This blog analyses recent developments in the Atlantic security environment, in particular the issue of increasing combat mass of conventional forces by the development of militia forces. This is a subject that has been in the forefront of the news recently. The principal trigger has been the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Inter-state warfare is a now a reality in Europe for the first time in decades. Russia has a large conscript military and has been able to call up significant reserves. By contrast, whilst NATO is enlarging, the size of its militaries, measured in actual combat capable troops, is generally shrinking. Creating militia, or at least the enhancement of reserve forces, has been cited as one way of alleviating this problem.

Militia and the United Kingdom – a history of doubt 

Dad’s Army is the name of a popular but singularly unfunny situation comedy television show that was developed by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).  It was originally shown from 1968-1977 on the BBC’s prime channel, BBC1, only to be more or less permanently repeated since then. If you flick through the 400 or so channels on Satellite TV in the United Kingdom (UK), you are more or less guaranteed to find it airing at any given time.

The title and premise of the programme come from the colloquial name that was given to the Home Guard, a defence militia force that was first created by the UK Government in 1940, during the Second World War. At this time, with the continent of Europe under the control of the Axis powers, it seemed feasible that the UK might be invaded by German forces crossing the English Channel. The German name for this operation that never happened was ‘Sealion.’ Operation Sealion was effectively ended by the British victory in the Battle of Britain (10 July-31 October 1940). With the Royal Air Force (RAF) having air superiority over British territory and the neighbouring air space, a seaborne crossing by the German military would be impossible. In truth, it was always impossible. The German Navy (Kriegsmarine) was never a very powerful force and the only area where it had considerable strength, in submarines, would not have helped much in an invasion of the UK. The German Navy had next to no landing craft and not much experience of amphibious landings. Operation Sealion would have largely relied on Germany using requisitoned private canal boats from the states of Europe it had by then conquered. These would have required near perfect weather conditions for a crossing, which would more or less tell the UK Government when an attack would come. Meanwhile, the UK had the Royal Navy, at the time the largest and most capable maritime force the world had ever known. The UK had been the dominate seapower for over 200 years and did know how to carry out and thus prevent amphibious landings.

We know this now, but at the time it seemed like there was a genuine threat and a miltia force to resist an invasion made sense. Apart from anything else, the British Army was in a poor state. The British Expeditionary Force (BEF), sent to assist in the defence of France, had only just retreated from Dunkirk in Operation Dynamo (26 May – 4 June 1940). The ‘miracle of Dunkirk’ remains a touchstone of British culture. When a crisis like Covid hits, you will find British people referring to ‘Dunkirk Spirit.’ This reflects the peculiarly British penchant for celebrating catastrophic blunders, where the day is somehow saved right before ultimate disaster.  This is what happened in Covid: the UK lost thousands of people due to rubbish governmental advice, only to be saved by the ingenuity of its medical scientists.

The Home Guard was thus created. It was called ‘Dad’s Army’ because it naturally accepted older recruits: all the younger ones would ultimately join one of the three main services. In order of age and prestige, these are the Royal Navy (RN), the British Army (‘the Army) and the aforementioned Royal Air Force (RAF). It could equally have been called the near-sighted army, or the below minimum intelligence army. The point being that it was composed of everyone the regular military would reject, along with some people who were able to game the conscription process with made up medical conditions endorsed by bribed doctors. George Orwell (1903-1950) tried to enlist in the British Army but was rejected because he was physically weak, the main source of this being the bullet wound he received in the neck serving in one of the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War. It was secondary infections from this that contributed to his early death. As a combat veteran too weak to serve in the regular Army, he was perversely perfect for the Home Guard.

The show Dads Army justifiably mocks the Home Guard as an effective fighting force. At its peak it had 1.5 million personnel, but they were never adequately trained or equipped until the period immediately before the Guards dissolution in 1944. The role of the Home Guard became unclear after the invasion panic of 1940 has subsided. On Sunday, 22 June 1941, Hitler turned his attention East and invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa. It was obvious that a rapid defeat of the Soviet Union would be a catastrophe. The United States of America (USA) would not join the conflict for another six months. If German forces could conquer the Soviet Union in that time, thus also gaining control of Soviet resources, it was conceivable that the Axis might force the UK and USA to agree to a peace settlement. It would be stupid to send resources to the Home Guard when sending them to the Soviet Union would make much more difference. This was constantly the case for the Home Guard: there was always another front that needed the resources more.

