Why we could be at war with Russia next year

The apocalyptic vision of the British general and Nato chief threatened with sack for blasting Tory defence cuts

THIS week, British General Sir Richard Shirreff, Nato’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander for Europe until 2014, accused Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond of wanting him courtmartialed for criticising the Government’s military spending. Here, in an apocalyptic vision, he explains why those cuts could lead to catastrophe...

DEEP inside the control room there was an overriding smell of male sweat — usual in a submarine that had been at sea for days. In the centre of the room stood Captain Alexander Ivanovich Chernavin of the Russian Navy, the commander of the Kilo-class submarine Krasnokamensk.

Despite his years of experience, Chernavin was feeling hesitant that morning, as his sonar operator was within close torpedo range of something very much larger than anything he had ever contacted before.

Chernavin needed to take a look. ‘Up periscope!’ he ordered.

leaning down, he grabbed the handles of the periscope as it slid up to him, anxious to get his eyes to the viewfinder.

He immediately spotted a vast Royal Navy aircraft carrier. Despite being five nautical miles away — in international waters in the Western Baltic — the distant ship was magnified by the powerful lenses of the periscope and filled the viewfinder.

‘Down periscope!’ Chernavin ordered. ‘Flood torpedo tubes one to three. Stand by to fire.’

Chernavin took a deep breath. What he was about to do would surely go down as an event of the magnitude of the sinking of HMS Royal Oak, the pride of the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, by a German U-boat in Scapa Flow in October 1939.

And now, HMS Queen Elizabeth — at 65,000 tonnes and at 920ft, longer than the British Houses of Parliament and the largest ship ever built for the Royal Navy — was about to join them.

It would be him, Captain Chernavin, who would be responsible.

‘Bearing three–three–five. Range, 9,000 metres,’ chanted the sonar operator, like a Russian Orthodox priest in an incense-filled church.

‘Identity confirmed. Stand by to fire,’ Chernavin said to his fire controller. Krasnokamensk continued to slide silently under the waves. ‘Shoot!’ There was a perceptible thump throughout the submarine as the first torpedo left its tube; a pause, then another, and then a third.

Then came a muffled explosion. The first torpedo had struck home. Another pause, then another two explosions.

In the earphones of the sonar operators, the thud of Queen Elizabeth’s propellers stopped — replaced by the screams of collapsing bulkheads.

AlTHOUGH this terrifying scenario is, of course, fictional, I believe that it could easily come true, and as soon as this time next year.

In my new book, 2017: The War With Russia, I present a ‘what-if’ situation in which the UK, along with her Nato allies, finds herself in a full-scale conflict with an enemy I believe represents an existential threat to the West and which is a far greater danger than ISIS.

If war with Russia does break out, then I believe that the seeds were sown in Ukraine in March 2014.

At that time, I was a four-star British General and the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander for Europe (DSACEUR).

I had been in post for three years

THE big questions, therefore, are these: Do the member states of Nato have the will to stand up to Putin? And, if so, do we have the military muscle to back it up?

In my book, I am afraid that I paint a very gloomy picture, in which our politicians, through complacency and a lack of backbone, fail to deter an expansionist and belligerent Russian president, and the Baltics end up being invaded.

Too many world leaders today have no appreciation of history, which tells us never to trust Russia.

It was Count Shuvalov, a Russian who was governor-general of what were then the Baltic Provinces in the Tsarist Empire 150 years ago, who said: ‘The historical mission of the Baltic provinces is to serve as a battlefield for the problems of the highest politics in Europe.’

What the fictionalised politicians in my book fail to realise, just like so many appeasers in the Thirties, is that the fate of the Baltic states — and, indeed, Poland — cannot be simply dismissed as the concerns of ‘faraway countries of which we know nothing’, to paraphrase Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

But will it really affect us in Britain and western Europe if Nato is rendered impotent and we are unable to protect the Baltic states and Poland from Russia? The answer to that is a resounding ‘yes’.

A militarily triumphant Russia — able to dictate to a defeated Europe and Nato from the end of a gun barrel — will be enough for life as we now know it in western Europe to come to a very abrupt end. ‘To the victor the spoils.’ Always. Most worryingly, our politicians blithely continue to view the situation through Cold War spectacles.

By that, I mean they must drop their antiquated view that any attack by Moscow on a Nato member would consist of massed Soviet tanks invading across the inner German border, or biting off a chunk of northern Norway, as would have been the case in the Cold War days.

