Lad's Army

General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army, is not alone in issuing a national call to prepare for a major conflict in Europe, proposing a "citizen army".  

Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister has called for a “serious national debate” about the future of the country’s military preparedness and Admiral Rob Bauer, head of NATO's military committee, said countries needed to be alert "and expect the unexpected". Grant Shapps, the UK's defence secretary, has also warned of the need to be prepared for war, saying, ominously, that the country was moving from a "post-war to a pre-war world".

I imagine many of us will have worked this one out for ourselves but possibly stopped short of thinking through the practical implications of it, which are indeed alarming. Many of us who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall are perhaps still clinging to the heady memory of the so-called 'peace dividend', when we heaved a collective sigh of relief that the Cold War was over, the Iron Curtain had lifted, East and West Germany were reunified and all was well with the world. Except, of course, it wasn't.

Euphoria had clouded our judgment, no doubt, and while we deluded ourselves that we could finally beat our swords into ploughshares, almost immediately things began to fall apart. After 1999, with the election of Vladimir Putin as President of Russia, it became apparent that he would be no Mikhail Gorbachev or Boris Yeltsin. He was clearly set on rebuilding Russia's lost empire while the West, far from trying to reassure or placate him, added to his sense of paranoia by actively (Putin would say aggressively) expanding NATO and the EUs sphere of influence right up to the borders of his new Federation, absorbing many former-Soviet satellite countries along the way, with the clear intention of continuing to do so. 

None of which excuses Putin's meglomaniacal actions since 1999, notably and most egregiously in Georgia, Chechnya, Crimea and more recenty, the Donbas region of Ukraine, to say nothing of his malign involvement in Syria and several African conflicts as well as his poisonous and murderous escapades against those ex-patriot critics who had wisely fled abroad, and his clampdown on any kind of dissent or challenge at home.

But to contemplate waging war with Russia on European soil, and discussing so openly and graphically citizens' mobilisation to augment it, seems little short of reckless. We might think it and even prepare for it but to talk it up so brazenly seems a dangerous strategy, which risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy. 

Perhaps our policy-makers feel they need to proactively throw down the gauntlet to Putin whilst pandering to the illusion of democratic accountability at home by making public pronouncements to set the scene for what will, in effect, be a fait accompli. But in a year where four billion of the world's population, in over fifty countries, are due to go to the polls we, the electorate, should make it clear we think this is the same old rhetoric of war mongering. The cart is clearly being put before the horse here. In other words we're not being asked if we're willing to go onto a war footing, we're being warned that we inevitably will be.

This simply isn't good enough. At a time when conscription is a live political issue and being reintroduced in several European countries, including France and Estonia, and where youngsters, mostly male, are fleeing their countries to evade call-up or, as in the case of 18 year-old conscientious objector, Tal Mitnick, undergoing imprisonment in Israel for their principles, couching pronouncements about conscription in terms of when rather than whether is unacceptable.

This isn't 1914, or even 1939. We are clearly at a dangerous crossroads but old-fashioned sabre-rattling simply won't cut it. In modern democratic systems we surely have a right to expect a proper public debate on the options available to us by way of a response to external threats. Herr Pistorius is right to talk about holding "a serious national debate”. Instead of which, it feels suspiciously as if, just as in the past, the decision has already been taken and we're being propelled into war hugger-mugger. And, as in the past, it will be our young people who will be expected to pay the price; possibly the ultimate one.

This is a grotesque proposition in the modern age and I would urge them to resist it. Why should they be automatically expected to fight for the survival of a system which, having so spectacularly failed them, now expects them to die for it in numbers? As I often say, it's instructive to follow the money, and let's face it, there's an awful lot of money to be made out of waging war. The problem is that there may be no coming back from this one.

Maybe political parties around the world will make their stances clear in their manifestos and allow their electorates to decide which policy they prefer - in Churchill's term, jaw-jaw or war-war.

Somehow, though, I very much doubt they will.

Update 29/01/24: And now news emerges that the US is preparing to station nuclear weapons at RAF Lakenheath for the first time since 2008. With Donald Trump due to take the Presidency back I'm sure that's hugely reassuring to us all.