Most people question if the Home Guard could have served any real purpose. If the Axis ever did invade the UK, it seemed unlikely that the Home Guard would be able to stop German tank (Panzer) divisions with rusty Enfield rifles and bombs made from milk bottles and petrol. This view is flawed because it seeks to put the Home Gurd on the same level as the other forces in the battle, something which it was never intended to be. The Home Guard may not have been capable of winning an engagement, but it would still have to be dealt with. This meant it could play a role in absorbing attacks and forcing Axis units to change their plans.  This would free up the regular forces to make counterattacks. Put more crudely, the Home Guard would undoubtably have been effective if used as cannon-fodder.

One of the reasons that Dad’s Army is able to easily mock the Home Guard, is that the UK has no other recent historical experience of militia. They have not existed since the end of the Feudal system and the victory of the Parliamentary forces in the English Civil Wars. The Glorious Revolution of 1689 established there would be only one army. The fact that Parliament’s army defeated the Monarch’s is the reason why the British Army is the only one of the three services to not feature the word ‘Royal’ in its title. The idea of a militia is alien to the UK, whereas it is foundational to the USA: The Second Amendment to the US Constitution specifically refers to the need for a militia. The UK has always opted for a comparatively small professional army, with the understanding that it can be expanded by conscription when necessary, as in the Great War and the Second World War. This is why the UK has never been a major land power.

Conscript Militaries Today

Very few first rank professional armed services use conscription today. Conscription produces a mixed service, where some service personnel are professionals, and some are just doing their national service. In these states, some conscripts go onto choose to serve longer, but most of the officer corps will come from people who always wanted to serve professionally. It is also common practice that after perhaps a year of national service, the personnel remain on the reserve list until a certain age, meaning they can be recalled to service at any time. This is the model that Russia and Israel use. There are hybrid models that cannot be adequately discussed here: Sweden is a good example, if one wishes to follow this line of inquiry further.

Israel is interesting in that the length of service is much longer than in other states: 34 months for men and 24 months for women. Israel is just about the only example of a state where national service makes any military sense: a small state, with a small population, surrounded by several states it has no diplomatic relations with.. In every other example, conscription is outdated and exists largely for cultural and historical reasons: if your Mother had to do it, she is likely to think you should do it too. It is also often described as being in some sense good for the soul, although this assumes that you won’t either get killed or have to kill anyone else. These could both fairly be described as being bad for the soul. In other words, marching a lot and learning how to make your bed are good for you.

This does not translate very well into the needs of most modern militaries. A year of service is probably just long enough for a conscript to learn all the things they need to learn about modern armed conflict and the technologies involved. They then disappear, probably never to be seen again. If they are finally needed, aged 40 years old, they are likely to be in a physically poorer condition and technologically divorced from the modern world.

The USA manages this problem in a very different way. The ‘weekend warriors’ of the National Guard and the other reserve commands are fully integrated into the main force structure of the US military. A United States Air Force Reserve Command officer might fly commercial airliners for 8 months of the year and then serve on the frontline flying a combat aircraft for 4 months. The equipment they use is identical to the full-time pilots, as is the training, albeit that there is less of it.

Militia and combat mass in 2024

Success in armed conflict, in the military rather than political sense, is decided by three factors:

1. The size of a force that can be fielded, otherwise known as combat mass. This has to be assessed carefully, because some militaries will have more non-combatant personnel than others;
2. The quality and quantity of training that the force receives;
3. Technology

