The outgoing head of the army has called on the UK and Nato to wake up to the very real threat of a World War Three-style global conflict within five years.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, the former chief of the general staff, insists the alliance may only have until the end of the decade to substantially re-arm to ward off a Russian attack on its own soil.
Sanders dubbed Russia, China and Iran “the new Axis powers” but argued that they pose an even more lethal challenge than the Nazi alliance in 1939 as “they are more interdependent and more aligned than the original Axis powers were”.
That has left the world facing “as dangerous a moment as any time that we’ve had since 1945”.
A hot war with Russia and its new allies is not inevitable, he insists, but is made more likely if the UK and Nato don’t significantly re-arm, he told The Times in a valedictory interview.
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The general said: “Most estimates will tell you that we’ve got somewhere between five and ten years before Russia recapitalises and is able to pose the sort of threat that it did before the Ukraine war.”
Putin may order operations before then that are “just below the level of conflict” or “seize some territory opportunistically,” he added.
“If we take the right steps now, if we address the threats and gaps we have in our capability, if we modernise our armed forces, if we make society and the UK more resilient, that’s how we prevent it. If we do that, it’s a low likelihood. If we don’t, it increases the probability and it encourages Russia, China and Iran.”
Under Sanders’s assessment, the UK’s own armed forces are no longer powerful enough to repeat the kind of invasion of southern Iraq that they did in 2003, or even retake the Falklands Islands again as they did in 1982.
He added: “Could you scramble together the two brigades that took the Falklands? Yes, of course we could. But could we get them there? Could we have the task force that made it possible and sustain it? No.”
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Sanders’s comments echo those made by Dr Rob Johnson, a senior MoD official, who last week said the UK was “not prepared to fight and win an armed conflict of any scale”. However, Sanders said: “The point I differ with Rob on is we can’t do it at any scale. We can, but we just can’t do it for very long. Rob was not far off the mark though.”
He refused to reveal the precise size of the army’s artillery shell and missile stocks, adding: “That bit is classified, but it would put the hairs up on the back of your neck.”
Sanders also issued a major warning on how able the forces now are to defend the UK itself from attack.
• The Times view on national security: Defence is Different
On national resilience, Sanders said: “We defend against terror threats very effectively. Our ability to defend in the cyber domain is better than most. We’ve definitely got gaps. Our ability to defend our undersea infrastructure is improving.
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“Unlikely as it is, our ability to deal with long-range precision missiles is pretty weak. We have a huge gap in air defences. We need to ensure that our skies are protected with greater investment, and that the undersea cables that we rely on are protected from Russian sabotage.
“But it’s also about making sure as well that our national manufacturing capacity can step up so we can rebuild stockpiles and we can repurpose manufacturing if we needed to, as we did during Covid, and do that relatively quickly.
“It’s a whole-nation effort. We’ve been conditioned to an era where military operations are conducted by small professional forces away from home and don’t really concern the rest of the country. That was true when the threats were discretionary and relatively low level. But with the threats we’re facing now, the only way we can deal with them is to treat them as a whole-nation effort.”
Sir Keir Starmer, the new prime minister, has pledged to increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP but only when the public finances are healthier.
In his first press conference in No 10 last Saturday, the Labour leader warned that the increase was not imminent, saying: “It will have to be done within our fiscal rules, and we will not be tempted as the last government was to pretend money is there now which isn’t there.”
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Sanders claimed that even the 2.5 per cent figure was too small for the forces to meet all their current challenges.
He argued: “At the moment, what we’re being asked to do by the government is well beyond what we are funded or capable of doing. We are carrying some very, very big financial commitments at the moment, the biggest is the renewal of the nuclear deterrent, which is absolutely necessary to do.
“But we’re trying to do that at the same time as modernising the air force, the navy, and the army, and restock empty magazines, and regrow our defence industrial base, and ensure that we’re looking after our people properly in terms of their accommodation and their reward packages. What we have at the moment doesn’t stack up to doing all of that.”
Sanders first caused controversy two years ago when he took over as chief of the general staff by warning that the world was at “a 1937 moment”. While he thinks his warning “was heard”, he doesn’t think it “galvanised the reinvestment in capability and in stockpiles, and crucially in national resilience, that I would have hoped for”.
The general was also disappointed by how much Britain’s general election campaign discussed defence and security. “It was conspicuously absent,” he said. “At the moment, the political debate in in the UK is is trying to shield the public from the reality of the world that that we’re now finding ourselves in.”
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A new global conflict on the scale of the Second World War was “not likely but it is plausible”, he argued.
Nato faces the threat of conflict in a series of flashpoints around the world; Russia’s aggression in eastern Europe, with China — “a rising power that has territorial ambitions” — Iran’s destabilising activities in the Middle East, and with North Korea.
Sanders explained: “Each of them has the potential for conflicts. And what links them all is they form an axis, so you have a new Axis powers.
“The difference this time is that they are more interdependent and more aligned than the original Axis powers were. You’ve got the potential for a conflict that won’t look like World War Two, but could spread like cancer, will be global, and will operate at different levels of intensity in all the operational domains. They may be low-likelihood but any of them would be a very, very high-impact event.”
The general also believes the early stages of a global conflict could have already begun. “Putin has done most of the things that he said he would do,” he added. “He’s described his intentions to rule and dominate Russia’s near abroad. So how likely is it? In some respects it’s already happening.”
Sanders also believes Ukraine is losing its war against Russia and can only win it if Nato does more and makes a stronger commitment to the country this week.
And he branded Donald Trump’s plan to force a peace deal onto Ukraine as disastrous, as it would only worsen the conflict and “provide succour to Putin”.
While Nato remains “the most powerful and successful alliance in history, it’s ability to act is lacking and levels of readiness are still well below where they were at the end of the Cold War”, he argues.
He said: “Everything that Nato has done over the last couple of years to devise an operational approach to defend against Russia now needs to be resourced. That resourcing is not moving at the speed that would make us comfortable.”
His warnings also echo calls this week from eastern Nato countries bordering Russia who will urge alliance leaders in Washington — including Starmer — to raise its minimum national military spending target from 2 per cent of GDP to 3 per cent.
Despite a big recent push, 20 out of the 31 Nato members still spends less than 2 per cent, including France and Germany. In comparison, Poland spends 4.1 per cent and Estonia 3.4 per cent. Sanders insisted he did all he could to press his arguments with ministers while in service, but he did consider resigning “a number of times” when he and others were ignored.
He revealed: “I have thought about it a number of times, over concerns that we were not acting at the scale and pace we needed to to respond to the threats, or that we weren’t replacing or replenishing equipment that we were giving away.”
He decided to stay in his position because he thought it “would not have had any impact”. The general explained: “I don’t have enough egotism to think that me resigning would have made more than about a day’s worth of headlines, so I thought it was better to continue to speak out.”
He also stands by another controversial call that he made in January for Britain to develop “a citizen army” to be ready for the growing threat of conflict. While insisting he went through all the correct clearance procedures to give the speech, he confirmed reports he was dressed down by his boss, Admiral Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff.
“Tony and I had a candid conversation,” he said, adding: “It wouldn’t be the first time in my career I’ve had had a dressing down.”
He also slammed the Tories’ election manifesto promise to bring back a form of mandatory national service, describing it as “the most unhelpful thing that happened in this election” as well as “ill-thought through”.
Preferring a voluntary system, he said: “It has poisoned the debate. The idea that you would impose some sort of punishment system for not doing national service turned the very people that we want to explain the positive aspects of this to against it — my son’s generation, who think that I’m the devil incarnate.”
