War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?

extract

If the UK suddenly found itself at war, would you know what to do? Do you know what would be expected of you? The Government wants us all to start preparing for severe disruption to our lives. It wants us to stockpile canned food and drinking water, strengthen our civic resilience, and plan for the possibility of war. Work has begun on the government's so-called "war book", which hasn't been updated in decades. The UK's most senior soldier has sounded the alarm. The Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton this week said the threat from Russia meant Britain was living through the "most dangerous" period of his 35-year career in the armed forces. But what is the threat? In 1940 the danger of a German invasion of the UK was very real. But the chances of Russian tanks rolling up Whitehall are surely negligible. "It's not the tanks you need to worry about," says historian Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us. "It's the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It's the hacking into systems on which so many things depend. The possibility for asymmetric war, for cyber war, is growing by leaps and bounds." But are we ready? After 80 years without war on our own soil, are we, as a society, psychologically prepared for it? Are we ready to approve large increases in defence spending, and for the sacrifices that that might entail in other areas of our national life? Or does the threat seem too far-fetched to be real? The Great War legacy "I think we have become used to the idea that peace is the normal state of affairs, that it's going to last," says McMillan. "So no, I don't think we are psychologically prepared… but I do think that we are beginning to recognise that war is something that is closer to us than we'd like to think". Archive film footage showing Britons in 1913 enjoying days at the races or watching the cricket contrasts sharply with what followed during the horrors of World War One. "In a sense it's now a bit like those Edwardian summers before 1914, when there was a lot of talk of war but the notion of actually going to war seemed so far-fetched as to be beyond belief and I think that's where we are at the moment," says retired British General Sir Richard Shirreff, a former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe. Europe has not always been so war-averse. In 1914, recruitment stations were flooded with volunteers eager to serve their country. In Britain, that generation was raised on heroic tales of empire-building, in which war was one glorious cavalry charge, leading to swift victory and everyone home by Christmas. But the experience of what came to be known as the Great War seared itself into the popular consciousness and survives in our collective imagination. One in eight of the men who enlisted in the UK left their bones in the fields of Flanders and France, Mesopotamia and Gallipoli. The survivors carved their unspeakable grief into the landscape with the erection of thousands of war memorials. The pain of it touched every community in the land. That conflict, says Margaret MacMillan, changed fundamentally the way Europe thought about war. "The experience of the First World War showed just how dreadful modern war is… And the idea that war could be glamorous never really came back after that." A crisis of disbelief Europeans, and especially Western Europe's leadership elites, have succumbed to a decades-long "crisis of disbelief", argues Andrew Michta, a Polish-born American academic who is professor of strategic studies at the Hamilton School, University of Florida. He argues that the UK, in common with many European nations, has very low levels of psychological preparedness, and that authorities are not being candid about the looming threats. "The Germans have totally disarmed during the last 30 years. The UK is also largely disarmed and, most importantly, mentally. There is no readiness for what's happening because the policy elites are not addressing their publics in a way that would honestly state the gravity of the situation," Michta says. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, many European countries began a decades-long winding down of military preparedness, dramatically cutting defence spending, in the belief that the threat from Russia had disappeared. Michta singles out Germany's heavy reliance on Russian energy via the Nord Stream gas pipelines - which transported huge quantities of gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea - in what he sees as the mistaken belief that Berlin could manage its relationship with Moscow via political and economic means. "So you've lived through 20 years of appeasement in Europe driven by the elites' lack of willingness or courage… to articulate how the situation was changing and how rapidly." General Sir Richard Shirreff argues that Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the real turning point, the moment Russia revealed itself as a tenacious threat to western security. "The reality is that Russia believes it's been at war with Nato since 2014. Not a conventional war, but a war designed to undermine the integrity of target states or alliances. "I would never take the Russians for granted. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility for them to try to unhinge Nato by, for example, attempting to take over Spitsbergen [in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard] or something else indirect. "So that's what we need to be prepared for". Mounting calls for increases in defence spending are rooted in a belief that the best way to prevent a war is to be ready - psychologically and militarily - to fight one. Not everyone agrees. The belief that we are under threat is key, says psychologist Jim Orford, professor emeritus of clinical and community psychology at the University of Birmingham. "It is what I call simplistic thinking. In order to contemplate the possibility of going to war we've got to think in simplistic terms. In terms of enemies and heroes. We've got to think of Russia as an enemy. The narratives are all simplified. "Being [psychologically] prepared for war is the first stage. Contemplating war is the second phase and then actually engaging in war is the third. I think we're well into the 'contemplating war' phase." Citizen engagement This "crisis of disbelief", as Michta put it, is not evenly spread. The further east you go, the closer you get to the Russian border, the more alert a nation's people are to the threat, and the more psychologically prepared. Sweden hasn't had a war in 200 years. It has pursued a policy of neutrality for centuries. But after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it abandoned that and has made itself, in a very short space of time, one of the most psychologically prepared countries in Europe. "Russia is self-evidently dangerous", Sweden's Prime Minister Ulf Christersson told The Economist magazine last month. "We don't know when it [the war in Ukraine] ends, but how it ends will define the security situation in our part of the world for at least a generation" Sweden has a system of partial conscription, in which all school leavers must register for military service. The armed forces pick - and conscript - the best candidates. The conscripts then do up to 15 months compulsory training before going back into civilian life, in employment or higher education. At the same time, they become part of their country's large reserve force. "There's a lot of citizen engagement," says Minna Alander, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies think tank. "It was almost an internet joke in 2022 and 2023 that everybody wished for a call up. Sometimes people get frustrated if they haven't been called up for a long time. It's an expectation for sure. "Sweden has, for example, been identifying civil engineers with some relevant skills in, say, electricity supply who could be exercised in case of disruption. So Sweden can access this pool of civil engineers [who know] what they could do and how they could be activated." When Christersson was asked whether Russia should be seen as a potential aggressor even after the war in Ukraine is over he said, "Yes. We have a few hundred years experience of this… We know Russia pretty well." The three Baltic Republics - Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia - also know Russia pretty well. They only regained their independence from Moscow in the 1990s. German troops invaded Lithuania in the 1940s and are now back on Lithuanian soil, this time by invitation, to bolster that country's defences against the threat from the east. A thousand British troops lead a multi-national force in Estonia for the same reason. But it is to the Finns that much of Europe now looks for lessons in mass psychological preparedness and civic resilience. Finland's approach to defence and security is also rooted in historical experience. Of the 100,000 Nordic citizens who died in the World War Two, 90% were from Finland. They died in the so-called Winter War of 1939-40 against the Soviet Union. This tiny country repelled an attack by its giant neighbour and retained its independence. Finland today shares an 800-mile (1,287km) border with Russia. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Finland also quickly abandoned its historic neutrality and joined Nato along with its neighbour Sweden. Finland has universal male conscription, and some women also volunteer to serve. When their service is complete they then become part of Finland's reserve force. This has the effect of closing the gap between the professional military and the civilian population. "If conscription is done well, it ties every single family into national security thinking. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather and your sons, they all go to the same military service," says the retired three-star General Arto Raty, a former permanent secretary of Finland's Ministry of Defence. "We bind the whole of society into supporting the military. Every single hospital has its crisis tasking. Every water supply agency. And interestingly, the most publicly trusted organisations in Finland today are the military, the defence forces and the police. That is not the case in most countries." The Finnish military also runs a series of courses annually for leaders of society - MPs, government ministers, the CEOs of private enterprises and public utilities, the health service, even NGOs and the churches. "We train them in crisis management, so that they understand how society will work in a crisis. We've been doing it every year since 1960." Finland, with a population of 5.5 million, has a professional defence force of 23,000. That compares to Britain's 70,000 from a population of 66 million. But it also has a trained reserve force of close to 1 million and can mobilise a reserve army of 280,000 at short notice. In 2025, Finland spent 2.5% of its GDP on defence, comparable to the 2.3% spent by the UK the same year. Should the rest of Europe go to the expense of following Finland's lead when the prospects of a conventional war with Russia seem vanishingly remote? "An army of 70,000 is simply not going to cut the mustard in the sort of war we are going to have to face," says Gen Sir Richard Shirreff. "So I don't see how we could generate the military capability needed without some form of call-up." He says the Norwegian model might be one that helps change the British mindset around war. "There, every school leaver is registered for conscription… and they go and do a year's training after which they go on to university and when, later, they are competing for jobs, if they've got national service on their CV, they're seen as the best candidates… That's the sort of thing we should look at." He adds: "The case has to be made honestly by political leaders who must really look the population in the eye and say 'this has got to be done for us to be secure'." Lead image: Getty More from InDepth - Why Andy Burnham will find it so tricky to unite Britain - Published21 July BBC InDepth is the home on the website and app for the best analysis, with fresh perspectives that challenge assumptions and deep reporting on the biggest issues of the day. Emma Barnett and John Simpson bring their pick of the most thought-provoking deep reads and analysis, every Saturday. Sign up for the newsletter here Get in touch Are you personally affected by the issues raised in this story?