Until recently, the trend in NATO and other states that share its values (eg; Japan, Australia) has been for technology to replace the other two factors. Militaries got smaller but more technologically advanced. This trend was observable overall since the mass demobilisation of the Second World War, throughout what became known as the Cold War. Yet there were also key historical moments where force sizes were reduced due to the political climate. In the beginning of the 1960’s, states like the UK were abandoning national service. This meant their militaries shrunk. This was offset by the growing sophistication of nuclear weapons. As NATO moved into the era of ‘flexible response’, with a growing emphasis on using tactical nuclear weapons in an otherwise conventional conflict, militaries did not need to be as large. This was cheaper than having a large conventional military, like that of the Soviet Union. In 1991, Western leaders believed the Cold War was over: we now know it was merely going through a cease-fire phase. This led to large defence cuts, in what was known at the time as the ‘peace dividend’.  As The Warsaw Pact and even the Soviet Union itself collapsed, it seemed obvious that Western governments could spend less money on defence. Like many things that seem obvious, it was flawed. Just ten years later the War on Terror began. This was not a coincidence. The Cold War had helped to contain certain new forms of violent tendency in international relations. When it ended, states like North Korea decided they needed to develop their own nuclear weapons: the Soviet Union was not there anymore to provide an extended deterrent. At the sub-state level, terrorist organisations that had previously been kept in check by their sponsors were now free to act however they wished. They also had to replace their previous sources of income, which in practical terms meant more drug, arms and people trafficking than before. Counter-terrorism and counter insurgency (COIN) operations require lots of troops and armoured vehicles, exactly the capabilities that had been reduced. Nuclear weapons, the cheapest means of guaranteeing the states actual survival, were of limited utility in such operations. Using a nuclear weapon against Osama Bin Laden, for example, would have killed a lot of very surprised people in Abbottabad.

Regeneration

Military professionals are reluctant to even temporarily lose a capability or skillset, because they know that re-instituting it after a break will be very difficult. A good example is operating aircraft carriers. The skillsets involved in this are complex and numerous. The most obvious is the pilot’s ability to land back on a relatively small deck, but there are hundreds of others.  Reestablishing a capability set after an absence is far more resource intensive than simply gradually upgrading an existing capability. If a state is lucky, it can send its personnel on exchange programmes with the US Navy. This is what the UK did between 2010-2020, the period when the UK had no aircraft carriers in operation.

Western militaries have been through a capability gap for the last thirty years. That capability is simply operating with a sufficient combat mass. In 1991, the UK contributed around 53,000 personnel to the liberation of Kuwait. In 2003, the UK contributed around 46,000 to the ‘liberation’ of Iraq. The trend is gradually downwards. It is virtually impossible to imagine a UK government being able to commit a force above 30,000 to any operation today. The numbers simply are not there.[1] The RAF is massively over-stretched and has no spare capacity to actually launch a large-scale air dominance campaign. The Royal Navy has more admirals than surface combat vessels. The British Army has around 80,000 regular troops and is giving away its tanks to Ukraine as the slow reality dawns that tanks are not very useful anymore. On paper, militaries often look far more capable than they really are, because on paper, nothing breaks down and needs repairing. Troops on paper do not need to go home and see their families or risk developing dangerous psychosis. The reason the UK operates four submarines that carry the Trident Submarine Launched Ballistic Missile (SLBM) is to ensure that there is always one of them at sea. One will always be in refit, and one might be suffering from some unforeseen maintenance problem. That would leave two spare, but it is considered wise to have the extra one just in case some totally unforeseen event intrudes. This might be a technological breakthrough that makes tracking submarines more practical, or some ideological shift which we literally cannot foresee. It is also entirely plausible, albeit unlikely, that some major technical fault might be uncovered, practically disabling all four boats at once. Getting just one back in service quickly enough to make the deterrent credible would be a significant challenge.

There is some recent experience to undermine confidence in Trident’s effectiveness. In 2016 a Trident test launch from His Majesty’s Ship (HMS) Vengeance went off course and headed towards the US, which is, in a dark turn of serendipity, its state of manufacture.[2]  On 21 February  2024, another Trident test, this time from sister ship HMS Vanguard barely made it off the submarine before landing in the adjacent sea. It seems the gas that is used to eject the missile to just above the surface of the sea worked, but the solid rocket motor did not ignite at all.[3] This is a major failure and means that the Royal Navy has not now conducted a successful test of the UK’s nuclear deterrent in over a decade.[4] This might legitimately be grounds for panic at the UK’s Ministry of Defence, and highlights the shortsightedness  of the UK’s decision to remove its aerially delivered nuclear weapons capability in 1998.[5] It also confirms a worrying trend of defence mismanagement within the Royal Navy.[6]

Having a continuous at sea deterrent is considerable advisable for two reasons: First, it guarantees the deterrent; second, if the UK were to only launch the patrols in times of crisis, their launch would make the crisis appear worse. It would appear to a potential adversary that the UK was preparing for nuclear use.

