We're Already Losing the New Cold War

A lavish pay rise won't solve the retention crisis or fund the hardware required to deter Russia.

A new Cold War is gearing up. NATO is calling for members to increase spending, the mainstream media has (at last) seen through the Potemkin façade of the British Armed Forces and some defence experts are even fretting about a shortage of tactical nuclear warheads.

While the Admirals, Generals, Air Marshalls and arms salesmen contemplate more exotic and expensive weaponry, Rachel Reeves is working hard to ensure that there is no money. Even if there were it would be heading to the train drivers. Meanwhile Jack Tar, Tommy Atkins and Biggles are voting with their feet and leaving for civvy street, a decent house and a worthwhile career. The British Armed Forces are collapsing at the rate of 3% a year. For every 12 recruits that enter basic training (which not all will complete) 15 experienced servicemen leave.

Trained personnel are the most valuable part of any armed force, so we’re already losing any new arms race. Worse, we lack the funding, leadership and will to even address this problem; the MOD awaits the results of the Robertson review (sometime next year). It will probably have lost another 3% of its trained military personnel by then. Despite the evidence of this crisis John Healey does next to nothing. He has announced a large pay rise and retention bonuses, but people don’t join the Armed Forces for the pay and they tend to leave them due to the conflict of service lifestyle with family life, starting with housing. The Armed Forces have major structural problems. The generous pay rise just papers over the cracks.

The Cold War That We Won

To understand how we won the last Cold War here’s a snapshot from the late 1980s.

Then, as now, the Royal Navy kept the Polaris nuclear deterrent at sea in four Resolution class submarines, with at least one missile submarine on station. For 24 hours a day 365 days a year that submarine was ready to deliver instant sunshine across the Soviet Union at a moment’s notice. Polaris has been replaced by Trident and the nuclear deterrent is still at sea today, probably with a longer list of targets. It wasn’t cheap then and it isn’t now.

It the 1980s in addition to the nuclear deterrent, the Royal Navy’s fleet comprised three (small) aircraft carriers, one assault ship, 33 frigates, 12 destroyers, 11 diesel electric submarines and 11 nuclear fleet submarines plus abundant lesser vessels, fast jets and helicopters. They were active across the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean (the NATO region) and beyond. As the Cold War could have turned hot at any time, warships were routinely at sea with a full load of ammunition, including nuclear ones. Having won a major naval war in the Falklands in 1982, losing several ships and almost 100 sailors in the process, the Royal Navy was aware of the realities of maritime combat. It was training hard and was generally regarded as the best in the world, especially at anti-submarine warfare.

The Army had three armoured divisions based in West Germany, along with an infantry division. They were there to destroy a Soviet attack long before it got to the Rhine. The forces in Germany were all ready to deploy at six hours’ notice (some at four). This readiness was tested regularly; failing to get out of camp with all soldiers and vehicles was career ending so preparation was comprehensive and extensive. For example, at the end of every working day all vehicles had to be able to move or able to be towed out of camp, with towing ropes in place,

Soldiers routinely spent two to four months a year on exercise, often training over the farmland that they would be fighting the Soviets on (land war is all about ground and the home side has a significant advantage). Their equipment was good, some of it superb (the Challenger tank was world leading). Today’s Army can’t field a single division of any sort and lacks key equipment.

The Royal Air Force had four air bases in West Germany and many more in the UK. Each held several squadrons of twelve to sixteen combat aircraft. In Germany most of these squadrons maintained one or two aircraft on nuclear quick reaction alert – that is they had nuclear weapons loaded and a crew briefed on where to drop it (often an air base in Eastern Europe or Western Russia). That alert was maintained day in, day out throughout the Cold War.

That constant readiness required a certain mental attitude; as the sign at the entrance to RAF Bruggen said, “The Task Of This Station In Peace Is To Prepare For War. DON’T YOU FORGET IT.” This attitude worked. NATO tests (known as OPEVALS) of air base readiness are the stuff of legend, except that they’re true. Despite simulated Russian Spetsnaz and chemical strikes the aircraft could get airborne and strike. Today’s RAF has perhaps a quarter of the combat jets, many of which have reliability issues. It’s failing to train pilots, taking eight years to do what should be done in three.

