This story landed nearly a fortnight ago and is still running in some media outlets.

First, separate reports from Finland and Sweden circulated saying that their people must prepare for war.

Project Fear alive and well

Then, around January 25, 2024, Britain’s General Sir Patrick Sanders sounded the same warning, the latest Project Fear alarm. How disappointing:

I asked a good friend of mine who keeps abreast of all things Military and he had never heard of Sanders.

Anyway, London’s Evening Standard reported (purple emphases mine):

Britain should “train and equip” a “citizen army” to ready the country for a potential land war, the head of the Army has said.

But General Sir Patrick Sanders, the outgoing Chief of the General Staff (CGS), said even that would be “not enough” as he pointed to allies in eastern and northern Europe “laying the foundations for national mobilisation”.

In a speech on Wednesday, the military top brass said increasing Army numbers in preparation for a potential conflict would need to be a “whole-of-nation undertaking”.

The comments, first reported by the Daily Telegraph, are being read as a warning that British men and Women should be ready for a call-up to the armed forces if Nato goes to war with Russia.

Although General Sanders’s name is mostly used when discussing this story in the media, the UK’s Defence Secretary sounded the alarm first:

It comes after Defence Secretary Grant Shapps in a speech last week said the world is “moving from a post-war to pre-war world” and the UK must ensure its “entire defence ecosystem is ready” to defend its homeland.

Dear, oh dear.

Grant Shapps is the least credible man for Secretary of State for Defence. In his early days as an MP, he was part of a small investment company in which he adopted various online personas, e.g. Michael Green. A parlous state of affairs.

That said, the article tells that Sanders talked about mobilisation after Russia invaded Ukraine nearly two years ago:

Wednesday’s comments by Sir Patrick, made during a speech at the International Armoured Vehicles conference in west London, do not mark the first time he has pushed for greater readiness of Britain’s armed forces for conflict.

Speaking in 2022 in the months after Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Army chief said “this is our 1937 moment” – a reference to preparations made for the start of the Second World War – and that the British Army should be at “high readiness”.

In his speech on Wednesday, Sir Patrick said Britain could not rely on its navy and air power, arguing “we must be able to credibly fight and win wars on land”.

On that last point, I agree with the General, yet Conservative MPs have been defending their cuts to the numbers of boots on the ground, saying that we are now fighting aerial and technological wars. I don’t think so. Just look at Russia and Ukraine.

Because our number of troops is so low, Sanders says:

Within the next three years, it must be credible to talk of a British Army of 120,000, folding in our reserve and strategic reserve. But this is not enough …

As the chairman of the Nato military committee warned just last week, and as the Swedish government has done, preparing Sweden for entry to Nato, taking preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing when needed are now not merely desirable but essential.

We will not be immune and as the pre-war generation we must similarly prepare – and that is a whole-of-nation undertaking.

Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.

Downing Street wisely tamped down the fear factor:

Rishi Sunak’s government slapped down the suggestion from Britain’s army chief that the public could be called up to fight a war against Russia.

Asked if Mr Sunak agreed with the possible move, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “No.”

Pressed whether he ruled out conscription following the idea floated by the top officer of public call-ups to the military, the spokesman added: “There is no suggestion.

“The Government has no intention to follow through with that.

“The British military has a proud tradition of being voluntary.”

Asked if the PM believed the British military was strong enough to fight against Russia, he added: “These kind of hypothetical scenarios, talking about conflict, are not helpful.”

He declined to get drawn into discussions about “hypothetical wars”.

It is unclear whether Sir Patrick’s tenure is coming to an end in June 2024 because he has spoken against cuts in troop numbers and defence funding:

He has been a vocal critic of cuts to troop numbers and military spending.

He will be replaced as CGS in June by General Sir Roly Walker, an announcement that followed reports he was being forced out in response to his outspoken comments.

Chief of the Defence Staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, denied the claim when asked by MPs about the reports in July.

Sir Patrick has not been alone in criticising defence spending. In the middle of January, General Lord Dannatt, a former chief of the general staff of the British Army, also invoked the 1930s and lack of military preparedness:

General Lord Dannatt hit out at the shrinking size of the army, which he said has fallen from 102,000 in 2006 to 74,000 today and is still “falling fast”.

He drew parallels with the 1930s when the “woeful” state of the UK’s armed forces failed to deter Adolf Hitler, saying there is “a serious danger of history repeating itself”.

However, Grant Shapps said that all was well:

Mr Shapps has insisted the size of the Army will not dip below 73,000 under the Conservatives …

“It is actually, specifically, to 73,000 plus the reserves.”

