“Tripwires aren’t enough.” In this one sentence General Sir Patrick Sanders summed up the UK military’s new strategy towards the European landmass and the threat from Russia. Now all he has to do is get the government to fund it.
The Chief of General Staff’s (CGS) first major speech is well worth reading in full, and, although written with refreshing clarity, also worth analysing what lies behind the clarion call to arms.
Take the “tripwires” quote. This is a reference to the post-Cold War policy of positioning small numbers of NATO troops in places where if Russia wanted to achieve a military objective it would have to kill them, and thus bring in the full force of the alliance. It was considered a deterrence. The classic example is the Suwalki Gap linking Poland to the Baltic states.
General Sanders is arguing that a revanchist Russia makes this policy outdated, saying: “… the British Army, in conjunction with our NATO allies and partners, must be in-place or at especially high readiness – ideally a mix of both.”
This chimes with the speech delivered by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace on the same day in which he declared a “determination to shift from an emphasis on warfighting contingency to persistent presence for containment”, and with the subsequent decisions made at the NATO summit in Madrid. The UK will commit an extra 1,000 troops to help defend Estonia. Some will join the 2,000 already there, others will be placed on high readiness to deploy. One of the two British aircraft carrier strike groups will be on standby to head to eastern Europe. The US will add to the 100,000 personnel already in Europe, send extra F-35 fighters to the UK, two navy destroyers to be based in Spain, and create a new permanent army headquarters in Poland. Heavy equipment will be stockpiled on the continent, closer to potential flash points.
This falls short of the call from the Baltic states for a permanent base with a division-sized force of about 15,000 troops but it is still a serious signal of intent by NATO, as is the plan to eventually have 300,000 troops at high readiness to deploy. The “strategic concept” is similar to the Cold War “containment” policy and will require NATO members to up defence budgets. It is driven by the growing belief that, as General Sanders put it: “It is dangerous to assume that Ukraine is a limited conflict… We don’t yet know how the war in Ukraine will end, but in most scenarios, Russia will be an even greater threat to European security after Ukraine than it was before.”
The Baltic states, in particular, are warning that if Moscow learns from its failed assault on Kyiv, capital cities such as Vilnius could be overrun before NATO could mount a counterattack. Hence Sanders argues that: “We are not at war – but we must act rapidly so that we aren’t drawn into one through a failure to contain territorial expansion”. Such thinking has got through to the politicians, many of whom refused to take Putin seriously when he referenced Peter the Great or spoke of the fall of the Soviet Union as a “catastrophe”.
But tripwires are cheap – mass is expensive. Sanders fired a number of salvoes: “Land will still be the decisive domain… Technology does not eliminate the relevance of combat mass… Success will be determined by combined arms and multi-domain competence. And mass.” Blunter still was the sentence: “It would be perverse if the CGS was advocating reducing the size of the Army as a land war rages in Europe.”
Just in case Downing Street hadn’t got the message, Wallace underlined it, in thick red ink: “What use is boasting about how many tanks or ships you have if you have no spares or no ammunition? What is the point of demanding more brigades if the ones you have possess no electronic warfare or sufficient air defence? How long do we think our reformed armoured brigades will last when their enemy’s artillery out-range them by tens of kilometres?”
Answers – no use, no point, and not long. But to remedy this is going to cost huge sums, and if the UK military is to compete on the above, as well as in cyber, drone and space warfare, it will need more than the already record sums committed by the current government.
At least Gen Sanders hinted he agrees that the MOD’s insistent habit of spending far too much, too late, and often on the wrong things, needs to change even if he did it with lashings of understatement: “I’d be naïve if I ignored the fact that the Army’s platform procurement has not been a smooth journey during the last decade.” Or indeed the last several decades.
Wallace is reported to have written to the Prime Minister asking for the defence budget to rise to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2028 and on Thursday Johnson said it would reach that figure by the end of the decade. In 2021 an estimated 2.26 per cent of GDP was spent on defence. Given the rate of inflation, even maintaining that will be a “challenge” as they say in Whitehall.
Boris Johnson would probably like to give the military every bell and whistle it wants. In Madrid he said NATO’s target of members spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence was “a floor not a ceiling”. However, just as Gen Sanders has said he will be “ruthless” in prioritising where money must be spent, so will Johnson, especially as we near the next election.
Despite some media reporting about rows between the MOD and Downing Street, there is significant strategic agreement between Sanders, Wallace, and Johnson. They are acutely aware that American governments, of whatever colour, demand the Europeans do more and pay more. As Sanders puts it: “Given the commitments of the US in Asia during the 20s and 30s, I believe that the burden for conventional deterrence in Europe will fall increasingly to European members of NATO and the JEF” (The UK-led 10 nation Joint Expeditionary Force).
Yet Johnson knows the UK has more “wiggle room” with the Americans than do most NATO allies when it comes to budgets and a commitment announced on the world stage of a NATO summit can always be “clarified” due to a change in circumstances down the line. Sanders has made his pitch public, he has a nice turn of phrase – “To put it bluntly, you can’t cyber your way across a river” – but he cannot continue to be as blunt without falling out with Downing Street.