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View of War in Ukraine and Europe by UK General By Britain's Chief of General Staff General Sir Patrick Sanders June 29, 2022
The war in Ukraine is not a brief and bloody spat in a faraway country of which we know little. Instead, as the new Chief of General Staff General Sir Patrick Sanders warned in a historic speech at RUSI today, “This is our 1937 moment,” as “we are living through a period in history as profound as the one that our forebears did over 80 years ago.” The harsh reality is that “the visceral nature of a European land war is not just some manifestation of distant storm clouds on the horizon; we can see it now”. As a result of major state-on-state conflict on our home continent, at a scale vastly beyond our current capacity to sustain, including artillery battles with “ammunition expenditure rates that would exhaust the combined stockpiles of several Nato countries in a matter of days”, Britain therefore has no choice but to rearm: “Mobilisation is now the main effort.” As it stands, our Army is simply too small to confront Russia. As Sanders warns, “if this battle came, we would likely be outnumbered at the point of attack and fighting like hell”. The decades of cutbacks that have diminished our land forces must end, now: “it would be perverse if the CGS was advocating reducing the size of the Army as a land war rages in Europe and Putin’s territorial ambitions extend into the rest of the decade, and beyond Ukraine.” Similarly, so much of the Whitehall commonsense of the past few decades must be discarded as unfit for the present threat: the excessive focus on cyber capabilities founders on the hard truth that “Land will still be the decisive domain… to put it bluntly, you can’t cyber your way across a river.”
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