Britain faces 'crisis of disbelief' on war readiness as threats mount

Britain's military leadership is sounding an alarm that few seem ready to hear. Sir Richard Knighton, the country's most senior soldier, declared this week that the threat from Russia represents the most dangerous period of his 35-year career. The government is dusting off its war book—a document that hasn't been meaningfully updated in decades—and asking citizens to begin preparing for severe disruption: stockpile canned food, store drinking water, think about what war might mean for your life.

But the threat feels abstract to most Britons. Russian tanks rolling down Whitehall? That seems far-fetched. The real danger, according to historian Margaret MacMillan, lies elsewhere entirely: in severed undersea cables, hacked infrastructure systems, asymmetric warfare waged through cyber attacks rather than conventional invasion. These threats are growing rapidly, yet they lack the visceral clarity of a traditional military assault. Britain has not experienced war on its own soil for eighty years. That long peace has shaped how the country thinks about conflict—as something that happens elsewhere, to other people, in other eras.

The comparison to 1913 is instructive. Archive photographs show Britons at the races and cricket matches, living through what seemed like an endless summer of normalcy. War was discussed in drawing rooms and newspapers, but the idea of actually fighting one seemed too distant to be credible. Then came 1914, and the Great War shattered that illusion with a violence that scarred an entire continent. One in eight of the men who enlisted from Britain died in the fields of Flanders, France, Mesopotamia, and Gallipoli. The survivors built thousands of war memorials across the landscape, physical monuments to grief so profound it entered the collective memory. After that experience, the notion that war could be glamorous or glorious never truly recovered in European consciousness.

Yet the psychological armor that experience provided has worn thin. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, European nations—Britain among them—began a three-decade process of military and mental disarmament. Defence budgets shrank. Military capacity contracted. The assumption took hold that the Russian threat had vanished. Andrew Michta, a Polish-American academic at the University of Florida, calls this a "crisis of disbelief." He argues that European elites, lacking either the will or courage to honestly articulate how the security landscape was changing, allowed their societies to become psychologically unprepared for conflict. Germany's deep reliance on Russian energy through the Nord Stream pipelines exemplified this misplaced faith that economic interdependence could manage geopolitical risk. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2014 should have shattered that illusion, but for many in Western Europe, the wake-up call remained muted.

The nations closest to Russia have responded differently. Sweden, which had pursued neutrality for centuries and had not fought a war in two hundred years, abandoned that posture entirely after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Prime Minister Ulf Christersson stated plainly that Russia is "self-evidently dangerous" and that how the Ukraine war ends will define European security for a generation. Sweden implemented a system of partial conscription in which all school leavers must register for military service, with the armed forces selecting the best candidates for up to fifteen months of compulsory training before they return to civilian life as part of a large reserve force. The psychological shift was swift: citizen engagement became so high that it became an internet joke in 2022 and 2023 that people wished to be called up, and some grew frustrated if they weren't selected.

Finland offers perhaps the most instructive model. With an 800-mile border with Russia and the memory of the Winter War of 1939-40—when ninety percent of the hundred thousand Nordic deaths in World War Two came from this tiny nation's defense against Soviet invasion—Finland has woven military readiness into the fabric of society itself. The country maintains universal male conscription and some female volunteers, creating a reserve force of nearly 280,000 that can be mobilized at short notice. Retired General Arto Raty explains that when conscription is done well, it ties every family into national security thinking across generations. Finland's military runs annual crisis management courses for societal leaders—MPs, ministers, corporate executives, hospital administrators, church leaders—teaching them how society functions under stress. The result is that the military, defence forces, and police are the most publicly trusted institutions in Finland, a distinction most countries cannot claim.

Britain's current defence force numbers 70,000 from a population of 66 million, compared to Finland's 23,000 from 5.5 million—though Finland can rapidly mobilize far larger numbers through its reserve system. General Sir Richard Shirreff, a retired British officer and former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, argues bluntly that 70,000 troops "simply will not cut the mustard" in the kind of war Britain might face. He suggests looking to Norway's model, where every school leaver registers for conscription and completes a year of training before university, after which national service on a CV becomes a competitive advantage in the job market. But such changes require something that has been largely absent: political leaders willing to look the population in the eye and make the case honestly, explaining why these sacrifices are necessary for security. That conversation has barely begun.