Britain and its Nato allies have no effective plan for defending Europe from a Russian attack because of splits within the military alliance, a recently retired military chief said last night.
Russia could deploy tens of thousands of troops into Nato territory within 48 hours, backed by warplanes and ships, whereas it would take Nato months to do the same, General Sir Richard Barrons said.
As a result, some land and control of airspace and territorial waters could be lost before Nato’s 28 member states had even agreed how to respond, the former chief of Joint Forces Command warned.
The North Atlantic Council, the political decision making body of Nato, has the power to authorise the supreme allied commander Europe, Nato’s top military officer, to draw up plans and training to prepare the alliance to respond to an attack. But this work had stopped after the Cold War because the threat had gone away.
Sir Richard said that there was no appetite for a revival even following the invasion of Ukraine and evidence that Russia has invested in new equipment specifically designed to outmatch Nato.
Countries that border Russia lobby hard for other member states to change their attitude but allies such as France, Greece, Italy, Hungary and to a lesser extent Germany would rather not offend Russia. They are generally too fixated on the problem of migration in the south and the connected terror threat to have time to think about Russian aggression.
“If you list all the military capability that Nato has, it has a lot more than Russia, but because most of it exists in this semi-dormant state there is a window of opportunity where . . . Russia could use its smaller forces to tweak Nato in a way to which Nato would be very pressed to respond because it doesn’t have any plans to do that,” Sir Richard said. “In the absence of consensus, largely between the north, the centre and the south, it drops down to the lowest common denominator and not much will happen,” he added.
The general said that British and other Nato forces due to deploy to Poland and the Baltic states to deter Russian aggression had no real firepower to back them up. The troops did not even have rules of engagement in the event of a Russian incursion.
There is a proposal to base about 1,000 Nato troops in each of the Baltic states and Poland. Britain is heading the Baltic deployment.
“There is no force behind it, or plans or resilience . . . It is an indication of how, at this stage in our history, I think many people have lost sight of what a credible military force is and requires. They think a little bit of posing or a light force constitutes enough and it isn’t.”
Sir Richard said that he was speaking out because he wanted a debate on the changed nature of the threat posed by countries such as Russia, which could devastate an economy through cyber warfare. A memo sent by the general to Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, just before he retired in August was leaked to the media over the weekend.