(Matthew 24:6-7) “ you will hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.”
We’ve certainly been hearing those rumours in recent weeks. The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, appears to be one of ‘doves’ when he told us last month that Western armies and political leaders must anticipate conflict with Russia in the next 20 years. Other analysts and commentators have put the prospect of total war very much closer.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of the General Staff, has said that our forces would not be large enough to defend the country if there was a war, and it and that it is essential that we lay the foundations now for “national mobilisation”. Others have explicitly called for the return of conscription.
I accept entirely, notwithstanding that we already have the 4th largest defence budget in the world, we do need to beef-up our defences in the face of Russia’s expansion of defence expenditure to a third of their entire national budget. We are one of the few NATO members to reach the current defence expenditure target of a mere 2% of national income. So, we have a lot of ground to catch-up.
The purpose of the increased the defence capability that we now need to acquire, is not so that we are able to fight the next war, but so that we can avoid having to do so.
As the Roman said ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’, which loosely translates as ‘if you wish for peace, then prepare for war’. Only our readiness will deter the enemy from the risks of making war upon us. It is the possibility of defeating us that will tempt the enemy to try: Deterrence is cornerstone of our defence policy.
Do we have time?
I certainly don’t accept the hyperbole that the threat is imminent. Russia’s military performance against Ukraine does not indicate that they will be capable of successfully taking on NATO in the short term. Furthermore, NATO retains very impressive capabilities, far in excess of what Russia has encountered in Ukraine, which should make Putin think twice.
As we were surprised by Ukraine’s ability to resist, similarly in the nineteen-eighties we believed that the Soviet capability was so great, that our only chance of holding their advance was to resort to first use of battlefield nuclear weapons. Very swiftly, at the end of that decade, the myth of Soviet superiority was exposed by its complete collapse.
That Russia has had to empty its prisons to field troops in Ukraine, may indicate that we may, as in the eighties, be overestimating their capability.
I shall return in this column, to the question of how we might improve our defence without breaking the bank, and certainly not by resorting to conscription.
In the meantime, whilst we do live in very dangerous times… “but the end is not yet”