British Army Boss: Politicians Will Explain to Citizens They Must ‘Consent to Sacrifices’, ‘Play a Part in Defence’
The Chief of the General Staff has warned that a moment of “extreme jeopardy” is nigh, and Britain’s political class should prepare the public to make sacrifices.
The years-long campaign by senior British and European security and defence figures to slowly warm up the broader public to the idea that they now have a role in defence took its latest turn this week, when the professional head of the British Army said in a speech that the voting public would have to prepare to make sacrifices.
Addressing a group of 700 soldiers drawn from the First UK Division at the Catterick Garrison — Britain’s high readiness response force — General Sir Roland ‘Roly’ Walker KCB DSO told the troops “our nation is going to need you… there is extreme jeopardy in the world at the moment”, reports the British Forces Broadcasting Service.
In an unusually political speech for a man in his position, General Walker said Britain’s political leadership would soon have to persuade the public to accept that sacrifices would be needed to protect the country. He said:
…very soon, the political leaders of this country will start to have a frank conversation with the citizens of this country, about just what is going on and where the risk lies, and what the nation must need to be prepared to do… They’re going to try and explain to our citizens that our citizens have got to consent to sacrifices to prioritise defence and security. And then, they’re going to ask those citizens, for whom we are not necessarily at the front of their mind, that they too need to play a part in the defence and security of this country… They need to understand what we do for them, they need to consent to allow us to do that – which means sacrifices by them.”
While the Chief of the General Staff’s address undoubtedly used striking language, his comments were perhaps less strident than similar speeches from other British military leaders. Though Walker was apparently implying the sacrifice expected of the public would essentially be economic — with more tax money going to the Armed Forces — others doing the same thing have skirted conscription, and alluded to civilians having to backfill the casualties of the pre-war professional army ‘first echelon’ in a hot war as they did in 1914 and 1939.
The speech comes against a persistently contradictory political situation in the United Kingdom, where Westminster constantly speaks of massive security threats, yet continues a decades-long exercise in winding down the military, trending toward inoperability. Despite the rhetoric of security threats, when pressed on spending more money to match those claims, it is always made clear that priorities lie elsewhere.
In September, Prime Minister Andy Burnham was challenged on defence spending in Parliament and shot back that taking £4 billion from housing welfare to boost the military would be a poor choice because the homelessness it would create would itself be destabilising. He said: “We do everything to support our national security, but it can’t come at the expense of social security.”
Even the defence minister himself, intemperate Labour stalwart Wes Streeting, who got the top job after the previous incumbent quit over the government’s failure to fund the ministry sufficiently — seems content to defend his own department getting the short end of the stick. Recognising the essential guns-versus-butter debate in which ‘butter’, or welfare, has won in every European country since the end of the Cold War, the minister also implied that Britain’s greatest security threat is internal, not external.
He said: “I know that more spending on defence comes with choices and trade-offs, but our critics on the right need to understand that you don’t make your country stronger, by making our people poorer.”
General Walker’s comments came just days after the head of Britain’s internal security and intelligence agency, MI5, delivered a similar speech in which he said he was directly addressing the public to tell them the time had come for them to get involved in the defence of the realm. As reported:
MI5 Director General Sir Kenneth McCallum said in his annual security threat report that: “they’re aiming at people, businesses, communities. At the cohesion of our society. So today I want to talk directly to the British public… We all have a stake in our national security. And because we all have a stake, we have some adapting to do.” He added: “My message to the British public is this: you have a stake in our national resilience. You too have a vital role to play. It might be quiet. It might be life-saving. It all counts.”
Others have been even more explicit. General Walker’s predecessor as British Army boss, General Sir Patrick Sanders, suggested the public needs to prepare for conscription, saying in January 2024 that people in Britain today will be remembered in the future as the last “pre-war generation”.
Of the coming First or Second World War-like mass army that he thought would soon be needed, Breitbart reported:
General Sanders said the Army needed the capacity to rapidly expand, saying present plans to enhance the reserves and enrol recently retired soldiers in a larger “strategic reserve” talent “is not enough”. Instead, he said, the Army needed to be in a position where it could fight a “land war” against the “Russian threat”, bring “second echelon” reserves online quickly to fight, and train and equip “the citizen army that must follow” at the same time. The Ukraine war shows how important it is to be able to expand a military quickly — as Britain did in the First World War, for instance — Sanders said, noting “Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them… We will not be immune and as the pre-war generation we must similarly prepare – and that is a whole-of-nation undertaking.”
Despite the government moving quickly to disown General Sanders after his speech, insisting there were no plans to bring back conscription, the Ministry of Defence was at the same time involved in training Ukraine’s conscript army and reporting how beneficial that experience had been in learning “useful lessons” on building a future “citizen army”.
General Sanders was eased out of the top job a year early as he repeatedly brushed up against the government of the day, speaking out against the military being cut at a time he felt it needed to grow.
Talk of imminent war stalks the discourse in the United Kingdom… Both NATO and Westminster have spent the past two years drumming the idea into the British public that the post-Cold War era is over and the West is now in a 1930s-like pre-war state, if not already in the prelude of ‘Hybrid war’. The leitmotif of these warnings is the coming conflict, be it successfully deterred or not, will be a “whole of society event” and young Britons will be a particularly important part of that. … the head of the UK Armed Forces Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton made similar remarks. He added: “Sons and daughters, colleagues, veterans, will all have a role to play. To build, to serve and, if necessary, to fight. And more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means”. The same day, the head of Britain’s foreign intelligence agency MI6 said it would now be acting like the Second World War SOE agency, which launched sabotage campaigns against enemies in Europe. The Director said: “At an operational level, we will sharpen our edge and impact with audacity, tapping into – if you like – our historical SOE instincts… We will never stoop to the tactics of our opponents. But we must seek to outplay them. In every domain. In every way.”
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