PUTIN A ‘CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER’
HEAD OF ARMY’S CHILLING WARNING ‘Russia could initiate hostilities sooner than we expect . . . it will start with something we don’t expect’ ‘Our generation has become used to wars of choice . . . but we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia’
VLADIMIR Putin could start hostilities against the West ‘ sooner than we expect’, the head of the Army said last night.
Warning of russia’s ‘eye-watering’ military capabilities, sir nick carter laid bare the scale of the threat.
The chief of the General staff said the Kremlin was a ‘clear and present danger’ and predicted a conflict would start with something we did not expect.
‘They are not thousands of miles away, they are on europe’s doorstep,’ he said
in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute. Britain’s ability to pre-empt or respond to the threat ‘will be eroded if we don’t match up to them now,’ he said, adding: ‘Russia could initiate hostilities sooner than we expect.’
Using the dire warning to make the case for more money for the armed forces, General Carter said:
Britain could scale back its military withdrawal from Germany to allow personnel to race to Eastern Europe if war breaks out;
Syria’s civil war was exploited by Moscow to get its troops combat-ready while testing long-range missiles and other equipment;
Russia’s conventional forces give it a ‘calculable military advantage’;
Hostile action would be hard to predict and the time to address the threats was now.
General Carter’s major speech came as experts issued their own warnings about the threat from Russia and the need for Britain to spend more on defence.
Former defence secretary Sir Michael Fallon said the Prime Minister must increase the military budget by billions of pounds, saying the UK’s security was at stake. He told a defence and security forum last night that Theresa May should set a new target of spending 2.5 per cent of national income on defence by the end of the next parliament.
The head of the National Cyber Security Centre warned that a major attack on the UK was a matter of ‘when, not if’.
Ciaran Martin said Britain had been fortunate to avoid a ‘category one’ hacking attack. This is defined as one that could cripple infran structure such as energy supplies and the financial services sector.
He suggested one was likely in the next two years, telling the Guardian: ‘It is a matter of when, not if, and we will be fortunate to come to the end of the decade without having to trigger a category one attack.’
And the former head of spy agency GCHQ, Robert Hannigan, told the BBC he was seriously concerned about Russia’s growing aggression in cyberspace. He said: ‘It’s the single country that’s kept me awake, because their intent has changed over the years.’
In his speech in London yesterday, General Carter said there were stark parallels between the situation before the First World War in 1914 and how Russia might view things now.
He said: ‘Our generation has become used to wars of choice since the end of the Cold War. But we may not have a choice about conflict with Russia. And we should remember Trotsky’s advice that “you may not be interested in war but war is interested in you”.’
Showing a Russian military propaganda video, he said Moscow was developing an ‘eye-watering quantity of capability’. He cautioned that hostilities would not start with ‘little green men’ – a reference to conventional ground troops in camouflage.
‘It will start with something we don’t expect. We should not take what we’ve seen so far as a template for the future,’ he said.
The Army chief said Russia’s doctrine for war utilises ‘all of the instruments of national power, not just the military’. He added: ‘The character of warfare is making it much harder for us to recognise true intentions and distinguish between what is peace and what is war.’
He said credible deterrence could be underpinned only by genuine forces and commitment ‘that earns the respect of potential opponents’.
To deter Russia in Eastern Europe, Britain and its Nato allies must improve their speed of recognising what was going on, speed of deciding what to do and speed of assembling forces if needed, he said: ‘The time to address these threats is now – we cannot afford to sit back.’
General Carter said there were no longer two clear and distinct states of peace and war.
He said: ‘The risk we run in not defining this clearly, and acting accordingly, is that rather like a chronic contagious disease it will creep up on us, and our ability to act will be markedly constrained. And we’ll be the losers of this competition.’
General Carter said he was ‘actively examining’ keeping supply bases in Germany open once British personnel are brought home. This would enable troops to return at short notice with equipment already in place. At one point 55,000 UK personnel were stationed in Germany but the latest figure is no more than 17,000.
ONCE upon a time, when Britain ruled nearly half the world and the Royal Navy dominated the seven seas, our forefathers took it for granted that this country was the target of jealousy and hatred.
Thus, we built dreadnought battleships and sent soldiers to garrison far-flung shores, to protect our national riches.
Today, however, this country has shrunk, its people ask only to be left in peace to get on with our lives and watch The Crown on Netflix.
To some, it thus seems monstrously unfair that we should have to spend tens of billions of pounds defending ourselves against foreign foes to whom we wish no ill.
Weapons
We have got used to the menace posed by Islamic fanatics. But why should we have to go head- to- head with the Russians, of all people? What is the head of the British Army thinking of, delivering a speech in London last night in which he warned that President Vladimir Putin’s nation presents ‘the most complex and capable security challenge we have faced since the Cold War’?
General Sir Nick Carter, probably the ablest Chief of the General Staff so far this century, declares that ‘ the parallels with 1914 are stark’.