Some NATO governments are discussing the idea of raising and training militia, or vastly improving the size and quality of their reserve forces. The Russian Special Military Operation In Ukraine has been a double shock to NATO: the fact it happened at all is the first shock. The second is that is has lasted so long. Most experts assumed Russia would seize the territory in Eastern Ukraine it effectively already controlled, annexe it and then offer a ceasefire. When Crimea was annexed in 2014 and parts of Eastern Ukraine became a battlefield, it was described as hybrid warfare. But the longer it goes on, the more hybrid warfare is starting to look like conventional warfare. Russia called up 300,000 of its reserves in September 2022.[7] That is about the same size as the active elements of the French and German regular armies added together.

NATO is a collective security organisation, and one might suppose that it is so large it does not need to worry about reservists or militia’s.  But it suffers from several flaws that make it less effective than it first appears. First, there are member states who are, militarily, more or less useless. The Baltic states of, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have next to no military capability of their own. They have literally no combat aircraft and the policing of their airspace, which borders Russia, is a mission that rotates amongst the other NATO states.[8] This makes them a drag on the alliance: other member states are obligated to protect them, but they offer little in the way of mutual support. Since a Russian attack on one of these states is often highlighted as at least possible, this must be a major concern. Former President Trump has highlighted this issue recently.[9] NATO finds itself obligated to protect a possible Russian target yet gains next to nothing in return.

Second, there is a general misunderstanding about how NATO works. An attack on one state is considered an attack on all, if the North Atlantic Council invokes Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. The only time this has happened was after September 11, 2001.[10] The Council takes its decisions by consensus rather than vote, but consensus is, in practice, a form of unanimity.[11] Thus, Article 5 might not be invoked even if, for example, Russia invaded Estonia. Second, even if an armed attack is declared under Article 5, there is no compulsion on member states to actually contribute forces to combat operations. It seems highly unlikely that, for example Turkey or Hungary would send troops to fight Russia. In practice, NATO operations are always carried out by the same handful of member states: France, Italy, The Netherlands, Spain, the UK and US. This means that NATO is far weaker in reality than it appears on paper. This is where combat mass starts to become a problem.

In NATO states with conscription and reserves, adding combat mass will mean beefing up the reserve part. It could mean requiring reservists to spend a week every 6 months actually serving, for the rest of their lives. Few states currently have a structure this robust. Thus, the British Army has an Army Reserve, but it is a voluntary force. States like the UK will need to undergo radical change and think about a new way of rapidly developing combat mass.

The deterrence dilemma

Deterrence is the idea that having a significant military capability makes the enemy unlikely to use their equally significant military capability. It is generally desirable that deterrence works and armed conflicts are avoided. Deterrence theory has been afflicted with several problems, paraphrased below:

1. The knowledge problem: if two large militaries face each other and never engage, one can fall into the post hoc ergo propter hoc The conclusion is that the militaries deterred one another. But one can never know for sure this is the case. It may be that there was simply no reason to fight. Deterrence is assumed to be the answer, but there is no way to know it is. The Cold War (1945-1990) is an example of this.
2. The uncertainty problem: two militaries may face each other, with one assuming it is superior to the other, when in fact they are balanced. This is a situation where deterrence should exist, but fails because of the imperfection of military intelligence. The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) is an example of this. The Iraqi’s believed that the Iranian forces would crumble because of the purges following the Iranian Revolution (1979). This meant that Iran had lost many of its senior officers. In fact, both sides were equally matched for most of the conflict.
3. The credibility problem: two large militaries may face each other, threatening terrible destruction. Deterrence should work to stop the conflict. But if one side believes that the other is not really willing to fight and risk the destruction, then deterrence fails. This is one of the most frequent critiques of nuclear deterrence: we simply have no data on what the leader of a nuclear armed state might do if they are subject to a nuclear attack. The only use of nuclear weapons in history was when one side enjoyed a nuclear monopoly (Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945).
4. The intentionality problem: as tension rises between states, they may take measure that they consider to be defensive, sensible and proportionate in nature. Yet the other state may view these as offensive, reckless and disproportionate. We have two historical examples for this. In 1914, Europe fell into the Great War as the armed services of various states were mobilised. Deterrence failed because the mobilisations threw the European security environment out of balance. The other example is the now infamous NATO exercise, Able Archer, 1983. Both sides in the Cold War were constantly exercising and war gaming World War Three. Able Archer introduced some new elements: government leaders, who had previously been ‘played’ by civil servants, fulfilled their own functions in the exercise. The operation was larger than anything seen before. Some of the Soviet Union’s security services and leadership believed that Able Archer was cover for an actual attack. The presidents and prime ministers of NATO had vastly under-estimated the level of paranoia on the Soviet side. What to them was simply a better version of exercises they had previously conducted, appeared to the Soviet Union as crossing a line.
5. The strategy problem: Deterrence is not actually strategy. Lawrence Freedman, when specifically addressing nuclear strategy,[12] has changed his mind on whether there can be such a thing as a nuclear strategy. Does the goal of deterrence, which precludes use, mean that strategy itself is denied? It recalls the closing line of the film War Games (Dir: John Badham, 1983), that nuclear war is ‘a strange game; the only winning move is not to play.’ There is no reason this cannot be extended to thinking about non-nuclear deterrence. If deterrence fails, then one must fight. But if all ones energy and thought has gone into deterrence, then there probably is no strategy to fight with. Another option is to try and have it both ways: deterrence is emphasised, with war fighting also heavily resourced and practiced. But this simply leads one back into the intentionality problem: the other side sees preparation for warfighting rather than deterrence.