On Monday, January 29, in The Times, former Conservative Party leader William Hague jumped on the bandwagon for a citizen mobilisation, ‘Yes, it’s serious: your country needs you’, echoing General Kitchener’s words from just over a century ago.

Now, while Downing Street says we’ve never had conscription, in the 20th century, we have had compulsory National Service for men, which was of a military nature.

Hague quoted General Sanders and then James Heappey MP, the armed forces minister, before advocating that we use present-day Sweden as a model:

James Heappey, the armed forces minister, has indicated that a force of half a million will be needed. It is time to consider seriously, and in detail, how that could be brought about.

National Service is firmly associated with the past. It’s what they did in the 1940s and 1950s, isn’t it? That was our dads and grandads. How very 20th century. It is not seen as compatible with our hyper-individualistic age. How dare we disturb the idea that everyone has a lot of rights without any responsibility to protect them?

Most people with such fears can rest easy: the last thing the army needs is several million unwilling conscripts on its hands. But now we need the 21st-century version of National Service: not its return but its reinvention, bringing the prospect of skills, motivation, recognition and inclusion for individuals while ensuring the security of the country. Sweden has just set an example of this, reinstating civic duty for 18-year-olds, which includes training in emergency services or maintaining vital infrastructure as alternatives to the armed forces. “Citizenship is not a travel document,” explained the Swedish prime minister, but comes with obligations as well.

The UK needs to move to the same reassertion of citizenship. The best model to draw on is also Scandinavian. Norway has a modern and highly successful form of National Service, keeping up with changes in society as well as the demands of national security. Every Norwegian 18-year-old, irrespective of gender, fills in a questionnaire on their health and motivation. About a quarter of them are chosen for interview, accompanied by physical and intelligence tests. In the latest year just under 10,000 were selected for military service, 17 per cent of the age cohort. They serve for 12 to 16 months.

There are huge advantages to this system. Although some people end up having to serve against their wishes, the majority are highly willing and proud of being selected. Many choose to serve for a longer period. They learn skills that are often of great value in later employment, while mixing with people from other regions and backgrounds all over their country. All of them become trained personnel who form a strong national reserve. From a small population Norway can deploy 70,000 personnel when it needs to: the equivalent of 870,000 if applied in the UK.

Implementing something like this would represent a significant cultural shift in the UK. There would be strong criticism of loss of personal freedom, or supposed militarism, or of the cost. Yet any visitor to Norway will have noticed that it is one of the freest places on earth, strongly committed to peace at home and abroad. Its young people and society are strengthened, not harmed, by its modern, competitive form of service. It does all this within a lower defence budget, as a proportion of national income, than ours. That does not mean that we, with our aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines, can have a lower budget, but it does illustrate that the cost is not prohibitive. And the benefits are immense.

… The party leaderships should put this in their election manifestoes. Seriously. Come on, we need to do it.

It should be noted that William Hague never became Prime Minister. Enough said.

The problem

In between General Sanders’s and Hague’s remarks were discussions on GB News about the type of person the military is seeking.

Everyone participating agreed that many young Britons have been turned off from the notion of defending their country. Then again, those on the more conservative side of the spectrum said that the armed forces were going ‘woke’. According to some sources, the military is finding new recruits difficult because they do not perceive the military to be what it was in their fathers’ or grandfathers’ day.

On January 26, Conservative MP Lee Anderson gave his views to Guido Fawkes on the Royal Air Force (RAF)’s recent recruitment campaign, also unsuccessful (red emphases are Guido’s):

I agree with Lee.

In fact, The Telegraph pointed out recruitment and morale problems on January 23, ‘Public face call-up if we go to war because Army is too small, military chief warns’:

The number of regular troops in the Army stands at 75,983, although defence sources insisted applications for the Army were at the highest they had been in six years.

Last week Capita, the outsourcing specialist in charge of the Army’s recruitment, said soldiers who have visible tattoos, hay fever or a record of asthma should be allowed to join to solve the crisis.

The Royal Navy is struggling to hire more than the other forces, with just 29,000 full-time recruits.

Earlier this month The Telegraph revealed that the Navy has so few sailors it will have to decommission two warships to staff its new class of frigates.

HMS Westminster and HMS Argyll will be decommissioned this year, with the crews sent to work across the new fleet of Type 26 frigates as they come into service.

A recent MoD survey found that just 34 per cent of service personnel said they felt valued while 46 per cent felt dissatisfied with the overall standard of their accommodation. Over the past year, 16,260 personnel have left the Armed Forces.

It comes as the forces struggle to retain female personnel amid a sex harassment crisis engulfing the military.