He also warns, with the direct sanction of his political boss, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson, that Britain’s Armed Forces are today in no state to face the threats; nor will they be, unless the Treasury finds money to plug the yawning chasm in the defence budget.
Some cynics will say the service chiefs are playing a familiar game of crying wolf, warning of a ‘Red Peril’ in Moscow as they have done so often before, in order to secure expensive new weapons and platforms with which to posture on the international stage.
Yet anybody who knows anything about defence and national security on both sides of the Atlantic understands that General Carter’s depiction of the Russian threat, and of our weakness in the face of it, are all too true. Indeed, General Carter’s speech was one of the toughest by a military leader for many years, and he used some chilling language.
A very senior American officer said to me in the summer: ‘The British Armed Forces are no longer big enough to command credibility either in Washington or with our enemies.’
I told him that I hoped the next time he saw our Prime Minister, he would say as much to her, because American top brass are often too polite to British leaders for our own good.
In 2018, the RAF’s centenary year, its fast-jet resources are strained to the limit to sustain a tiny contingent operating over Syria and Iraq.
The Royal Navy is crippled by its mad commitment to two giant aircraft carriers — we lack the cash to arm these with anything more than a token force of aircraft.
The Army and Royal Marines, already relatively small and under-recruited, are threatened with further severe cuts.
All this is because, with the NHS and welfare budgets almost devouring the State, a weak British government flinches from responding realistically to the challenges to our national security.
The Treasury lavishes resources only on the intelligence services, because terrorists represent a daily threat to ordinary British people on our streets.
Yet, as General Carter said last night, terrorists cannot destroy our society, whereas the Russians pose a major threat to the West’s stability.
Nobody supposes that Putin’s soldiers are about to launch an amphibious assault on East Yorkshire. But the Russians have mastered an extraordinary range of cyber, fake news, military and guerrilla tactics to destabilise the Western alliance and threaten its most exposed regions, such as the Baltic states.
The clear distinction between peace and war is gone: the world henceforward must exist in an uneasy and permanently perilous limbo between the two.
The Russians — like the Chinese and North Koreans — have, says General Carter, ‘become masters at exploiting the seams between peace and war’.
One reason for taking the 1914 comparison seriously is that the Great War broke out not because either Germany or Russia wanted a big war, but because both miscalculated.
Carter points out that ‘whether we like it or not’, in the eyes of the Russian people, we Westerners ‘have been made to appear as the enemy’.
The Russians have shown again and again that they respect strength and exploit weakness. Thus we must protect our capabilities — or, though General Carter was too tactful to say this baldly — rebuild them from the sorry decay into which they have fallen.
We must convince our European allies, of whom only the French have war-fit Armed Forces, of the need to work much more seriously together.
It is weakness that makes Russia dangerous: its population is shrinking and its economy would be a basket case but for oil and gas.
Shooting
Putin needs enemies — including us — and, frankly, also conflicts, in order to sustain his own power-base at home, and browbeat his way to the respect he demands, in the spirit of every street bully.
Lest anyone suppose that either I, or General Carter, am making all this up, consider the overwhelming evidence of Russian meddling, not only in the 2016 U. S. presidential election, but in almost every aspect of the information struggle that has become part of all our daily lives.
The Russians’ annexation of Crimea; their shooting down a civilian airliner; the war in eastern Ukraine — these are stark facts. Carter concluded last night: ‘ These threats are now on Europe’s doorstep — and the character of war is making it much harder to recognise the true intentions of our opponents, and thus distinguish between what is peace and what is war.’
I am not nostalgic about Britain’s Armed Forces. We should not keep tanks or jets, guardsmen or frigates, merely to ornament reviews and look pretty at Trooping the Colour.
But the rundown of our Armed Forces by successive governments represents a scandal. Successive prime ministers have been deeply irresponsible to allow it to happen. Crisis
Nations that wish to avoid fighting wars can only hope to do so by possessing defences that deter prospective aggressors, as today ours do not.
The only plausible means of dissuading Putin from his adventurism on both the physical and electronic frontiers of the U.S. and Europe is that he should believe aggression will cost him, as today he does not.
‘ We have to invest,’ says General Carter — and that means in men, weapons, ships and planes, the total cost of which is still a tiny fraction of Britain’s social spending.
Some cash should, of course, be diverted from the bloated overseas aid budget, but there must also be new money. Nobody who takes an adult view of Britain’s safety, of our self- respect in the world, should begrudge this.
Some of the Defence Secretary’s colleagues at Westminster curled their lips cynically after last night’s speech, attributing to Gavin Williamson’s naked ambition his willingness to allow General Carter to speak so honestly about the cash crisis facing the Armed Forces.
But Williamson’s predecessors, Philip Hammond and Sir Michael Fallon, brought shame on themselves by seeking to conceal from the nation the scale of the defence cash crisis, rather than try to solve it.
Both the new Defence Secretary and his army chief have acted honourably by telling us the truth.
Now, it is up to the Government to act to repair our ailing forces, and to the British people to back them in doing so.