Are We Fit to Fight?

Speaker: General Sir Richard Barrons, KCB, CBE

Moderator: Rt. Hon. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, KCMG, KC

Presiding: Lady Olga Maitland

Event report by Emily Claessen

18^th of November 2025, London

Is the UK fit to fight? For decades, the question felt like an artefact from the Cold War, to be handled by archivists rather than policymakers. But in 2025, as Russia grinds onwards in Ukraine, as Iran tests the limits of deterrence in the Middle East, and as China accelerates toward technological supremacy, the question has returned with force.

The End of Post-Cold War Habits

Britain has acquired the wrong habits. The post-Cold War era - those “glorious 30 years” without existential threats - shaped a public and political culture that prioritised domestic welfare, low risk, and low sacrifice. Defence spending quietly lost roughly one percent of GDP each decade. The armed forces became the bill-payer of choice whenever fiscal pressures mounted.

This was understandable at the time. There was no obvious enemy to deter. Why maintain large, ready forces - or demand that industry and civil society remain mobilisable - when no one felt endangered? The problem is that those habits persisted long after the world changed.

The Wrong Model of War

War is fought “over there”. After Iraq and Afghanistan, Britain internalised the belief that war is something fought “over there”, in bounded campaigns, by professional forces, at manageable political risk. The homeland remained untouched; daily life remained unchanged. The conclusion, never quite spoken aloud but deeply felt, was that war itself had become optional.

Ukraine shattered that illusion. What is done to Ukraine could be done tomorrow to London or Birmingham - and without a single Russian soldier landing on British soil. Hybrid warfare, often misunderstood as “cyber plus politics”, is better seen as continuous competition below the threshold of open conflict.

The modern battlefield includes the electromagnetic spectrum, compromised seabed cables, commercial satellites, logistics pipelines, mapping ports and commercial shipping, disinformation networks, offshore gas infrastructure, stealing IP and industrial secrets, manipulating domestic political sentiment via data-driven psychological operations, disrupting GPS, aviation control, hospital systems, digital payments and the digital services that make twenty-first-century life work. If the nature of war never changes, its methods are transforming at the fastest pace in 150 years. A coordinated attack that disabled these infrastructures could seriously undermine the UK’s functioning within weeks.

The question: will young people fight? Polls say no. But when threats become real - when homes and futures are at stake - people fight. They always have. The real danger is not that Britain will lack volunteers once war begins, it’s that Britain will be unprepared before it begins.

Military Affairs Led by Others

The military is being reshaped by technologies, and China is accelerating fastest. By the early 2030s, Beijing will hold an unmatched advantage in digital military capabilities, able to see and strike globally - London included - from home territory.

Ukraine offers lessons: the battlefield is both intensely lethal and radically transparent. Artillery still decides territorial war - but drones now decide artillery. Electromagnetic dominance decides drones. Industrial mobilisation decides the rest. If NATO draws the wrong conclusions by treating Ukraine’s tactics as a universal template, it risks preparing for the wrong war.

The Hard Choices We Are Avoiding

The costs of credible deterrence are rising. Integrated air and missile defence, protection of critical infrastructure, cyber-hardening, and resilient supply chains are expensive - tens of billions expensive. Britain currently spends roughly £59 billion on defence, but the scale of vulnerability suggests a requirement closer to 3–4% of GDP, not by 2035 but within five years.

Instead, political debate fixates on whether spending should tick up by half a percentage point - without ever confronting the true alternative: the cost of deterrence failure.

Whole-of-Society Resilience

Conflict is inherently whole-of-society. Perhaps the most damning critique is that Britain has outsourced war almost entirely to the military - yet modern conflict is inherently ‘whole-of-society’. And this is the UK’s deepest vulnerability: a population untrained in resilience, accustomed to assuming that if something breaks, “the government will fix it”.

The UK’s own Strategic Defence Review (SDR) called for a national debate on societal resilience, but nothing happened. This inertia reflects a broader issue: politicians accustomed to marginal change; citizens conditioned toward individualism and fragility by the digital age; and institutions designed for yesterday’s risks.

What the Private Sector Must Do

Do not wait for government. Beyond society, government does not know how to structure risk-sharing, build dual-use ecosystems, or scale innovation rapidly. Thus:

·       Industry must build proposals that deliver the SDR’s recommendations - and present them to government as executable partnerships.

·       Allies must be bundled together so that major defence investments achieve scale (Nordics + Baltics + UK + key EU states).

·       Critical-infrastructure owners must share data and participate in national preparedness; the Navy cannot guard every seabed cable.

·       Private finance must help build the industrial base for autonomous systems, missile defence, cyber resilience, and space assets.

An Urgent Recovery of Confidence

Britain remains a country of immense assets: rule of law, fairness, scientific leadership, entrepreneurship, global alliances (none more consequential than with the United States), and a cultural capacity for reinvention. What Britain lacks is not talent or resources, but confidence - the conviction that it can act decisively, choose wisely, and adapt rapidly. Leaders often emerge when circumstances demand them. But circumstances are shifting faster than Westminster. In short: stop positioning as victims; start behaving as co-producers of national security.Britain is unlikely to take the necessary steps in time. Therefore, we must prepare for two futures simultaneously: A future where we succeed - where the UK rebuilds resilience, deters aggression, and regains strategic confidence. A future where we fail - and must claw our way out of catastrophe. Preparing only for the first is hopeful. Preparing for the second is responsible.

Britain does not have 30 more “glorious years”. It has, at best, three to five.

By Emily Claessen

28 November 2025