The war drums are beating

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The military mind is a strange beast, even if the phrase is not quite as much of an oxymoron as military intelligence. Perhaps it’s a necessary qualification for the job, but the top echelons of the military – and this seems to be common to most countries – start from an assumption that the ‘enemy’ (and there is always an ‘enemy’, whether real or supposed) is just waiting for an opportunity to invade and seize territory and resources. In order to prevent and deter that, we must devote an ever-increasing proportion of the world’s resources and wealth into weapons of destruction, and be prepared at a moment’s notice to fight.

The paranoia has been working overtime recently, with dire warnings about the need to reintroduce conscription, talk of putting the economy on a war footing, and even demands for the government to issue guidance on how to survive an all-out nuclear exchange. The UK is not actually at war yet, although Sunak’s euphemistic hints about a “sustained campaign” in Yemen have a certain resonance with Putin’s “special military operation” as a way of avoiding the word ‘war’. I tend to favour the duck test when it comes to deciding what is or is not a war, although I’m conscious that those killed as a result of military action were probably not overly bothered about the distinction anyway.

There are a number of possible reasons why someone might want to launch an attack on the UK, but war isn’t always about territory and resources. Insanity is under-rated as a cause of war, but must surely be a factor in the ‘thinking’ of anyone who can seriously contemplate an all-out nuclear exchange. Strange ideas about what constitutes a nation and the desire to impose a nationality on people certainly seem to have been a factor in Putin’s attack on Ukraine, although he really doesn’t seem to have given much thought as to how Russian identity could be effectively imposed on 44 million Ukrainians, especially given the differences between the twenty-first century and the time of the Tsars. On the other hand, if you ‘know’ that all Ukrainians are really Russians anyway, just waiting to be liberated, maybe you don’t need such a plan.

Probably one of the biggest potential causes of mass conflict in current times is a belief that the ‘other side’ is about to invade ‘us’. That is, of course, precisely the justification being used by NATO countries to drive military expansion and locate troops and equipment along the Russian border in response to perceived threats from Russia. But, and without wishing to create any sort of false equivalence, is it really wholly unreasonable for Putin to see such a build-up as an indication that NATO might be preparing to invade Russia? I don’t believe that NATO has any such intention, by the way (its leaders surely can’t be quite that mad) but it’s the perception which is important here, not the fact. “Use it before you lose it” is a powerful motive for getting your retaliation in first.

The political mind, like the military mind, seems to see the large scale use of high explosives as the answer to all conflicts, despite the overwhelming evidence in recent decades to the contrary. But, as the saying goes, if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The question is how we can de-escalate from an increasingly dangerous situation. There are no easy answers – and probably no answers at all if the underlying problem is that many of the actors are simply not rational. It’s said that generals always fight the last war, and that might well turn out to be true in some respects. One of those relates to conscription; whilst the patriotic fervour at the commencement of the first World War meant that it was two years before conscription became necessary in the UK, the probability of a repeat lives only in the minds of the deluded. And the successful implementation of a conscription programme to fight in a massive land war looks dubious not just in the UK, but in much of Europe. Conscripts on both sides have more interests in common with each other than they do with those sending them into battle, and modern communications technology makes them more likely to realise that than they were at the time of the last two large-scale European conflicts. That ought to be a reason for optimism, but the danger is that it makes the early use of weapons of mass destruction more likely. The times we live in are dangerous – and the UK government and military seem bent on making themselves part of the problem rather than the solution.