Raising militia forces in Europe in direct response to Russia’s Special Military operation in Ukraine potentially triggers many of these problems.  They are compounded because NATO consists of liberal democracies and therefore its policy changes when these governments change, but not in a very clear or direct manner. For example, 2024 will see elections in the US and UK, potentially leading to change in NATO policy. But no one can really predict what these changes might be. The UK election will probably resort in no change to NATO policy, whomever wins, because the UK is only one of many second-tier members of NATO and Labour Party defence policy is virtually identical to that of the incumbent Conservative Party. The US election might lead to substantive change if it results in as second term for President Trump. But even that is uncertain. President Trump talked a lot about changing NATO policy in his first term, but then did nothing.

Why we must raise militia now, not when they may actually be needed

Security in the Atlantic area is in a period of great instability due to the Special Military Operation in Ukraine. The risks of a wider conflict between NATO and Russia are as high as they have been since the early 1960’s. The Cold War never ended. The chances of such a conflict remain low overall however. This might seem to be a contradiction, but this simply reveals how terrible human beings are at dealing with probabilities. Smoking more than doubles an average man’s chances of developing lung cancer.[13] This is a terrifying statistic. But the chance that a non-smoking man will develop lung cancer in his lifetime are about 6%.[14] Smoking could push this up to 14%, but these are still very low odds. If you smoke, you are a fool. But if you smoke and die of lung cancer you are an unlucky fool.

Similarly, the chances of conflict between NATO and Russia might have doubled in recent years. This is a guess: it is obviously not possible to prove empirically something that has not happened, whereas causes of death are statistically verifiable. Yet this would still leave the risk at very low levels. NATO leaders are fools to threaten President Putin with the use of troops in Ukraine. But they would have to be unlucky fools for this to actually degenerate into World War Three. On 29 February 2024, President Putin delivered his annual State of the Nation address. Large parts of it are rambling nonsense about the threat from NATO and it includes the obligatory reference to nuclear war.[15] Yet it has not seriously raised the threat of such a conflict by even 1%. We have gotten to the point where President Putin has made so many references to nuclear war that they now make no difference.

Things can get worse however. There could be several triggers that could increase the risk of a NATO-Russia conflict. Russia might make substantial gains in Ukraine that could make NATO become more interventionist. NATO is already effectively fighting alongside Ukraine in the field of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR): NATO and Australian aircraft are flying outside Ukrainian airspace but providing intelligence data on what is going on inside to the Ukrainians.[16] Russia might choose to escalate by directly attacking a NATO state, such as Poland or Lithuania. Russian support for Iran, which is in a proxy war with Israel, might force the US to take some kind of escalatory action against Iran. The most likely source of instability is the one this blog addresses: European states might move to increase the size of their militaries via militia. This could be seen as preparing for war by the Russian side. Far better that the militia be called up now, before further destabilisation and potential misinterpretation can occur. Calling them up right before a crisis will help to create the crisis. This occurred in the rush to war in 1914, discussed supra. This was called the action-reaction phenomenon by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in a speech in 1967.[17]

