My letter to the Observer this morning

Did Andrew Rawnsley seriously write “Senior military officers privately worry that Britain’s Armed Forces would have difficulty fighting a high intensity war in Europe for more than a month or two”? (Britain has never looked more exposed, adrift in the Atlantic in a world pulsing with perils Observer 8/12/24) How long does he think “a high intensity war in Europe” – with an unnamed power which, for the sake of argument we’ll call “Russia” – would last? Never mind a month or two, with nuclear weapons we’d be lucky to get to the end of an afternoon, and no one would be “home in time for tea and medals”, because we’d all be dead. 

What is seriously worrying is that our futures are in the hands of people who think that ramped up confrontation on the lines envisaged in the “Defence Review” is in any way survivable. As he says at the start of his article, “I don’t know what effect these men have upon the enemy, but, by God, they frighten me”.