, mostly captured.
The “miracle of Dunkirk” rescued the surviving 338,000 British and French soldiers. But they lost all their equipment, forcing the country to rely on the Royal Navy and, of course, the Royal Air Force to defend it in the Battle of Britain.
How would such a British expeditionary force fare today? A British Nato contingent similar to the one now participating in Steadfast Defender would be fortunate if any of its troops at all were to survive the first few weeks of a war against Russia – even assuming that only conventional weapons were used.
We can be confident about this rate of attrition because we can see the scale of losses on both sides in Ukraine. Russia lost nearly 30,000 soldiers plus more than 400 tanks in December 2023 alone, according to the Ukrainians. Even if these figures are exaggerated, they put the unprepared state of Western – and especially UK – defences into perspective.
| Lots of details about the parlous state of of the British army can be read at the link. |
The plight of the British armed forces is not unique, of course. In France, Emmanuel Macron is regularly accused of betraying the military.
As a result there is now much martial rhetoric from the Élysée and the new Prime Minister, Gabriel Attal, has been tasked with rearming French forces to prepare for war.
However, Macron’s guiding principles appear to owe less to the strategic genius of Napoleon than to the duplicitous diplomacy of Talleyrand.
As for Germany: the Bundeswehr has a long history of incompetence and penny-pinching, especially among its political masters.
Ursula von der Leyen, now President of the European Commission, has never been allowed to forget the fact that, during army exercises while Angela Merkel’s defence minister in 2015, she ordered her troops to use broomsticks instead of rifles.
The invasion of Ukraine prompted a major rethink in Berlin, the so-called Zeitenwende. After yet another defence minister became a laughing stock, in January 2023 Olaf Scholz finally appointed a serious person to the job: Boris Pistorius.
In just over a year, Pistorius has transformed the country’s reputation at home and abroad, making Germany the major European supplier of arms to Ukraine.
A leaked strategy paper (of which more below) revealed that he had ordered the military to prepare for war with Russia by 2025, but this week Pistorius went public.
He warned recruits in Hamburg that peace in Europe was “no longer an irrefutable certainty” and asked: “Are we seriously ready to defend this country in an emergency?” Raising the possibility of reintroducing conscription, he continued: “And who is this we? This debate has to be had.”
Pistorius is now certainly the most popular member of the German government and perhaps the most admired politician in the country. The unpopular Scholz is now fending off demands to make way for a man who has shown real leadership. 
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