Back to the Future of Great Power Politics

The period of global liberalism from 1989-2014 was an historical aberration. The belief that the traditional security paradigms that dominated international relations until 1990 were outmoded was incorrect. From the end of the era of European empires, which most scholars date to the Peace of Westphalia, 1648, international relations was dominated by Great Power Politics. This is the idea that a series of large states essentially ran their own affairs within their spheres of influence, with little outside interference. These spheres of influence were a continuation of the previous empires. The states involved were regularly at war, but these wars did not change the fundamental territories of the great powers. The UK has been essentially the same territory since 1707, with the status of Ireland being the temporary exception. France today is largely France as it was 300 hundred years ago. Russia is still Russia and what became Germany was recognisable even before German unification in 1871. Germany was split for 45 years from 1945-1990. But this was a result of a temporary political imposition rather than any long-term military imposition. The Great Powers were subject to two forces that substituted for the impossibility of large-scale military-imposed change. They changed internally due to revolution. France and Russia look similar on a map, yet have changed a great deal in their values and internal organisation. The other outlet was colonialism. If the French could not impose their will on the Russians, then would impose it on Africans and Asians.

The Cold War was a continuation of this: the number of great powers simply reduced to two. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent period of the unipolar world of the USA as the sole superpower, there was a belief that A New World Order would replace the previous 400 years of competition. The phrase comes from President George HW Bush’s State of the Union address on the 29 January 1991.[18] This was two weeks after the commencement of Operation Desert Storm to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Just about every President uses military force as a tool of statecraft, but this was different because it was completely legal. Bush was arguing that a system of international relations premised on lawful actions was emerging. The Cold War was over and so was the general sense of enmity and impasse at the United Nations (UN). The UN Security Council (UNSC) would now be able to authorise military action when it was deemed necessary by the ‘international community’,  a term that no one seemed willing to define, but in practice meant the USA. Bush was unconsciously echoing President Wilson’s faith in the League of Nations as a tool to prevent conflict. The League had been a failure and the UN was its successor organisation but it could now be re-invigorated and finally deliver on the promise of 1919. President Bush went onto prove that the New World Order was not just a cover for the self-interest of the USA by sending troops to relieve the terrible humanitarian disaster in Somalia. Again, this was authorised by the UNSC, under Resolution 751, 24 April 1992.[19] There was no oil in Somalia. There was nothing in Somalia but suffering, so this was a lawful and selfless operation, which started well and ended badly.[20]

The New World Order was not just based upon military interventions.  Globalisation would make everyone capitalists and possibly even democrats too. Globalization has been ongoing since human society’s emerged millennia ago, but it was a process that developed at an exponential rate and in its earl phases was so slow that it was hard to detect.  By the 1990’s it was happening sufficiently rapidly that everyday people, and their elected leaders could see it. The development of truly global, instantaneous telecommunications was one example. The transfer of manufacturing jobs from the West to the East was another.  Western leaders fell into the hubris of believing that the death of European Communism was evidence of the inevitable superiority of their system, rather than at least partly a result of historical accidents. It became fashionable to refer to the end of history as a process: Liberal, Democratic Capitalism was the end point of human development.[21] The states of the former USSR would have to follow this path and the growing liberalism in Chinese politics would eventually result in the same outcome. In a quirk of history, the claims being made for global capitalism were much the same as Marxist-Leninism made for global communism: victory was inevitable, it was just a question of when. Any temporary reversals were just that. Good historians, if such a group exists, always maintain that there are no inevitabilities and historical events usually have multiple causes.

Demographics and Great Powers

Of course, we now know better. China is not a democracy and is certainly less liberal now than it was ten years ago. Russian democracy lasted for about 15 years. Russian capitalism has been killed by Western sanctions: Russia is now essentially a planned, war economy, and is functioning reasonably well. It has a medium-term advantage in terms of being able to generate combat mass. Russia has a large population. State propaganda and the elimination of unfriendly media and political personalities has made this population more enthusiastic for armed conflict than it had previously been. President Putin’s narrative, that attacking Ukraine was a necessary pre-emption because NATO was planning to attack Russia, is plainly utter nonsense, but people believe it. President Putin suffers from the same sense of grievance that drove Osama bin Laden: that what they represent is irrelevant to most of the World. For bin Laden it was obvious that a radical, political form of Islam should replace the monarchical based version that functioned in most Muslim majority states. It was obvious that friendship with the West could only be a corrupting influence. To most actual Muslims, none of this was obvious. Al Qaeda’s period of influence was relatively brief because the message itself was unpleasant and the use of violence was indiscriminate and petulant. bin Laden was like a child kicking over an anthill. President Putin is similar. In his view Russia had always been a Great Power. It had lost this status and become irrelevant. Pre-February 2022 the Oligarch’s would never have used the restriction of natural gas supplies as a weapon against the West, because the West paid the most money and that is all they cared about.  For President Putin, gold may be sacrificed for glory. For the Oligarch’s, it is precisely the other way around.

