The world has never been more volatile. Britons must be prepared to fight for their country

Telegraph

5 hours ago

When Lord Robertson was asked to co-write a strategic review of Britain's defence, he had one slightly peculiar objective. 'It was suggested at the beginning that the objective of our report should be to stop The Daily Telegraph judging Britain's defence by the number of people in the Army,' the former Nato secretary general said.
'And I think we've done that,' he remarked in an interview with The Telegraph 's Battle Lines podcast this week.
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) is a 144-page, 45,000 word prescription for 'root and branch' reform of Britain's military.
Officially, it is an instruction to the Government. But at another level, it is addressed to us, the British public. The message is stark: how much are you prepared to sacrifice to make this country safe?
That implies a demand no British government has had to make of voters since Winston Churchill promised blood, toil, tears and sweat. It's a reflection of the danger of the current geopolitical moment.
And it is why Robertson believes he has made the case in this review for looking beyond numbers of troops, submarines and fighter planes that previous reports have focused on.
The real issues, he argues, are much more crucial. 'Too many of the interviews I've had this week have been about the money. Whereas actually this report fundamentally transforms the way in which we do defence.
'It's a strategic review, it is designed for 2035, not just for what we're facing at the present moment.
'It's to do with what we are going to need in future: agile forces, grasping the whole of technology, capturing the innovations that are coming. I think a lot of people have missed that.'
Lord Robertson has spent a career in and around defence and security. As Tony Blair's first defence secretary he authored the new Labour government's own strategic review in 1998. He went on to serve as secretary general of Nato from 1999-2003.
So he was a natural choice when John Healey, the defence secretary, was hiring independent reviewers to take a new look at the state of British defence. His co-authors were General Sir Richard Barrons, an accomplished soldier who is best known for publicly warning of the current crisis in the forces 10 years ago, and Fiona Hill, the British-American foreign policy expert who advised Donald Trump on Russia during his first term as president.
Both have a reputation as the best in their respective fields. The report they have come up with – readably penned by Hill, who Robertson strongly hints was by far the best writer of the three – is both ambitious, and frighteningly blunt.
Three years into the biggest war in Europe in 1945, they warn, Britain's Armed Forces remain shaped by the post Cold-War era of small wars, far away, against irregular or poorly armed opponents.
'Exquisite' capabilities have masked the 'hollowing out' of the Armed Forces' war fighting capability. Stockpiles are inadequate. The 'strategic base lacks capacity and resilience following years of under investment. Medical services lack the capacity for managing a mass-casualty conflict'.
Poor recruitment and retention, shoddy accommodation, falling morale, and cultural challenges have created a military 'workforce crisis'. And in addition, the relationship with industry is still stuck in the Cold War.
'Business as usual is not an option,' they write. Their plan is to bring Britain to war-fighting readiness over the next 10 years. Will we have that long?
General Carsten Breuer, the head of the German army, said this month that Nato could face a Russian attack by 2029.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British defence think tank, found in a report in May that the attack could come as early as 2027, in the admittedly worst-case scenario of America leaving Nato and removing troops from Europe.
'The decade [to 2035] is what we were working to. That was our view about what we needed to do,' says Lord Robertson. 'For a peer adversary attacking the United Kingdom, which is what we're talking about, it would probably require that long for the existing potential adversaries to reconstitute. But it can be earlier, and therefore the model that we have created and are promoting can be accelerated.'
Of the 62 individual proposals in this 'root and branch' reform plan, many are of operational implications that will mostly be of interest to those already in uniform.
The Royal Navy, it says, will need a greater submarine and anti-submarine warfare capability to protect our underwater pipelines and cables.
The RAF is called on to deliver deeper air and missile defence, expand its use of drones, and could be involved in 'discussions with the United States and Nato on the potential benefits and feasibility of enhanced UK participation in Nato's nuclear mission'.
Some have taken that to mean mounting air-dropped nuclear-bombs on F-35As jets, but Robertson says: 'It's not in the report because we found a huge diversity of opinion about that, ranging from the best nuclear platform to the suitability of the F35.'
The biggest implications are for the Army, the least modernised of the three services and the one most depleted by donating kit to Ukraine. It will have to increase its armoured brigades from two to three, implying a massive investment and overhaul.
But woven through all of this is a theme of relevance to everyone living in Britain, whatever their relationship to the Armed Forces.
The new era, they say, requires an 'all-of-society' approach. Forget recent decades. The Falklands, Gulf, and Afghanistan wars did not require anything close to the scale of national preparation for war, home defence, resilience, and industrial mobilisation that they have in mind.
'We need to have a national conversation among the British people about your defence and security, how safe do people want to be, and what you are willing to pay in order to be properly safe,' says Robertson.
'Our adversaries don't believe in business as usual, and therefore what we are doing can't be business as usual.'
Nor will it be business as usual for Robertson, who left Nato in 2003 and at the age of 79 could be forgiven for wanting to spend more time at his home in Dunblane with his wife Sandra.
Instead, he says, he and the other reviewers will be visiting 'various parts of the country' to make that case for a new defence pact to the general public.
'The volatility of world events is unprecedented'
It is a function of just how fundamentally the world has changed since the defence review he last authored nearly 30 years ago.
'We had 10,000 troops committed to Northern Ireland in 1998, either in the province or ready to go there. Nato had just signed the Nato-Russia Founding Act with Boris Yeltsin. China was in the shadows, wasn't really a big player at all, and we thought globalisation was a great idea.'
'So that world has gone. We now have a great power competition playing out in front of our eyes,' he adds.
'We have geostrategic shifts taking place all the time in terms of industry and commerce. The volatility of events in the world is unprecedented, probably in history.'
For that reason, the SDR devotes several pages to home defence and resilience, ensuring continuity of national life in the event of infrastructure failures and 'build national preparedness and resilience, ensuring the UK can withstand attacks and recover quickly'.
Its prescriptions include renewing the contract between the Forces and the country, enhancing protection for critical national infrastructure, making sure that industry knows what is expected of it in case of war.
All of this will be useless without one crucial, but unquantifiable factor. Just as nuclear deterrence depends on the willingness of national leaders to use it, whole-of-society deterrence will only be as credible as our own – that is, ordinary people's – willingness to endure hardship our enemies can inflict upon us.
Those hardships will be enormous. Experience from Ukraine shows that full scale war involves electricity, water, and energy supplies being targeted. There will be shortages of fuel and possibly of food.
We have already had tasters of the chaos to come. 'If the lights go out in this studio and this building here today,' Lord Robertson says, gesturing around The Telegraph 's podcast studio, 'do we know how to get out of it?'
I'm not entirely sure I do. He carries on: 'A few weeks ago, the whole of Spain and Portugal lost power. Two modern European countries lost power. Paralysis was the result.
'A transformer blows up and Heathrow airport, the busiest airport in the world, has to close down for 24 hours. Something like 90 per cent of the data that we are using in this country and in Europe as a whole, comes in under sea cables.
' About 77 per cent of the UK's gas imports come from Norway and one in one pipeline. So the vulnerabilities from cyber and from the grey zone, disinformation, targeted assassinations, electoral interference, all of that is part and parcel of today's world.'
Once confrontation moves from the grey zone to open war, there is a question of casualties.
How would the British public respond, I ask, to cruise missiles slamming into Catterick Garrison leaving dozens, possibly hundreds, of young soldiers dead?
Or glide bombs ripping women and children into pieces as they shop? Or a Royal Navy ship being lost with all hands?
Are we, as a nation, psychologically and culturally prepared to shoulder the kind of hardship and grief unseen since 1945?
'We'll need to make sure that that is the case and remind people about what it is. And I think that's the job of the media. It's the job of politicians.
'And we need to raise awareness of the issue. What is it you want, what is the insurance premium that will keep you and your family safe in the future.
'But we in the review are talking about how to avoid it. Deterrence is the question. You know, we all go to our beds at night safe because of Article 5 of the Nato treaty.'
However Nato – the bedrock of British defence – is under strain. And Britain's relationship with its allies is about to be tested at the annual alliance summit in the Hague later this month.
Robertson, Barrons and Hill wrote the Review to parameters set by the government: specifically, a commitment to raise defence spending from 2.3 per cent to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 and to 3 per cent in the next parliament when economic conditions allow. Nato officials told The Telegraph this week that they expect Starmer to commit to 3.5 per cent at the alliance's annual summit in the Hague.
Donald Trump and his defence secretary Pete Hegseth are demanding a much higher bench mark of 5 per cent. Lord Richard Dannatt, a former head of the British Army, said earlier this week that postponing three per cent target is 'tantamount to back in 1937 saying to Adolf Hitler 'please don't attack us until 1946 because we won't be ready'.'
Although Robertson argues the money question is a distraction from the 'guts' of the review, it is not difficult to see where the tight budget has constrained ambition.
'Ten times more lethal'
The review clearly states that none of the three Services – Army, Royal Navy, or Royal Air Force can afford to lose any more highly trained and equipped regulars.
Yet the authors' proposed remedy is strangely modest. For example, it says the Army should have a total strength of 100,000, consisting of the current nominal 73,000 regulars (the smallest since the Napoleonic wars) and the difference made up by an expansion of the number of reservists.
It argues that new technology can make this small force '10 times more lethal' than it is now. And it is true that automation is changing warfare.
The audacious Ukrainian operation to strike Russian airbases last weekend, points out Robertson, is a perfect example of the kind of thing Britain should be planning to carry out – and defend against. But high intensity peer conflict still involves casualties. Heavy casualties.
In the trenches in Donbas, there is a constant threat of shrapnel, bullet, and blast wounds. Drones may now be inflicting more casualties than artillery, but that is of little comfort to the infantry: unlike a 152mm shell, a quadcopter loaded with plastic explosive can chase your car or fly right through the door of your dugout.
'Ukraine is an example, but it's not a template'
That is one reason why this month Russia is projected to suffer its millionth casualty, including dead and wounded.
No one is suggesting the British Army should fight with Russian-style tactics. But can a force of 73,000 regulars and 27,000 reservists really sustain modern levels of attrition?
'The Army's lethality is what matters. It's the effectiveness of our forces that actually matter, at the end of the day. And Ukraine is an example, but it's not a template.
'People say that generals, and even strategists are busy fighting the last war, and in some ways, Ukraine is the last war. The next war will be a very different war in many ways with very different sets of circumstances that we have to deal with,' says Robertson.
Yet it is difficult to shake the feeling that although Robertson, Hill and Barrons did the best they could within the financial parameters they were set, they would have liked to do more.
Would he have liked more money to work with? And does he believe Labour will deliver? Everything in the review has been 'ruthlessly' costed, he says, and the Prime Minister has explicitly promised its recommendations are going to be implemented.
'So the three of us are going to be right there, you know, sitting there like crows on the branch of a tree, watching carefully as to how the recommendations are implemented and how, and, and when and when they are,' he says
'So Labour has created a bit of a rod for their own back by having independent reviewers, but at the same time, it should galvanise them.' The question of raising the budget, he says, is a question for voters.
'What we can say is what we think is necessary, in terms of reference [we were given]. If the British people as a whole decide they want to spend more money on defence and less money on other things, then they will make that decision,' he says.
'At the moment they don't. We had a general election campaign last year where defence wasn't really mentioned at all. We had a Conservative party leadership campaign where defence wasn't mentioned as an issue. So people in the country have to see the threats that exist at the moment and the threats that will be there in the future and make a decision about what they have.'
Britons will have to make sacrifices
It's a fair point. For all the grumbling about Keir Starmer's timidness, the truth is his government – and British taxpayers – face three equally unpalatable options. They could borrow, while national debt is already at 95 per cent of GDP and growth anaemic; raise taxes, when the tax burden is already on course to be the highest since the Second World War; or make cuts elsewhere, when public services are already struggling.
Is the blunt message, then, that to be safe ordinary Britons will have to make sacrifices?
'I think so. Unless the economy improves and unless we get growth – and a lot of what we are doing is promoting growth, defence expenditure is a way of gaining growth – then that makes the pie bigger and the choice is less difficult to make.
'We don't live in a world where there is an infinite amount of money available. It's a question of priorities. And if in a national conversation, which the Prime Minister has promised he's going to lead, people come to the conclusion that they want to avoid the lights going out or the hospitals being shut or the airports being shuttered and the data cables being broken, then the insurance premium that keeps your family safe has got be afforded.'
As Robertson leaves The Telegraph, I remark that there is something about our conversation that leaves me uneasy. Here we are, a journalist in his 40s and a peer of the realm in his 70s – blithely discussing a war that neither of us will probably have to fight in.
Does he find it morally awkward, talking about sacrifices today's teenagers and twenty-somethings will be asked to make? 'It is, and that's why I'm so obsessive about deterrence,' he says. 'The idea is to do this now so we don't have to fight.'
He returns to the nuclear question, and three decades of interactions with top Russian officials. 'I've been in the Kremlin. And I am convinced that even if we did everything you've suggested – double the size of the army, and so on – the one thing that will really get their attention is the independent nuclear deterrent.'
'You know, there are people who will still argue that if Ukraine had not given up its nuclear weapons in 1994, in return for the paper assurances of the Budapest memorandum, that Russia would never have dared to have crossed the border. I don't know if you can prove that or disprove that.
'All I know is that Nato and the Article 5 guarantee is a deterrent to any aggressor who thinks that they can take on these 32 countries. So all of the missiles, all of the submarines, all of the planes that we are proposing are part of the build-up to war readiness are designed not to be used.
'They're designed to make sure that nobody fires that cruise missile.'