Sir Richard Shirreff: ‘The time has come for the UK to start gearing up to be ready for war in every respect’

Last week, the UK chief of defence, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, warned us that we are at the dawn of a third nuclear age. As Dmitri Trenin, former head of the Carnegie Moscow Centre and an ex-senior Soviet Army officer, wrote in 2016: “The Kremlin has been at war with Nato since 2014.” And if you need evidence of this look no further than at the steady drumbeat of hybrid or asymmetric attacks against the West: the alleged interference in the Scottish and Brexit referendums in 2014 and 2016, and the US presidential election in 2017; the Salisbury Novichok attack in 2018 ; regular acts of sabotage and arson, most recently in DHL warehouses and probably on the DHL freight carrying aircraft which crashed in Lithuania last month; drone activity around RAF and USAF air bases in eastern England and blatant attempts to manipulate elections in Romania, Moldova and Georgia in recent weeks. open image in gallery Chief of the defence staff Tony Radakin warned recently that we are at the dawn of a third nuclear age Ukraine continues to put up a valiant fight but has been dependent on the support of Nato and its other partners to avoid defeat. We must recognise that what Putin’s Russia has done to Ukraine it will, unless deterred, do to other European states if Nato fails to put in place an effective deterrent. open image in gallery This is something that we now have to be ready to do without the US lead and it means gearing up to be ready for war in every respect: increasing the size and capability of our armed forces ; defending our cities and national infrastructure from likely air attack; building a civil defence capability; putting defence industries on a war footing to produce the equipment and ammunition needed; buying off the shelf quickly to fill the gaps – to name just a few measures.