The world is an increasingly dangerous place. Today, there are more conflicts around the world than at any time since the Second World War, including the first major conflict on European soil. The old rules-based order, established after the Cold War, is disappearing before our eyes.
The world’s policeman, the United States, increasingly acts as an independent player, without the approval or interests of its NATO allies. A distorted mesh of chaotic but strengthening autocracies poses a genuinely existential threat to Western democracies.
Given this geopolitical situation, what, therefore, should Britain do? This is the question at the heart of a new Civitas report authored by two veteran defence-specialist MPs and a former NATO special advisor. The answer, they found, is an extremely urgent transition to warfighting-readiness.
The shameful truth is that the United Kingdom is far from being war-ready. The armed forces, it’s almost unanimously agreed, have been hollowed out. The Ministry of Defence, even with Labour’s modest budget boost, is facing a financial shortfall.
More broadly, the badly-needed reindustrialisation of the British defence industry remains all but impossible partly because the City and the Government’s self-sabotaging ESG rules render defence investment “unethical”. Several defence firms still find it difficult to open bank accounts, despite the government’s ambitious targets for growth in the sector published in the Defence Industrial Strategy last year.
These are necessary problems to overcome, but as the report notes, transitioning to war-readiness is about far more than improving the military or rebuilding the defence industry. Armies may well fight battles, but it’s countries that fight wars. Adapting to war-readiness is a concern of all departments of government, from Education to Agriculture, and even wider civil society.
The war in Ukraine has exposed the fact that Western governments of all stripes and colours possess limited understanding of modern war, and little will-power to change it. Ukrainian sources have pointed out that Western “peacetime thinking” caused the training of Ukrainian conscripts in NATO countries to fail to adequately prepare them for the conditions of war with Russia, which is harsher and more severe.
Seventy years of peace and prosperity have rendered our governing processes “sclerotic” and totally inadequate for waging war. The fact is that most of the West now lives in an illusion of permanent security and invulnerability that prevents us from recognising these very real dangers.
Take, for example, our public debt. The Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast that the British Government’s indebtedness will triple over the next five decades is unsustainable, even without a war. And as Thucydides wrote in History of the Peloponnesian War, “war is a matter not so much of arms as of money”. That is as true today as it was 2,000 years ago.
And what of the final piece of the puzzle of getting to war-readiness — civil society? It also has a vital role to play in war. Societal resilience, physical and moral strength are essential, overlooked aspects of warfighting. Recovering from shock and bouncing back requires the support of civil society in wartime.
The truth is, most of us in affluent Britain are not prepared for the shock of war. It is high time the British Government copied the “total defence” models of Nordic countries, which include resilience from the state, society and private sector in their defence practices.
It is, furthermore, unlikely that young people will sign up for war, and certainly not in their droves. We already know the Royal Navy is struggling to recruit for submarine service that involves young people being cut off from social media for months on end. As The Times reported early last year, only 11 per cent of Generation Z (aged 18-27) would fight for their country, fully half the amount of those the same age 20 years ago, according to their polling. This is a crisis the country is yet to address.
While our remarkably shoddy war-readiness leaves much to be desired, it does at least provide something of an opportunity for Britain. Yes, we are ill-prepared for war. But most European countries are in exactly the same boat. The United Kingdom could yet be a NATO leader for countries making the painful transition to warfighting readiness.
Being prepared for war has never been about desiring war. As a famous dictum states, “Let him who desires peace, prepare for war.” In our age of aggressive autocracies and splintered alliances, it’s high time we did so.
We must echo David Lloyd-George’s good wishes to Winston Churchill upon his accession to Prime Minister in May 1940: “God-speed.” It turns out, again, we may really need it.