In summary, the armed forces were larger, training much harder and very, very focused on the realities of what they would have to do. Chemical warfare was expected from the start and nuclear warfare later in the fight. Personnel were capable of operating in those conditions and spent much of their training time in respirators and noddy kit (as the chemical warfare suits were known).

The Nuclear Bit

Russian military doctrine developed from their experience of World War Two (25 million dead and devastation from the outskirts of Moscow to the River Bug on the Polish border). The lessons learned were never fight on your own ground and do whatever it takes to win. The former gave rise to the satellite states of the Warsaw Pact and the latter integrated tactical nuclear weapons into the panoply of combat systems available to military commanders.

A tactical nuke is short range and (relatively low yield) – typically under 10 kilotons, a little less than the yield that devastated Hiroshima, although Russian ones tended to be bigger.. They could be delivered by missile, aircraft or artillery. Like all nuclear weapons, their effects were heat, blast and radiation, the net result being the devastation of distances from one to three kilometres from the detonation point. Unprotected troops would receive a lethal radiation dose (although they might already have been immolated or blown apart). Protected troops, such as those in trenches, tanks or hardened aircraft shelters would survive much closer. Electronics were also vulnerable to the electromagnetic pulse, which would blow their fuses of fry circuit boards.

If the nuke was a ground burst it would create fallout, which would rain radioactive dust downwind for some days afterwards. Fallout would render wherever it landed a dangerous place to be, which in turn made it a difficult place to defend and one that made little sense to attack. The wind direction forecast had a profound influence on the utility tactical nukes.

Initially western thought was that if the Soviets attacked they would be engaged heavily with tactical nuclear weapons, both in the front line and in their supporting bases, ports and airfields, some of which were in the western USSR (Belarus today). NATO was not at the time sufficiently well-armed to stop the Red hordes with conventional weaponry alone, so nukes were fundamental. Nukes are far cheaper to own and operate than the conventional forces necessary to destroy a Soviet attack, so this tripwire approach was popular with cash starved politicians – except for the West German ones.

As Russia developed thermonuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to New York and beyond, the tripwire approach started to look less credible. Differentiating between a tactical strike and a strategic one is mere sophistry, particularly to the people at ground zero. The key question became whether the US really cared so much about West Germany that it would get immediately stuck into intercontinental, strategic nuclear war if the Soviets attacked, even without using nukes? Was the West really better dead than red?

The West therefore developed the theory of flexible response. A conventional (non-nuclear) attack by the Soviet Union would be met with conventional means, a nuclear one with nuclear weaponry. This was expensive. Western forces at that time were massively outnumbered. Deploying a nuclear trip wire was cheap. Having sufficiently capable forces to fight and win at 10 to one disadvantage (which is what Soviet military doctrine delivered at the contact point – as it had done in World War Two) – was challenging. Yet the technological advances of the West (and home advantage) made that possible, in theory at least. (Battlefield outcomes are uncertain, as the Russians have reminded themselves the hard way in Ukraine.)

There was also the flaw that the Soviets did not see it that way. If they attacked and were fought to a standstill by the West’s conventional weaponry their options would be either stop, give up and go home (which looks a lot like losing), or lob some nukes about to blast a hole in western defences and continue the advance. That might risk Armageddon, but it keeps alive the opportunity of winning. In the world of mutually assured destruction perhaps the US would not obliterate Moscow, thereby risking the vaporisation of New York, as an immediate response to (say) the Soviets nuking their way to the Rhine.

The Soviets also developed anti-ballistic-missile missiles (the nuclear armed SA-18 Galosh being the first) and deployed them round Moscow. The US developed the “Star Wars” programme, to destroy Russian nuclear warheads in Space. The West continued to develop and deploy nuclear weapons and their launch systems, like Cruise Missiles, Pershing missiles and ATACMS,. That led to the arms race which broke the Soviet economy, the Berlin Wall came down, followed by the rest of the Iron Curtain.

The West prevailed, despite significant public and political resistance to nuclear weaponry and objections to the defence budgets, then over 6% of GDP, and conscription in most European countries. In the Soviet Union all school children had four hours of military instruction per week. They could all take apart and reassemble an AK-47. They could all don and survive in chemical warfare suits; they ran up and down the streets in gas kit to prove it. Their counterparts in the West were worshipping Wham! How the heck the Soviet Union lost the Cold War mystifies them to this day. Like Waterloo, it was a close run thing that changed the shape of Europe.

