We are not at war - but we must act rapidly so that we aren’t drawn into one through a failure to contain territorial expansion.
Now, as then, our choices will have a disproportionate effect on our future. I believe we are living through a period in history as profound as the one that our forebears did over 80 years ago. In all my years in uniform, I haven’t known such a clear threat to the principles of sovereignty and democracy, and the freedom to live without fear of violence, as the brutal aggression of President Putin and his expansionist ambitions. For us, 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. The deliberate targeting of civilians with 4,700 civilian dead. Ammunition expenditure rates that would exhaust the combined stockpiles of several NATO countries in a matter of days. 77,000 square kilometres of territory seized – 43% of the total landmass of the Baltic states. A casualty rate of up to 200 per day amongst the Ukrainian defenders. Up to 33,000 Russians dead, wounded, missing or captured. The scale of the war in Ukraine is unprecedented. But let me be clear, the British Army is not mobilising to provoke war - it is mobilising to prevent war. There is no need to continue doing a thing merely because it has been done in the Army for the last thirty or forty years – if this is the only reason for doing it, then it is high time we changed and did something else.įor us, today, that “something else” is mobilising the Army to meet the new threat we face: a clear and present danger that was realised on 24th February when Russia used force to seize territory from Ukraine, a friend of the United Kingdom. We have got to develop new methods, and learn a new technique…. In relative obscurity, and recognising the impending danger the nation faced, the then Brigadier Bernard Montgomery wrote this in the pages of that magnificent publication Royal Engineers’ Journal of 1937: As I do, I’m reminded of the words of a man in whose footsteps I tread.
I stand here as the first Chief of the General Staff since 1941 to take up this position in the shadow of a major state on state land war in Europe.
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