In 2012, Capita was awarded a 10-year contract by the MoD to work on its recruitment. In 2020, this was extended by two years.

This year, having been given the task of recruiting 9,813 people, Capita admitted it has so far only recruited 5,000.

Women warriors

I highlighted the sentence pertaining to women, because the women serving in the Israeli Defence Force look happy in their service. Britain’s Ministry of Defence should ask an Israeli official how the IDF prevents harassment of women in the military.

As far as women warriors in a man’s world are concerned, here are two historical perspectives to explore.

Mary Harrington, a contributing editor at UnHerd, presents us with one example from the ancient world in ‘The curse of warrior women’:

According to Herodotus, after the Greeks defeated the Amazons, they loaded three ships with captives — only for the Amazon women to kill the ships’ crews and make landfall on coast of Scythia.

There they first fought with local Scythian men, only for those men to set up camp near them, creating an uneasy standoff. Herodotus recounts how the tension broke when a Scythian man met a lone Amazon woman near the camp, and sparks flew. After this, the two groups came together to form couples — though, even then, the Amazons refused to become Scythian village women, insisting their newfound husbands instead adopt their nomadic, pillaging ways.

The combustible cocktail of militarism and female sex appeal causes meltdowns to this day.

I will return to Mary Harrington’s article in a moment.

A second example from history is in a Times review of Hannah Durkin’s book on American slavery, Survivors. The book recounts a powerful episode from 1860 in Dahomey, summarised in the review as follows:

One morning in the summer of 1860, the inhabitants of Tarkar woke up to terror. Shaven-headed female warriors had attacked the town first, with machetes and muskets, followed by a second line of men. Many of those who escaped the hail of bullets were promptly decapitated with giant blades. In just under half an hour this west African town was wiped off the face of the earth.

This was punishment for the failure of the Tarkar people to supply half their harvest to the kingdom of Dahomey, the regional power that ran a slave-trading empire and a tawdry protection racket. The remaining Tarkars, 125 of them, were forced into iron collars and marched off to the slave port of Ouidah. The Dahomians added insult to injury by taunting them with the rotting heads of their kin along the way. There they were briefly held in barracoons, the slave barracks, before being sold and spirited away across the Atlantic on the Clotilda. This vessel has the dubious honour of being the last slave ship to make the infamous Middle Passage to the US.

Survivors tells the story of the Tarkars in gripping, harrowing detail. It was, Hannah Durkin observes, a miracle that 108 survived the journey. Packed like sardines and subsisting on occasional gulps of vinegary water, approximately 1.8 million slaves had died on the hellish Middle Passage; 10.7 million Africans survived, reaching the New World, where they enjoyed a life expectancy of seven years.

The review is equally powerful in revealing how the new slaves were not well received by slaves who had arrived some years earlier. The Tarkar people were outsiders. A 2018 book, Barracoon, by Zora Neale Hurston and published posthumously, includes this anecdote from one of the Clotilda’s survivors whom Hurston had interviewed in the 1920s:

Oluale Kossola’s testimony had apparently shattered her black-and-white view of race when he impressed on her that his original kidnappers weren’t white, but rather Africans just like him, albeit of another kingdom. Hurston had recoiled in horror at the revelation. “The inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me.”

Yes, and women helped to facilitate that!

But I digress.

Returning to Mary Harrington’s article for UnHerd, she discusses the inevitable tensions between men and women in war:

… delving into the long history of women warriors reveals three interconnected truths. First, that female fighters are a long way from being a “stereotype-smashing” recent development. On the contrary, as far back as history reaches, there have been warrior women. And wherever such figures appear, we also find an overlap between violent militarism and sexual desire.

The upshot of this is that the role played in warfare by fighting women is rarely as straightforward as that of their male counterparts. Female soldiers may sometimes be ferocious fighters. But they almost always become propaganda figures as well. And in this dynamic, sex is never far from the surface — sometimes with horrifying consequences …

Coverage of more modern Ukrainian female soldiers participating in the country’s defence against Putin has tended to come wreathed in a … haze of you-go-girl liberal feminism, as have recent reports from Gaza that female IDF troops will now fight on the front line for the first time …

But a closer look at women in war throughout history complicates this picture, revealing a danger-zone for women warriors between two very different kinds of battle. And in this sense, at least in Herodotus’s account, the Amazons are perhaps the least ambivalent case in point. As he tells it, the Amazon rapprochement with the local Scythian men seems to have been broadly consensual, after the initial outbreak of fighting. Even so, the word Herodotus uses to describe the coming-together of the Amazons and their Scythian suitors — ἐϰτιλώσαντο — raises modern feminist scholarly hackles because some read it as meaning “had sex with” but also “tamed”. There is a connotation not just of sexual intimacy, but also of defeat, and masculine dominance.

