The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
‘Defeated Russia still a threat to Britain’
Outgoing RAF head tells The Telegraph that Putin will be ‘vindictive’ if Ukraine war fails
RUSSIA will be “vindictive” if it loses the Ukraine war and poses a direct threat to the UK, the outgoing head of the RAF warns today.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, the Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), tells
The Daily Telegraph that Russia’s air force, surface navy and submarine force are threats to Britain and Nato and that this is something “we must focus our minds on”.
He warns that the threat from Moscow will endure or even become worse if Vladimir Putin is ousted.
The RAF has provided intelligence and materiel support to Ukraine since the launch of Russia’s invasion in February last year.
Addressing the conflict, Sir Mike says: “When the Ukraine conflict is over and Ukraine has restored its borders, as it must, we will have a damaged, vindictive and brutal Russia, whose means of harming us is through air attack, missile attack and subsurface attack.”
After four years at the top of the RAF, Sir Mike, 55 is to step down next month. He has led the air force during a period in which it has been engulfed in a diversity scandal after the head of the recruiting and selection branch resigned over claims she was under pressure to pause the hiring of white men to meet targets.
In his final interview as Air Chief Marshal, Sir Mike acknowledges for the first time that improving diversity was put into employee targets.
He also addresses the future of AI in the military, saying humans must always make decisions on lethal force.
His comments on the threat of Russia after the end of the war in Ukraine are the first public acknowledgement by a Western military leader of concerns understood to have been discussed in private over how a humiliated Russia might act if defeated in Ukraine.
Earlier this month Christopher Cavoli, a US general and the head of his country’s European Command, said despite major losses to the army as a result of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s armed forces were still largely intact and remained a significant threat.
“It’s very easy to look and to think that the Russian military has collapsed or is in dire trouble, but, in fact, it’s been uneven,” Gen Cavoli said, at a security conference in Tallinn, Estonia.
“The ground forces are greatly eroded. They have run into big problems but the navy has lost almost nothing, cyber has lost nothing, space lost nothing. How long will it take Russia to rebuild? The question is, how long will it take to rebuild to do what? They’re capable of doing things today.”
Ukraine’s allies have largely insisted that they will support Kyiv’s plan to restore its borders by military means.
Last year, however, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, suggested the West must not “humiliate Russia so that the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels”. Later that year as he announced he would visit Beijing, Mr Macron said he believed China could mediate between Russia and Ukraine.
Issuing a warning that the threat from Russia is likely to last for years and could become worse, even if Putin is forced from power, Sir Mike says that the Kremlin system “is more than about just one person”, and that others, waiting to seize power in Moscow, “could be equally brutal and vicious”.
Russia will remain one of the “enduring threats to the UK” even after Moscow’s poor performance in Ukraine, he says. “This [is a] dictator who’s prepared to wage a brutal war in the name of what Russia should be in his mind.
“But it also demonstrates that this is more than about just one person.
“There is a whole structure and a hierarchy behind Putin. So even if Putin was to disappear off the stage, there are countless others that could replace him that could be as equally as brutal and vicious to their own people and to neighbouring states.”
Sir Mike’s warnings come as the Kremlin confirmed it had moved tactical nuclear weapons to Belarus, the first deployment of such weapons outside Russia since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, a country bordering Nato nations Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, said on Thursday “the movement of the nuclear weapons has already begun”.
Western governments have been shocked by Russia’s development of long-range precision weapons, some supplied by Iran, which in Ukraine have demonstrated the ability to strike targets hundreds of miles away.
Russia has been using the Kh-47M2 Kinzhal (“Dagger”) hypersonic missile in Ukraine, said by the Kremlin to be unstoppable. That claim has been shown to be false after a number were shot down by US-supplied Patriot air defence missiles, but there is still nervousness in Western governments about Russia’s missile capabilities.
Sir Mike says that Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine had identified other lessons for Western armed forces.
“In the modern age, the ubiquitous control of the air that we’ve enjoyed [is] something we can’t rely on anymore because of the sophistication of groundbased air defence systems,” he says.
ASSOCIATE EDITOR (DEFENCE)
Having spent his entire adult life in the RAF, Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, the outgoing head of the service, could be forgiven for looking back to past successes.
Far from it. Instead, Sir Mike is quick to warn of the danger of trying to spot one’s legacy “as you walk out the door”. In conversation with
before his retirement next month, it is to the future of the RAF that he looks, even if he won’t be in post to ‘We were doing all we could to tackle this intractable problem, which is the lack of diversity in our service’ reap the rewards. But he is also willing to reflect on the clouds that have blotted the sky during his tenure.
On his watch, the RAF went into a flat spin over the diversity and inclusion agenda. He admits mistakes were made over the recruitment of personnel from under-represented groups.
“We were doing all we could to tackle this intractable problem, which is the lack of diversity in our service,” he says.
Of the 1,500 pilots in the RAF at the end of last year, only 30 were women and around 10 were from ethnic minorities. Less than 2 per cent of the 8,500 engineers were from ethnic minorities and 6 per cent were women. Only 3 per cent of the RAF as a whole came from an ethnic minority.
Efforts to improve these figures and meet the Chief of the Air Staff ’s stated aim of having 40 per cent women and 20 per cent of personnel from ethnic minorities by 2030 were “flatlining”.
Mistakes resulted in the resignation of the senior officer responsible for recruiting and selection; a “regrettable” outcome.
“One of the mistakes we made was that those aspirational goals filtered down into people’s personal objectives in-year, which they found almost impossible to meet.
“That put intolerable pressure on them and I’ve apologised to the recruiting and selection organisation.”