Enough history.

Cold War Two

Today the West is very short on credible conventional armed forces. Russia attacked Ukraine with about 100 battalions, equivalent to about ten divisions. While Russian losses in Ukraine have been huge their army will regenerate – far from all its units have been committed to Ukraine. It has first hand combat experience against some western weaponry and tactics. It has taken huge casualties but it continues to both fight and advance. Only a fool would belittle its capability.

NATO has just one (multi-national) battalion in each of the Baltic states, plus another one in Poland. The Baltic States’ armies total about one and half divisions. The impressive Polish Army comprises five divisions, based in Poland. That’s probably not enough to defeat a determined attack into the Baltics, particularly if it achieved surprise.

Certainly the West, and particularly the US, has more forces in other places. But getting them to the Baltics is non-trivial and is not rehearsed at scale. In the first Cold War the US had equipment and ammunition for some seven divisions pre-based in Germany under the REFORGER Scheme, which was exercised at least every other year. (Another four American divisions were based full time in West Germany, with multiple supporting units and a vast air force). That involved moving some 70,000 American soldiers from the USA to Germany, where they climbed into the redeployed vehicles and went immediately on exercise. That’s the level of effort that credible readiness requires. No credibility, no deterrence.

Absent sufficient conventional forces, deterring Russian aggression relies on the contention that the UK, France and The United States would launch Armageddon if Russia attacked the Baltics. NATO’s military weakness in Europe has got us back to the tripwire scenario. That wasn’t credible in the 1970s, why is it thought credible now?

The outlook for a Second Cold War is far worse than the previous one. Russia and China were not close by the 1980s, now they’re in step over Ukraine. India was unaligned in the 1908s, it’s close to Russia now. China wasn’t much of a threat back then as it was technologically backward. Now it isn’t and it’s a credible threat to Taiwan. The net result is that NATO is in a lousy place whence to restart the Cold War. Putin knows this.

Catching up is going to be expensive, very complicated and will take a long time. While it might be simple, for example, to order lots more Type 26 Frigates (at £1 Billion each), finding dockyard space and workers to build them quickly will make the problems of Harland and Wolf pale into insignificance. Recruiting and training the crews seems impossible at the moment. Similar constraints apply to the Army and RAF.

It’s not just a British problem. The Dutch Army hasn’t had a single tank battalion for 13 years. It’s getting one now. In 1980 it had two regular and one reserve divisions – a total of some 20 to 30 battalions. Ironically the Dutch Prime minister who scrapped Dutch armour in 2008 was none other than Mark Rutte, now NATO Secretary General. Putin must be terrified.

If the UK is going to rearm we need to be very clear about what that means and what it will cost. The Chief of the General Staff wants to “double the fighting power of the Army by 2027” by adopting “innovations in technology, including drones and artificial intelligence, drawing lessons from the conflict in Ukraine.” Right. Is that the same AI that will be solving the NHS and making net zero work? With all respect to General Walker, the major lessons from Ukraine are that technology alone doesn’t stop the Russian Army and that running out of soldiers is a bad thing, as is getting into wars that you can’t win.

Throughout recent UK history the United States has been by far our most important military ally. Yet the Toolmaker’s Son’s government members have personally insulted the next President, as has at least one Ambassador. The next one, the Blairite Machiavellian Prince of Darkness now Lord Mandelson once described Donald Trump as a “danger to the world” and “little short of a white nationalist and racist.” President Trump is an Anglophile, but our benighted government is testing him to the limit.

Drifting into a Cold War with an enemy stronger than we are while offending our major ally is lunacy. To do so when there is no money and no immediate prospect of growth delivering any is idiotic. To postpone the actions that the Armed Forces need for a year while waiting for yet another defence review is less sane than Nero playing the violin while Rome burned. Defence wasn’t a big topic in the election, yet restarting the Cold War has huge and profound consequences for everyone – engaging the taxpayers would be sensible.

Deterrence requires speaking softly and carrying a big stick. We’re shouting and the only big stick we have is the Trident nuclear missile. Unless the master plan is to make Putin die of laughter we – and the NATO – need to have a rethink.

Urgently.

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