However, Russia has only a medium-term advantage. In the long-term, it faces structural problems. Russia has been able to sell its resources to non-European states. These states cannot pay as much as the West, but the price of resources has been artificially inflated by the Special Military Operation. But in the longer-term, this has encouraged Europe to drastically ramp up its renewables programmes, whilst re-prioritising some of its green objectives. This means that the worst of the post-February 2022 energy crisis is now behind rather than in front of European states. This will depress global prices for oil and gas over the next five years, which will hurt the Russian economy.

The Russification of domestic industry is proving temporarily successful, but it hides longer term economic problems. Russia remains fundamentally bad at making products. This means when the prices of oil, gas, rare metals and other resources fall, it will not have an export industry to fall back on. Russia has a successful arms industry, but the relatively poor performance of affordable Russian weapons in Ukraine will hurt this too. Russia’s biggest arms customers were China and India. Both are now making their own systems, and India is also now buying American. Russia continues to sell arms, but they are mostly in small numbers and sold to whichever ungovernable African state Russia is currently involved with. Russian airlines are switching over to Russian airframes. But they are not doing so with any enthusiasm. Russia has never made a decent airliner. The United Aircraft Corporation of Russia is the nationalised entity that actually makes the airframes designed by famous design house like Mikoyan and Sukhoi. It manufactures a lot of civilian airliners. But even before the sanctions imposed on Russia, most of these were simply being sent directly to storage: no Russian airline wanted them and their export was hampered by the dreadful reputation for safety and maintenance they had acquired.

This means that the only market for Russian products will be Russia. A middle class accustomed to buying Western products will be stuck with poor substitutes and a reduced overall GDP with which to purchase them. Defence spending is creeping up as Russia has to replace its losses and develop better technology quickly. President Putin is facing an economy that looks like the one Mikhail Gorbachev presided over in 1988. There is another long-term weakness: the demographic future of Russia is weak. This may be one of the unspoken reasons for President Putin to act now: Russia may be simply not viable in the future. The population of Russia has been steadily falling since 2000. In the last two years, the main story has been men of military age fleeing, but these years have not even been the worst. In 2005, Russia’s population fell by 0.42%. As the population of the World, including first rank states like Germany and the USA, but also in the third world, is rising, Russia’s is falling. This makes its relative size even smaller than the bare figures for the last 25 years suggest. In 1955, 4% of humans were Russians. Today, the figure is 1.77%. Russia has an excellent education system, a leftover from the Soviet Union. But these people simply leave for a better paid and freer life in the West. The prospect of being killed in Ukraine is merely an added disincentive to the average Russian of university age. Russia is not merely losing people, it is losing the best people. Attracting immigrants to replace them is almost impossible. Who wants to move to Russia for a better life?

It is hard to be a Great Power when your own peoples main preoccupation is leaving. In his aforementioned 2024 State of the Nation address, President Putin mentioned the need to boost fertility rates. This is a common problem throughout the West, but there it can be compensated through immigration. President Putin will need not only to increase the number of children Russian’s have, he will also need to stop them leaving. This is relatively easy to achieve, but it will also leave Russian’s in no doubt that in terms of freedoms and rights, they are back to 1988. Ukraine cannot win the conflict with Russia in the short-term. But global demographics suggest Russia may simply cease to exist with the next hundred years. In the medium term, this will make maintaining a  large military impossible. This is the reason why Russia made use of Wagner mercenaries, including those drawn from the wretched scum or Russia’s prisons. They provided a short-term solution whilst long-term expansion of the military could be prioritised. But this is no way to run a sustainable military. It is possible to take a murderer and turn them into an infantry soldier. But making them into fighter pilots or submariners seems less feasible.

Final Thoughts – NATO’s insecurity about security

The Atlantic security environment is in a process of unconscious and disorganised realignment. Russia is reverting back to its late 1980’s military posture, as a large conventional military is being regenerated. NATO is not reacting in a coherent manner. NATO is enlarging in number of members whilst the actual combat mass of its front-line military is declining. With the admission of Finland and Sweden, NATO technically has fewer troops per square metre of territory than it had before. NATO also has a much longer shared border with Russia than before. The idea of using militia to make up for this shortfall in people-power has not really been thought through and is unlikely to be popular with electorates who have no recent history of conscription or national service (eg, the United Kingdom). It is also questionable if militia can be effective in an era where success in armed combat is heavily premised on familiarity with technically complex weapons systems.

Working up militia feels like an attempt to achieve security on the cheap. It is yet another example, of NATO’s peculiar propensity to talk a lot but do relatively little. Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s, NATO was locked in seemingly never-ending discussions about whether to deploy this or that weapons system,[22]  blind to the fact that the bill for the systems was being met almost exclusively by the USA.  By the time the systems were deployed they were abolished by arms control. Today, NATO is locked in a similar crisis of confidence. Relying on Dad’s Army, whilst refusing to fund a genuine and credible conventional force, is just another example of this. In the long-term, the demographics favour NATO. But President Putin knows this too.

References

[1]UK armed forces not ready for high-intensity war, MPs warn, BBC News Online, 4 February 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-68181275

[2]Trident missile test fails for second time in a row, BBC News Online, 21 February 2024 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68355395

[3] UK nuclear missile test fails for second time in eight years, The Financial Times, 21 February 2024 https://www.ft.com/content/c81351ac-d70b-4bb7-afa5-6d498632f92a

[4] Ibid

[5]Nuclear weapons at a glance: United Kingdom, Claire Mills, House of Commons Library, 3 May 2023   https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9077/CBP-9077.pdf

[6] There are ships that have lost all power generation at sea, F35B fighters that have fallen off aircraft carriers and personnel that have been taken prisoner because they simply got lost and strayed into the territorial sea of another state or were at the very least unable to explain exactly where they were.

[7] Russia extends eligibility for military call-up by at least five years, Reuters, July 18 2023 https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-extends-eligibility-military-call-up-by-least-five-years-2023-07-18/

[8] Baltic Airt Policing https://ac.nato.int/missions/air-policing/baltics

[9] Donald Trump again threatens to sacrifice NATO allies to Russia, The Guardian, February 15 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/15/trump-russia-attack-nato-campaign-biden

[10] Collective defence and Article 5, https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_110496.htm#:~:text=The%20principle%20of%20collective%20defence%20is%20enshrined%20in%20Article%205,attacks%20against%20the%20United%20States.

[11] Consensus decision-making at NATO https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49178.htm

[12] See The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, Freedman and Michaels, 2019

[13] VeryWell Health, What Percentage of Smokers get Lung Cancer? https://www.verywellhealth.com/what-percentage-of-smokers-get-lung-cancer-2248868

[14] American cancer Society, Key Statistics for Lung Cancer

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/types/lung-cancer/about/key-statistics.html#:~war between N   :text=Overall%2C%20the%20chance%20that%20a,t%2C%20the%20risk%20is%20lower.

[15] Russia-Ukraine war updates: Putin warns of ‘real’ nuclear war risk, Al Jazeera Staff, 29 February 2024, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/2/29/russia-ukraine-war-live-news-putin-to-address-nation-weeks-before-polls

[16] Australian Government Defence Continuing support for Ukraine, 25 October 2023 https://www.defence.gov.au/news-events/news/2023-10-25/continuing-support-ukraine

[17] Michael Krepon, Arms Control Wonk, https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archive/404269/action-reaction/

[18] Speeches that Defined a Presidency,, ‘A New World Order’, 20 January 1991, https://www.c-span.org/video/?525425-10/a-world-order

[19] The United States Army in Somalia, 1992-1994, U.S. Army Center of Military History, https://www.history.army.mil/brochures/somalia/somalia.htm

[20] Ibid

[21] The End of History and the Last Man, Francis Fukuyama, 1992

[22] Basically the weapons systems that were abolished by The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, 1987