General Sir Roly Walker’s inaugural speech as the new Chief of the General Staff fired a salvo of shots across the bows of the new government, highlighting the long-term threats we must configure the Army to defend against.
The top line: the British Army needs to be prepared to fight and defeat an enemy twice the size in three years and three times the size in five years.
The second: whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will still be our enemy, and could come back just as dangerous. As he put it: “the lesson from history is that the Russians don’t forget, and they will come back to get their revenge…Each time you think Russia is down they come flying back.”
Sir Roly is absolutely right that we must re-arm, and quickly, and that – contrary to what many hoped for, especially in Europe – there will be no return to the world as it was before Moscow’s full scale invasion.
For this war has fundamentally changed Russian society: it has become something more akin to fascist state, totally numbed to reason, engorged on propaganda, and – as far as the Kremlin is concerned – at war with the entirety of the West.
As such, he is right to push for increased defence funding not just for arming Ukraine, but for preparing ourselves for the worst. For only then can we stop the worst from happening.
Some have interpreted Sir Roly’s remarks as suggesting that we should learn from the errors of the Treaty of Versailles – i.e. that decisively defeating nations can make them vengeful and more aggressive. But as The Telegraph’s Francis Dearnley has argued on Ukraine: The Latest, we often take the wrong lessons from Versailles. Its failure was not in concept, but in enactment. If Versailles had ever been properly enforced, both in terms of reparations and consequences for rule-breaking – such as Hitler’s blatant rearmament – then however angry Germans were, there would never have been a Second World War. The risk of serious conflict could have been snuffed out in 1935.
In the same way, Russia has been enabled in its project of becoming an aggressive, dangerous power with a green light to continue its imperialist ambitions. We were warned in Syria and Crimea, yet we did little to weaken Putin’s freedom of strategic movement.
So whilst it is not wrong to say that countries can be vengeful when defeated, that need not mean we mustn’t seek to do so. And as an added bonus, many defeated countries, even humiliated ones, have not sought another war soon afterwards: indeed, it led to dictators being dethroned. Just look at the Argentine Junta after the Falklands War. It was defeat in the Soviet-Afghan war which played a role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But I digress. Time is ticking, especially when the Government will not commit to an increase in spending on defence and wants to delay any reform until its Defence Review reports sometime next year. I’m not sure Putin will be so generous.
As I have argued before, we must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of the past by prioritising hybrid tech over scale. Hitler’s undoing was partly due to his reliance on technology above numbers of tanks and manpower. That is not to say we must not embrace technology as a force multiplier, but warfare is a numbers game: a fact we dismiss at our peril.
We must also invest in the morale component of fighting power, severely depleted in the last few years. We expect our serving men and women to live in shocking housing, and the attractions of military life, like sport and training, have been cut to the bone. Even the tax on private school education, which is so important to so many for recruiting and retention, will be another dagger into the heart of army families if they are not exempted from the VAT increase, which is not yet fully clear.
Sir Roly’s basic message to the new government is that there is a hell of a lot to do and not much time to do it. War with Russia, and or implications of Chinese and Iranian aggression in the next 3-5 years is a distinct possibility, which we must strain every nerve and sinew to avoid and counter. This starts with a credible conventional deterrence which we do not have and have no chance of realising if defence spending is not raised now to 2.5 per cent.
Those who think we can just revert to the status quo are wrong: Russia, even defeated, will be our foe. This is a new Cold War scenario, but in real danger of becoming hot without robust action.
Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is the former commander of Nato’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion