There is an air of the Old Testament prophets over the latest dire military and strategic warnings in Britain and America about the need to prepare for war with Russia and China by 2027.
The new chief of the British Army, General Sir Roly Walker, told his London conference this week that his troops need to double their “lethality”, the ability to kill and destroy the enemy, within three years and triple it by 2030. They have to be ready for war with Russia in 2027 — and they fall short of what is required now, in terms of innovative tactics and weaponry.
Prophecy is a mug’s game in preparing for what is needed for security and resilience — key components of national defence and wellbeing — right now. We are in what the Norwegians, who sit on a strategic and vulnerable border with Russia, call a state of “near war”. As the war in Ukraine worsens, and heads towards a million casualties by the end of the year, we get more mentions across the media of the period leading up to the great wars of the 20th century.
Are we at 1936 or 1928, or is this more like “the guns of August”, the huge mobilisation of forces in the summer of 1914 leading the Great War of 1914-18, I am asked frequently. More urgent of late is the simple question: are we headed for World War III?
I’m asked: ‘Is this like the build-up before the Great War? Or are we headed for WWIII?’
In the sense that we may be headed to a huge outbreak of industrial warfare, a reprise of the wars in Europe and Asia of the last century, the likely answer is no. But if we are talking about global confrontation, spilling into bursts of open conflict, involving cyber hacks, threats to global communication through undersea cabling and the like, attacks on global maritime commerce, then the answer gets close to a firm “yes”.
History, however, is a poor instructor about what we should do about the current multi-crisis, involving Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Houthis, Gaza, Hamas, Islamic State, among others. If prophecy and planning get too rigid, to fixated on one set of dates and data, we are in trouble. The pioneering historian of the early television age, AJP Taylor, suggested that Europe pitched into full-blown war in the summer of 1914 largely because of the railway timetables. Germany, France and Russia had to get millions of troops to the front in weeks.
The Germans, under the plans of General Von Schlieffen, knew how to move 1.2 million troops. The French had prepared their Plan 17.
Three years ago, Admiral Philip Davidson, the then-commander of America’s Pacific fleet, told Congress that China was building up forces quicker than expected. An attempt to take Taiwan was likely by 2027, if not sooner, and the US government needed to prepare over the interim period. This has become known as “Davidson’s window”, an expression which has acquired the status of advanced theology in America’s strategic think-tanks.
2027 is seen as magical because it marks the centenary of what was to become the People’s Liberation Army. Xi Jinping has declared it the date by which he wants the People’s Republic of China to match or surpass the US as the predominant military superpower.
“There’s no period so remote as the recent past,” the new teacher Irwin says in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. It’s because the context is set by the present, he explains, and the present is a muddle we are still living through.
“There is nothing so deceptive as an obvious fact,” Sherlock Holmes remarks in The Boscombe Valley Mystery. The obvious fact about the management of history and prophecy in current strategic thinking is we must learn the lessons of the present rather than obsessively invoke the past. The fact is that we in Britain are on the edge of three main conflicts: Ukraine, the Houthis, and the multiple provocations of the Axis of Disruption of China, Russia and their junior partners Iran and North Korea.
The main allies of Nato and the EU are committed to supporting Ukraine to resist the Russian invasion. Yet surprisingly little is done to engage Russia itself and dissuade it from its current course of aggressive disruption across Europe and the Middle East.
Behind these, there are the causes of deep long-term tension anxiety, from migration to pandemic and climate change, the decline of state power and the rise of mafia clan lawlessness.
Clio, the muse of history, is a fickle jade. Treat her gently — the craft of history is a guide, and not a military instruction manual. Don’t let the philosopher Wilhelm Hegel be prophetic in his jibe that history teaches us that history teaches us nothing.