Today, through cyber-warfare and clandestine military backing to Moscow-sponsored separatists, the Russians are master practitioners of a new form of state-on-state war, in which gradually Putin ramps up the pressure on a target state, while remaining under the threshold of what would traditionally invoke Nato’s Article Five — that ‘an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all’.

The best way to stop such a crisis from getting out of control is to meet the Russians with strength. But even if we did have the will to do so, do we actually have the required strength?

Once again, the picture is gloomy, both in my book, and indeed in reality. In his Strategic Defence and Security Review of 2010, David Cameron made an appalling gamble assuming that the international scene would remain benign.

Wars and conflicts that threatened the security of the United Kingdom were declared a thing of the past.

Britain’s national strategy proclaimed that there was no threat to this country’s existence. Having unilaterally decided that this was the way the world would be for the foreseeable future, the 2010 review then emasculated British military capability.

The consequences of this decision are far-reaching — and difficult, if not near impossible, to reverse.

Twenty thousand experienced regular soldiers were axed from the Army. Royal Navy frigate and destroyer numbers — the workhorses of any fleet — were cut right back. Some ships were sent direct to the breaker’s yard.

It seemed quite extraordinary to me at the time to see our warships being broken up at the very moment they were most needed.

The unravelling of Libya after the fall of Gaddafi and the deepening turmoil of the Arab Spring ought to have told any politician with any sense that the world was not as safe and predictable as they were busy assuring us it was.

Not only were the RAF’s fleet of Harrier jets removed from the Ministry of Defence inventory, but that essential capability for a proud maritime nation — maritime patrol aircraft — was also disbanded.

This failure to understand reality was further reinforced during Britain’s response to the crisis in the Middle East, caused by the emergence of the so-called Islamic State in the summer of 2014.

Both the Prime Minister and the new Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, spoke in apocalyptic terms about this threat — and yet did nothing credible to confront it.

Hammond’s hubristic boast that ‘Britain defined itself by the extent to which it punched above its weight’ was proved hollow.

So, when the Prime Minister wrote in 2014 that ‘Britain should avoid sending armies to fight’ — strongly implying that the Army’s primary task was now humanitarian relief — I saw the profound effect of such a world-view on both our allies and potential adversaries.

Mr Cameron’s pronouncement signalled that Britain was led by a government terrified of being seen to commit, but nevertheless yearning to be seen as bold and resolute.

A country famous for once ‘walking softly and carrying a big stick’ — meaning British governments did not make threats they did not fully intend to implement — now had a leadership that shouted loudly but, thanks to ongoing defence cuts, carried an increasingly tiny and impotent stick.

Be in no doubt, the implications of this are not lost on the man in the Kremlin.

Britain, once Europe’s premier military power, is undoubtedly now set on a course of disarmament.

AS A young KGB officer in East Germany during the Cold War, Vladimir Putin can well recall the respect in which Britain, under its ‘Iron Lady’ prime minister Margaret Thatcher, was held by Russia for its bold recapture of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

That combination of a show of arms, and quiet but grim political resolve, had given Britain huge political clout.

Clearly that stubborn resolve, so respected and admired across the world, has evaporated.

Britain is now little different from any other semi-pacifist, European social democracy; more interested in protecting welfare and benefits than maintaining adequate defences.

And it is this lack of defences that terrifies me the most.

The most horrific scenario is that, without strong conventional deterrence — tanks, planes, artillery, ships and boots on the ground — the only remaining line of defence for a Nato facing imminent military defeat is nuclear weapons.

However, the consequence of the release of intercontinental ballistic missiles, such as Trident, on Russia would be Armageddon; a result so terrible that the Russian President will calculate that the US, UK and France — the only nuclear-armed states of Nato — would never risk the near total destruction of human civilisation in Europe for the sake of three small Baltic states.

And he is probably right. Which is why he would get away with it.

I shall not give away any plotspoilers, but in my book, I try to show how we might stop Putin from getting away with it.

However, my fictional war is a war that could yet be avoided, if we act right now.

That is why this story needs to be told before it is too late.

Because, in the chilling words of another notorious Russian, the inter-war politician Leon Trotsky: ‘You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.’

GENERAL Sir Richard Shirreff’s book 2017: War With Russia is published by Coronet at £20. To order a copy (P&P free), call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk.