War with Russia: “not if but when”

Gen. Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff

Such is the assessment of Gen. Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff. And he doesn’t rate our chances.

I’ve been saying similar things for years. That only goes to show how obvious they are: if a rank amateur like me can spot both the strategic menace and our inability to nullify it, then surely anyone can.

Well, not quite. While few will argue against the second proposition, that Britain is so weak militarily as to be practically disarmed, many are the ‘useful idiots’ who insist on Putin’s good intentions and generally spotless character.

They’ll probably be saying the same things if a Russian airborne division established a beachhead in Kent. You see, they’ll be saying, what our provocations have forced this good, Christian, anti-homosexual, patriotic, strong leader to do.

It’s anyone’s guess whether they’d change their tune if Russian tanks advanced on London. But I prefer to talk facts, not conjecture.

I shan’t repeat Sir Nick’s assessment of the relative military potential of Russia and Britain, or for that matter Europe. Those interested in the technical details can find them in today’s papers.

Suffice it to say that we’re decisively outgunned in every category – and the disparity is widening due to our successive governments’ criminal policy of denuding our military to pre-Napoleonic levels.

Then again, the only thing that matters to our spivocrats is self-perpetuation, which means garnering enough votes to win the next election. Pumping money into defence of the realm won’t achieve this purpose, while bloating welfare and NHS budgets to suicidal levels may.

Hence our spivocrats will throw trillions down the black hole of social spending and foreign aid, while only building, as a sop to the hawks, a couple of aircraft carriers with no aircrafts to carry.

But let’s concentrate on the nature of Putin’s Russia, along with her intentions. These are crucial because HMG’s entire defence policy is based on the assumptions peddled by Putin’s propagandists and their eager recipients in the West.

(Incidentally, if downloading child porn is a criminal offence because this encourages uploading it, then surely downloading RT should be as well. A few perverts aren’t going to cause nearly as much damage, after all.)

Alas, even reasonably unbiased Britons don’t understand the profoundly evil nature of Putin’s kleptofascist regime. We’ve lost the capacity to identify evil – or indeed to acknowledge it exists, this side of the Muslim world.

Those Britons don’t know much about evil regimes, and understand even less. Hence Lenin’s and Stalin’s nightmare had millions of supporters, especially within the fashionably lefty lumpen intelligentsia.

Hitler too had his supporters, drawn mainly from the classes above the intelligentsia. And the likes of Lloyd George and G. B. Shaw successfully spanned the two groups by favouring both red and brown Satanists.

Typologically, British fans of Putin resemble the group that supported Hitler, although their accents aren’t usually as upmarket. They certainly cite similar reasons: our government is weak and vacillating (true), their idol is strong (equally true), he’s patriotic (true about Hitler, less true about Putin), he’s the only hope of the world (false in both cases).

And even those who generously acknowledge that murdering or imprisoning dissidents, suppressing free press, turning the whole country and much of the world into an organised crime mob, attacking neighbours and grabbing pieces of their territory aren’t nice things to do still find excuses for the KGB colonel.

It’s all our fault, they say. We’ve provoked Putin by supporting the Ukraine’s independence and expanding NATO to include the Baltics.

This only goes to show that their moral compass must sit next to a powerful magnet. Chaps, the Russians deliberately starved millions of Ukrainians to death, forcing parents to eat their children. And in the next decade they murdered or deported about a quarter of the Baltics’ population.

In both places, guerrilla warfare against the Russians went on throughout the 1950s, with young people heroically going to their deaths to resist their murderers, torturers and suppressors of their national culture.

When their descendants finally managed to gain their independence, surely it’s the moral duty of the West to offer every possible support and protection? Even at a cost to itself?

However, Putin’s fans profess thinking in realpolitik, not moral, categories. But they wouldn’t know either morality or realpolitik if it bit them on the, well, nose. Because of that cognitive disorder they don’t realise that this is one of those rare instances when morality and realpolitik coincide.

They think Russia’s massive military build-up (see today’s papers) is just for show. They think that Putin’s hysterically bellicose propaganda identifying the West as both the enemy and the target is just a political stratagem designed to win the next election.

This only shows their pro-Putin bias married to cataclysmic ignorance of history, Russia, propaganda, military build-ups and just about everything else involved in the problem at hand.

Correcting such all-embracing ignorance in a short piece is an impossible task, but I can still outline some stab points. The most important one is that runaway militarisation coupled with total – not to say totalitarian – war propaganda acquires an inner logic all its own.

At some point militarisation becomes mobilisation and, as the German strategist Helmut von Moltke postulated, mobilisation is war. Once that juggernaut gathers speed, it soon reaches a point of no return.

I’d argue – and so evidently would Sir Nick – that Russia’s militarisation has already reached that point. So has her propaganda.

Bugles haven’t tooted and drums haven’t rattled so loudly in Russia since the 1930s, when Stalin was turning the populace into unthinking murderous automata ready to roll over Europe. I certainly never saw anything on the same scale during my 25 years in Russia (ending in 1973).

This sort of thing has the same effect as mobilisation. When the state’s whole raison d’être is rattling its sabre, at some point that sabre has to see the light of day. Otherwise the state will lose its legitimacy, a loss that its leader will be unlikely to survive physically.

Parallels with 1914 are being drawn all over the place, but the most critical one escapes most commentators’ attention. None of the future combatants wanted war then; they all hoped to achieve their ends by peaceful means. To that end, they all militarised, made bellicose noises and flexed their muscles.

They thus breathed life into the genie of war and consequently lost control over it. The genie came out of the bottle and wouldn’t be put back.

Putin runs a country where at least half of the population (and I’m being generous) live in appalling poverty, many of them actually starving. At the same time the country is facing a demographic catastrophe, with its population declining as a result of low birth rates, third-world life expectancy, practically non-existing medical care, undernourishment – and mass emigration.

Against that background, Putin and his junta are stealing the country blind, transferring trillions into various offshore havens. Putin has turned his whole entourage into billionaires, from his family and friends to his bodyguard and cook.

There’s a constant rumble of tectonic discontent in Russia, and an eruption can only be prevented by offering a metaphysical compensation for all the physical deprivations. Putin remembers Herzen’s maxim: the strongest chains tethering the people are forged out of victorious swords – or, to start with, out of the promise to unsheathe those swords.

But the deprivations are real, made even more so by the fact that Russians are allowed to travel to the West and compare. Since, in the good tradition of both the tsars and the Bolsheviks, the government is above reproach, that state of affairs has to be blamed on someone.

When Hitler took over a destitute, humiliated Germany, he identified the culprits rather narrowly: the Jews. So far this traditional enemy of everything that fascists of every hue see as good hasn’t been mentioned in Russia, at least not publicly by its government.

For the time being Putin has set his sights wider: the West. And he has made a solemn promise, sometimes in so many words, sometimes tacitly, that the West will pay for its perfidy.

Hence the whole logic of Russia’s kleptofascist regime demands war. Promises are supposed to be kept, and those who break them will be held accountable.

For all intents and purposes, Russia’s KGB government, backed by her KGB church, has already declared a crusade on the West. Sir Nick seems to realise this, and he’s aghast that the government doesn’t seem to.

In fact, the war is already in full swing, but only one side is fighting it – so far mostly with electronic and information weapons. Sir Nick knows that in modern warfare these are as deadly as tanks and missiles. So he screams, but, though his isn’t exactly the lone voice crying in the wilderness, it’s certainly not part of the mighty choir we need.

I do disagree with Sir Nick on one point. We aren’t facing the greatest threat since the Cold War. It’s the greatest since 1939 – and the only way to confront it is with a resolute show of strength.

With our government, I’m not holding my breath.

12 thoughts on “War with Russia: “not if but when””

  1. I’ve always thought that decommissioning our nuclear bunkers at the supposed end of the Cold War was too optimistic by half.

  2. 1. “Such is the assessment of Gen. Sir Nick Carter, the Chief of the General Staff. And he doesn’t rate our chances.”

    The British Admiral Parry said more or less the same thing a number of years ago. The world order as we know it will collapse anywhere from 2012 to 2018. With ensuing chaos and world-wide disaster.

    And Donald is to blame.

    2. “That only goes to show how obvious they are: if a rank amateur like me can spot both the strategic menace and our inability to nullify it, then surely anyone can.”

    Eisenhower said that it two areas of human endeavor did the amateur exceed the professional. Prostitution and military strategy.

    And Donald is to blame.

    3. “that Britain is so weak militarily as to be practically disarmed, many are the ‘useful idiots’ who insist on Putin’s good intentions and generally spotless character.”

    Don once again. Don wants all of NATO to pay their 2 % as was agreed was agreed on. Don again.

    4. “they’ll be saying, what our provocations have forced this good, Christian, anti-homosexual, patriotic, strong leader to do.”

    Don once more. Always Don. What did Don do now??

    5. “Pumping money into defence of the realm won’t achieve this purpose, while bloating welfare and NHS budgets to suicidal levels may.”

    Correct. The welfare state in all forms comes first. The pint of milk for each school kid. But that magazine of rounds for the infantryman – – we gotta stop and think about it for a while. Don somehow by his insistence made the situation worse. Don’t forget that. Think of how much for welfare if we could just get rid of the damned Trident.

    6. “it’s all our fault, they say. We’ve provoked Putin by supporting the Ukraine’s independence and expanding NATO to include the Baltics.”

    Don!! Don did something to provoke them and make them mad. Can be nothing else. DON!!

    Sorry for the rant but there it is.

  3. I’m very mindful of your perspective as a native Russian, Mr B and I have no doubt that Putin runs a gangster state…but, as a retired military chap, I have to say that the idea that we face a conventional threat from Russia is laughable whilst all sides retain a ‘mutually assured destruction’ capability. Nuclear weapons really were the game changer. As I say to my French friends, who argue that the EU prevents them from being invaded (again): “No, it was Charles de Gaulle and his acquisition of an independent nuclear deterrent who ensured that you will never be invaded again.” ( That subsequent politicians have engineered a muslim invasion of France is another argument).

    General Carter (I deliberately omit the ‘Sir’) is a political lackey like all of his type, since the Blair creature politicised our institutions (a reason why I resigned early from the Army). He is bleating at the behest of his minister who is undermining a very weak PM.

    I too think that current defence spending is appalling and our Armed Forces are in a woeful state – but money spent on recruitment campaigns urging would be recruits to weep and stop the battle so they can pray to Allah, would be better spent on men and equipment.

    1. I doubt the Russians will land in Kent. But they’re extremely likely to attack a NATO member on their border. Should that happen, the only alternative to surrender and the subsequent neutering of NATO will be to go nuclear. Neither option is appealing, don’t you think? As to Gen. Carter, his personality doesn’t really matter. He isn’t the only one saying the same thing, and – on the theory that even a broken clock shows the right time twice a day – even a political lackey just may be right.

      1. “I doubt the Russians will land in Kent. But they’re extremely likely to attack a NATO member on their border. ”

        NO such need for an invasion or unconditional surrender. Just place NATO in an disadvantageous position where a negotiated settlement and terms is the only option, NATO the loser. England as part of NATO among the various vanquished.

  4. Putin’s domestic rule and his foreign and military policy are separate issues, no? On the domestic side is he worse than China’s Jinping? Dissidents and journalists who do not tie the line are dealt with ruthlessly in China, too, and corruption is rampant there. On the foreign policy side, what is the evidence that Putin is extremely likely to invade a NATO border country? An ability to do so is not the same as an intention to do so. When I grew up in the Cold War era, I remember reading that Breshnev intended to roll tanks into Western Europe. As ruthless and morally bankrupt as Breshnev’s government was to the Russian and Eastern European people, we now know these claims to be false.

    1. The only reason those Brezhnev tanks didn’t roll was NATO’s commitment to stop them. That seems a lot slacker now. As to the relation between intention and ability, the effort in building up the latter is so huge that it’s seldom undertaken in the absence of the former. And no, Putin’s Russia is no worse than Jinping’s China — but then neither is it any better. And unlike China, Russia is making a lot of bellicose noises.

  5. Alexander, I don’t know how much stock you put in the Putin approval polls conducted by PEW (in Russia), but they show that his approval ratings have fluctuated from the low 60’s to the high 80’s over the past 17 years. Putin’s approval rating was in the low 60’s in 2000 after the Second Chechen War, and then reached similar lows in 2000 after the Beslan School siege and again in 2013. His approval numbers as of last summer were in the mid-80’s, though he did take some hits from the prior year’s poll on specific issues, such as his handling of U.S. relations. Assuming you assign any credence to these polls, do you think that some of his popularity in Russia is attributable to his rejection of some of the Western liberal pieties that we refer to as PC? Also, I hope you do a column in the future regarding whether there is some explanation in Russian culture for the failure of the country, over the past century and a half, to develop modern political institutions and for its historic underperformance economically (as compared to the West) over that same period.

    1. You can’t take seriously any opinion polls conducted in Russia. First, considering how they tabulate the results there, I’m amazed Putin’s approval rating isn’t in the area of 105% (as it was in Stalin’s time). Second, given incessant totalitarian propaganda, it’s not only possible, but indeed easy to make the herd bleat in the desired way. Causescu’s approval rating was 94% the day before it was shot out of hand — and crowds were dancing in the streets with joy on hearing the news. Third, you have to understand the mentality of the people who grew up in a country where an open disapproval of the state could be punished with death (Stalin), imprisonment (Khrushchev) or at least destroyed careers (Brezhnev). Even those who didn’t live under those regimes have a genetic memory of them. Now imagine one such person getting a call from someone he doesn’t know from Adam, asking how he feels about Putin. His every instinct is to say ‘approve’, just in case — especially if he has heard of the hundreds of dissidents murdered or imprisoned under this regime, and especially if he knows that 84% of the government is made up of unrepentant members of the same organisation that murdered 60 million his compatriots. The upshot of it is that citing Putin’s approval ratings is neither grown up nor clever.

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