Sir Mike also set out to tackle what he saw as “inappropriate [and] unacceptable behaviours”. “There are a number of things that I came into the job four years ago wanting to change, wanting to modernise,” he says, adding: “I saw that there were things we needed to do.”
On starting the job, he felt “there was just too much bullying, harassment and discrimination going on [and] we weren’t doing a good enough job of dealing with them and dealing with the aftermath both for the victims and for justice being done and being seen to be done”.
Discipline issues and accusations of toxic leadership in the Red Arrows display team, the service’s pin-up outfit and a major tool of Britain’s soft power, dogged Sir Mike’s time in office. “I was beyond infuriated when information came to me about inappropriate behaviours on the Red Arrows,” he says. “People have been harmed.”
He said dismissals and other disciplinary action “sent a very clear signal to the whole service that it didn’t matter which part of the organisation you are, whether you’re an elite display team or whether you are rank and file on a squadron, those behaviours have no place in our air force in 2023”.
Clearly at ease with the decisions he has made, a thread nevertheless runs through our discussion of a man impatient to get to the future and perhaps a little concerned that the RAF could be left out of it, unless radical new programmes and thinking take hold now.
“In the modern age, the ubiquitous control of the air that we’ve enjoyed – alongside the US and our allies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya over the years – that’s something that we can’t rely on anymore because of the sophistication of ground-based air defence systems.
“New lessons [from Ukraine] show us the undoubted utility of drones: one-way attack drones; drones used for reconnaissance; used for overwhelming air defences; confusing for deception. Swarming drones is undoubtedly a feature of the future battlespace.
“Many of the aircraft and systems we’re operating successfully today are a result of decisions that were made 20 years ago,” Sir Mike says. “I have that same obligation to my successors in 20 years’ time.” Painting a picture of a markedly different RAF in the future, he points to recent decisions that have reorganised the front-line fleet of aircraft. Gone are the squadrons of Tornados, Sentinels and the beloved Hercules transport plane, affectionately known as “Fat Albert”.
New arrivals have included the F-35 stealth fighter, the A400M – which did sterling work in the Sudan evacuation – and the Poseidon submarine-hunter. Taking such decisions has not been free of controversy, but the Chief of the Air Staff is adamant the RAF must
Air Chief Marshal Sir Mike Wigston, Chief of the Air Staff, in front of HMS Queen Elizabeth at the naval base in Portsmouth
modernise or risk being left behind in the 21st century. “It’s not just about delivering today,” he says. “It’s about what you are doing to build the next-generation Royal Air Force; the air force of 10, 20, 30 years’ time that our successors will pick up and fight and win with.”
Sir Mike, 55, the professional head of the RAF, has done a lot of fighting in his 37 years of commissioned service.
From leading his squadron in the skies over Iraq as the country below boiled in the aftermath Saddam Hussein’s rule (“going into a degree of danger to protect other people from a lot of danger”), to placing men and women in harm’s way right to the end of his time in charge (“there was a kinetic strike [against IS] just last week”), he is clear-eyed about the myriad threats facing the UK.
Right now, he says, and for many years hence, the biggest threat will be from Russia, either with or without Vladimir Putin at the top table.
“The ideology that is clearly now driving Putin … you can track all the way back to his period as a KGB operative,” Sir Mike says.
“This is a dictator who’s prepared to wage a brutal war in the name of what Russia should be in his mind.
“But it also demonstrates that this is more than about just one person. There is a whole structure and a hierarchy behind Putin. Even if he were to disappear off the stage, there are countless others that could replace him that could be equally brutal and vicious to their own people and to neighbouring states.” A humiliating exit from Ukraine, harried by the waves of sophisticated Western weapons sent to Kyiv, may even exacerbate that threat.
“That’s something we must focus our minds on,” he says, “because when the Ukraine conflict is over, and Ukraine has restored its borders, as it must, we will have a damaged, vindictive, and a brutal Russia, whose means of harming us is through air attack, missile attack and sub-surface attack.”
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers a “first-mover advantage” as governments grapple with the military applications of new technology. However, “there has to be a human in the loop for any decision on the use of lethal force”, Sir Mike warns.
The RAF currently uses AI in the training environment, to refine operational scenarios for exercises and to develop new tactics and procedures. The next leap, Sir Mike says, is around “decision-making in the battle space”.
The need to modernise, from developing AI or using synthetic fuel to help meet climate change commitments, is a theme running through Sir Mike’s vision for the service he will leave behind.
He takes particular pride in his service’s ability to seamlessly undertake what he sees as business-as-usual operations, such as strikes against IS, the evacuation of civilians from Sudan, helping in the fight against Covid and carrying out ceremonial duties on the death of the Queen and Coronation of the King.
“I’ve worn this uniform, in one form or another, since I was 13,” he says, an easy smile breaking out at the memory. “I was an air cadet. I went to a comprehensive school in north Wales. I was fortunate to get a place at university and a university cadetship from the RAF.”
The enthusiasm of the wide-eyed 13-year-old air cadet breaks through as he describes the possible future for the RAF that he says simply has to become reality if the service is to remain relevant and world-leading.
“In a few years’ time I would like to think that people will look back on this period as a moment where the Royal Air Force really began to modernise, really began to shape itself up for that future digital age, with space and cyber and autonomy and AI.
“And it was this period where we sowed the seeds, both culturally and by investing in the right areas of our business, to really get after some of those, to get ourselves set for the
21st century.
“We made some big changes in this period, and I think they are the changes that set us up now for the next 100 years.”
‘I was beyond infuriated when information came to me about inappropriate behaviour in the Red Arrows’