THE previous head of the Army, General Sir Patrick Sanders, has been interviewed by the Telegraph. He believes war with Russia in five years is a realistic possibility (as does the Telegraph) and goes on to suggest that the government should do rather more than pretend to increase our military might. It must also build public shelters on the Finnish scale.
Finland has shelters for 4.8million of its 5.3million people. That’s overcapacity: the mobilised strength of Finland’s armed forces is more than 800,000 and it has extensive conscription and reserves. Until it joined Nato its defence concept was not so much to be able to defeat a Russian attack but to make the blood price of such an attack so high as to deter it. That was the UK’s policy as part of Nato at the end of the Cold War. Since then, in pursuit of saving money to throw at the NHS and welfare, we extracted a ‘peace dividend’ and ran down our Armed Forces to the point where even the nuclear deterrent submarines were struggling.
The risible Strategic Defence Review (SDR) has done nothing to alter that. Starmer’s pledges to increase defence spending to over 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 and over 5 per cent by 2035 are likely to be achieved by including other items such as rural broadband that would not normally be viewed as defence expenditure. Imaginative accounting is not military might, but such is the nature of the UK’s government machine.
Measuring military capability in terms of percentages of GDP is asinine. It might, perhaps, be a useful indicator of the priority given to defence, but that’s all. What sensible military commentators (i.e. anyone but politicians, the BBC and most mainstream journalists) look at is organisations, equipment and (if possible) readiness. To recap previous articles, the state of the British Armed forces is appalling. While much of their equipment is, on paper, good to excellent, they lack numbers. Worse, much of the equipment is in poor repair or, in the case of the Army, mothballed in the (disastrous but expanding) Whole Fleet Management programme. Recruitment is dire, retention is worse.
Sir Keir spending £2billion or so on some American tactical nuclear bombs might in theory add some firepower should we find ourselves in a game of swapping buckets of sunshine with Russia, or anyone else. Whether Lord Hermer would permit Sir Keir to use them is an open question and, of course, the President of the US also has a veto. As part of Sir Keir’s surrender to Macron he agreed to co-ordinate nuclear warfare. The UK’s nuclear weaponry was already part of Nato. The French ones were withdrawn when de Gaulle reduced the French Nato engagement in 1967.
The Northwood declaration last Thursday doesn’t change that. It weakens Nato as British nuclear weaponry is now being ‘co-ordinated’ with a reluctant Nato member (and therefore, by definition, the most freeloading in the eyes of the current US President). Brilliantly, Sir Two-Tier has reduced Nato security without stopping a single boat. Or protecting any RAF airbases.
Meanwhile the Army continues to shoot itself in the foot (at our expense). It might now intend to replace its ageing Warrior Infantry Fighting Vehicles (IFVs) with Ares, a version of the Ajax reconnaissance vehicle which reached new heights of procurement incompetence. The Army’s previous plan (a term I use loosely) was to replace Warrior with Boxer, a wheeled Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC) which is already in production and being delivered. APCs are cheaper than IFVs. Ares is an APC, although there are military murmurs about developing an IFV version of it.
Sixty years after the appearance of the Soviet BMP-1, the world’s first IFV, the British Army still doesn’t know what it wants. It’s the same story with the RAF, proud owner of just two airborne radars (it needs at least five) and the Royal Navy, which blew its budget on an aircraft carrier that only one type of jet, the F-35B, can use, and its frigates are clapped out.
This is a poor place to start from to build forces capable of contributing much to a fight against Russia post some Ukraine settlement. Wise generals don’t fight battles they can’t win. Wise statesmen (rarer than unicorn tears in today’s UK) avoid wars that their admirals, generals and air marshals will lose. Given the weak leadership and deteriorating financial position of our country what makes us (or anyone else) think we could win a war with Russia in the Baltics?
We might not even survive it. The SDR and previous Cabinet Office announcements have seen the need to protect military headquarters underground and revamp contingency plans for post strike government. There wouldn’t be much to govern. Successive governments have failed to build the 300,000 homes per year that we need, so there is no chance of them rapidly building nuclear-proof accommodation for all 69million Britons even if they had the money, which they don’t.
That General Sir Patrick should imply it is a good idea is in itself alarming – the entire point of mutually assured destruction (the concept that underpins our entire defence policy) is that it makes nuclear war, that is war between nuclear armed states, unwinnable and therefore impossible. We have nukes, the Finns don’t. In any Finnish war with Russia, Finland would be the battlefield. As any Ukrainian will tell you, a battlefield is a dangerous place to be, which is why Finnish non-combatants have somewhere to hide.
If the UK gets into a war with Russia through its Article Five commitment to Nato, that battle is likely to be in or near the Baltic States of Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. President Putin (and many Russians) view the Baltic States as part of the Greater Russia. Like Ukraine, they were separate republics of the USSR. Their membership of Nato is tolerated as the countries are small, with a combined population less than that of St Petersburg, and their armed forces are weak, totalling just 50,000 active-duty soldiers. (That’s very different from Ukraine, whose Nato membership Russia views as an existential threat.) The anomaly of the Kaliningrad enclave is an irritation, particularly in times of sanctions on travel, but not a causus bellum per se.
If there is a realistic threat of a Nato war with Russia about the Baltics inside the next five years, as the General and others suggest, can Nato win it? That’s a tough call because, like all matters Nato, much depends on the involvement of the United States, which is currently less keen on matters Nato than it was pre-Obama. The UK maintains one battlegroup in Estonia as part of Nato’s Enhanced Forward Presence (a total of eight battlegroups spread from the Romania to Estonia). The Russian Army attacked Ukraine with some 100 battlegroups.
Three weak Nato battlegroups in the Baltics won’t stop an attack, let alone repulse it. They might impose sufficient delay for Nato reinforcements to arrive and strike into the flanks of a Russian attack from Poland (a country that does have powerful armed forces). Or they might not, in which case the only Nato option is instant sunshine. ‘Cry Armageddon and break out the nukes’, as Shakespeare might have put it.
Increasing the Nato presence in Poland and the Baltics takes time, commitment and money. Germany is contemplating buying itself 1,000 tanks to fill in capability gaps. (A thousand tanks cost about £10billion and equate to some 20 armoured battlegroups). Unfortunately it takes years to build that many and buying the hardware is the easy bit; creating effective military organisations takes much longer. In both world wars the professional British Army was largely destroyed in the opening moves. The massively larger conscript armies that won (eventually) took three years to become effective. In the Second World war no allied army was ever as well organised and capable as the Wehrmacht for the simple reason that most (western) allied divisions had done little fighting before D-Day whereas their opponents had been at war for six years and had developed a strong insertional memory. (The Russian ones had done lots of fighting, suffering huge casualties and inhibiting building sound tactics. They won through superior firepower and an indifference to their own force casualties that we in the UK can’t comprehend.)
If we’re serious about avoiding Armageddon, we need to make the sort of spending commitments that Germany is considering, plus the training costs, plus increasing recruitment and force levels and sorting a sensible reserves structure. Unfortunately we don’t have the money. Neither does Germany but the EU has invented the Security Action For Europe Fund that might have funds though some financial chicanery on the bond markets. We might get some SAFE funding via Starmer’s ongoing reversal of Brexit.
Either way, like the rest of Nato, we are unlikely to field a force capable of repulsing a Russian invasion of the Baltics. That likely failure gets us worryingly close to Armageddon, which means that the protection of the Baltics comes down to whether Putin (or his successors) believe we would use tactical nuclear weapons to thwart his putative attack. Remember the fallout from such an attack might well end up on Russian soil. The prevailing wind in St Petersburg is from the west. Most of Estonia is less than 300km upwind of St Petersburg, most of the Baltics are less than 600km upwind. The contamination from the Chernobyl explosion (equivalent to a small tactical nuke) travelled 1,100km in two days.
Using a tactical nuke in the Baltics could easily be interpreted as a nuclear attack on Russia, whose thinking on war does not mirror Western thought anyway. The Baltics may be worth the lives of a few hundred Tommy Atkinses, or even a few thousand. Are they worth risking Armageddon? I don’t think so, but no one has asked me.
That is perhaps the most important point. Nato, like the EU and the UN, answers only to the politicians who appoint its executives. Those politicians may or may not have an express mandate for what they do – Starmer has no express mandate to buy tactical nuclear weapons. The expansion of Nato following the end of the Cold War was never discussed in any UK election campaign, although the globalist cheerleaders thought it a good thing. Even after the events in 1999 at Pristina Airport, where Russian forces intervened to impede Nato operations in the former Yugoslavia, Nato expansion continued. The Baltics joined in 2004. They were indefensible then and even less so now; Nato armed forces have shrunk significantly in the past couple of decades.
Objectively Nato is currently unable to thwart a Russian invasion of the Baltics and the likelihood is that Nato will not generate a credible capability to do so in the next five years. That being so, what is the point of Nato as currently constructed? It lacks the credible military capability to protect the Baltics or anywhere else. It lacks the time, money and manpower to build one in five years. The only deterrence Nato provides is through a nuclear threat that is, at best, unwise. At worst it’s suicidal, yet there has been no public discussion of this, let alone a vote.
Has Nato’s ego written cheques its body (that is, you and me) can’t cash? I really don’t want to find out the hard way. It’s time for a discussion of Nato’s purpose, membership and policy. Don’t hold your breath.
