UK ‘must act now to stave off new threats’
BRITAIN’S “70-year holiday from history” is over and new enemies now threaten to overcome us, the Chief of Defence Staff has warned.
Increasingly assertive and aggressive states were using techniques below the threshold of conventional battle and had shown mastery in exploiting the seams between peace and war, General Sir Nick Carter said. “What constitutes a weapon in this grey area no longer has to go bang.”
The “global playing field” of international relations was now one of constant competition and confrontation where “energy, cash, corrupt business practices, assassination, fake news and good old fashioned military intimidation” are all being used as weapons.
“There are no longer two clearly distinct states of peace and war,” he said.
If Britain did not recognise this and act accordingly, the threat would creep up on us “like a chronic contagious disease”, he warned. “We will fail if we see these as a series of crises.”
The new Chief of the Defence Staff, giving his first speech after four weeks in the post, said Russia was the arch exponent of such behaviour.
Hinting at the widely held belief that Russian soldiers in Ukraine wore nonstandard uniforms to provide the Kremlin a means of denial, he said the country’s approach to conflict might involve “little green men, big green tanks and huge green missiles”. “Fail to change now and our adversaries, slowly but surely will overcome us. They will erode and finally overturn the democratic, rules-based system under which we have all lived comfortably for nigh on three generations.”
“I fear our 70-year holiday from history may well be over, and we all have a job to do to fix it.”
His comments come just hours after the first of the UK’S next-generation remotely piloted vehicles landed at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire two hours after take-off from North Dakota, in the US. Sixteen Protector aircraft will enter service with the RAF in the early 2020s, and they will be the first drones in their class to be able to fly in the same airspace as regular aircraft such as passenger planes.