This slippage between sexual intimacy and war, between “conquest” and conquest, disturbs modern sensibilities profoundly. But it pervades the literature of love, from Herodotus and Ovid through Les Liaisons Dangereuses and The White Stripes. A woman may be temporarily presented as a military figure — but the moment she is perceived as sexually available, military war is over, and another kind of conquest is sought. And the most famous warrior woman of the Middle Ages, Joan of Arc (1412-1431), saw this dynamic as such a grave threat to her effectiveness as a military leader that she fought almost as fiercely to defend herself against accusations of having surrendered sexually, as she did against the risk of surrendering militarily. Even after her capture, she enjoined the English to have a woman examine her for proof of virginity. And perhaps no wonder — even more than a century later, Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays set out to smear her posthumously by depicting her as a “trull” (whore) and suggesting she tried to escape death by pretending to be pregnant.

This in turn reveals a second, interconnected role played by women in war: as propaganda figureheads. Though commonly depicted in armour, Joan was never directly involved in fighting. Rather, she served as strategist and — importantly — as a rallying-point and morale-booster for scattered and battle-worn French forces who had been fighting on and off for decades by the time she appeared. In other words, Joan’s core role was less as a soldier than a symbolic figurehead — and to this end, within the moral framework of her era, the question of whether or not she remained “unconquered” was of immense significance.

The third element involved in women and war is violence:

However much we fly the flag for gender parity, historically, the role women have played in warfare is not just as warriors, propagandists, or some mix of the two. The other point where sex and war collide is in “conquest” not of the metaphorical, romantic kind but the brutal, violent, and violating sort.

It seems that this is what some British women in the military have been experiencing:

Wherever the most violent and bloodthirsty human instincts are unleashed in war, rape re-emerges as a weapon. Against this, we might wonder what we’re really asking of those women now being lionised as you-go-girl avatars for “gender equality” amid the fog of war.

This could happen with any nation’s women warriors:

… If, for example, the service of Israeli women on the frontlines makes inspiring and sympathetic content for a Western readership, so too does their suffering if events turn against them. When such women are captured, and — inevitably — brutalised, their empty eyes and bloodstained faces also make for powerful propaganda.

Physical parity unlikely

Harrington points out the fact that in the modern military, there are eternal differences between men and women, the main one being physical strength. The other is the real consequence of sexual conquest:

Behind the cultural power of sex and war, then, lurk two dark, enduring facts. Firstly, that most men can kill most women with their bare hands, while the reverse is not true; and secondly, that most men prefer — consensually or otherwise — the other kind of conquest. Accordingly, throughout history, warrior women have played an ambivalent role in conflict: sort of fighting, but also sort of sex objects, and — in the confusing but powerful emotions this combination evokes — almost invariably vectors for propaganda.

… Whatever the blank-slatists may believe, there is likely no curing humankind of intermittent outbreaks of bloodthirstiness. And I doubt there’s much we can do either to eradicate the age-old patterns of human sexuality — even when their persistence obstructs the liberal feminist pursuit of absolute “gender equality” all the way to the battlefield. If this is so, women might ask themselves: is this kind of equality really something to fight for?

Sexual politics aside, a reader commenting on the article pointed out the reality of military training and women’s physical strength:

When I was in the military, years ago, during training I was part of a mixed-sex unit. Part of our training was learning to use a fireman’s carry to evacuate “injured” fellow soldiers from the battlefield. We were assigned pairs, and then had to take it in turn to carry each other about fifty feet. I was assigned a female soldier. I knelt down, allowed her to get into the fireman’s carry position, hoisted her up, and ran as quickly as I could the fifty feet before I risked dropping her, not being a particularly strong man. Then it was her turn. She knelt, I took my position, eased my weight off my feet–and then we both went sprawling in the dirt. Not one of the female soldiers in my unit could carry one of the male soldiers. They couldn’t even carry each other. Yet all the male soldiers could carry the female soldiers, even if only for a short distance.

I have read reports that, in some countries, military training has become less rigorous for that reason.

Anyone who doubts lesser female strength can look at the controversies going on in women’s sports, especially when a biological man competes against the fairer sex.

By all means, let women in the military but just be aware that they won’t be able to do everything that the men do.

Conclusion

Back to my original premise: Project Fear and war. It is yet just another tiresome excuse to frighten the public. Yes, it is always good for young adults to volunteer in some respect in their communities. But let’s not play into our enemies’ hands by saying we need a national mobilisation of the public.

That said, if the public perceive the cause to be worthwhile, they will fight for their country.