THE Establishment is in panic mode after army brass hats warned that the forced recruitment of hundreds of thousands was “essential” for a war against Russia.

Number 10 rushed to say Rishi Sunak did not share the views of army chief General Sir Patrick Sanders and insisted there are no plans to reintroduce conscription.

The general’s speech to a military conference was published by the army's own press operation but an embarrassing clash developed after the Ministry of Defence (MoD) rubbished the soon-to-be-retired army chief views.

General Sanders warned that the British people — as part of a “pre-war generation” — might have to prepare themselves to fight in a war against Russia. 

The chief of the general staff referenced the Swedish system which reintroduced national service and its decision to formalise its longstanding alliance with Nato by joining the Cold War bloc officially.

Although he missed out in the contest to become head of Britain’s armed forces Sanders is no officers’ mess boozer with a stalled career, but a key figure in the subterranean conflicts between the politicians and the military — and within the military.

With his talk of “preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing” and that this approach was “not merely desirable, but essential,” he is positing a war-fighting strategy that abandons any notion of an armed “peace” regulated by notions of “mutually assured destruction” and anticipates a new era of war fought over the European landmass with conventional weapons.

The core of this new thinking, or rather its emergence in the public domain, is due in part to the changed position in the Ukraine war where Russia now has a strategic advantage that flows not just from a new configuration of forces on the battlefield but the differences opening up among the Nato states and within the US political class.

As illusions that Nato support for a Ukrainian military offensive could defeat Russia fade away, the bare bones purpose of the joint EU/Nato strategy — to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukraine’s fighting age population — is no longer hidden and no longer credible.

For Britain, “national mobilisation” on the model proposed by Sanders would entail a shift from a relatively small regular army to a much larger force which, even with enhanced pay and conditions, could only be achieved with conscription.

The Ukraine example shows that in modern battlefield conditions a regular army, even substantially reinforced by industrially developed regional and global allies, will soon be degraded with civil society destabilised by forced conscription. 

Distressing scenes emerge from Ukraine where workers on the way to work are dragged from their cars and public transport and forcibly “mobilised” to the front while others dare not leave their houses. Millions more have fled the country.

Post-war the British experience is for an army made up of working-class men compelled by law to fight in a series of colonial wars or garrison the north German plain. To justify conscription a cold war myth was propagated that colonial revolt was part of a Soviet strategy allied to an offensive to export socialism to western Europe on the bayonets of the Red Army. 

It was always a fiction. The reality was that two months after the Nazis surrendered, and while Japan was still fighting, Churchill wanted to attack the Soviets.

As Britain’s National Archives put it: “Churchill’s top secret plan to attack the Soviet empire was scheduled for July 1 1945. British, US, Polish and German forces were to attempt to liberate East Germany and Poland.”

The surrendered German army was only stood down when wider military counsels thought the project to risky and cautioned that the British people would not accept such a volte face in the immediate wake of an anti-fascist victory carried through in alliance with a popular Red Army.

That moment passed but a changed atmosphere of Cold War confrontation soon compelled a conscript army. A serious constraint on the Western plan for a renewed drive against the Soviet Union was the latter’s acquisition of nuclear weapons which allowed a peace, even if an armed peace, to keep the European landmass free of actual war until that unleashed on Yugoslavia by Nato in the 1990s.

But war continued abroad. In the immediate post-war period British forces restored French and Dutch colonial power in Indochina and Indonesia. In Vietnam Britain rearmed the defeated Japanese military to fight the the national liberation movement. The Korean national liberation forces defeated their Japanese occupiers only to confront a US and British invasion force.

India was a special case where the strength of the Free India movement overcame even Winston Churchill’s objections to independence. British troops proved unwilling to fight a rearguard action in defence of empire. My father, who fought in Burma, then part of British India, recounted how his fellow soldiers, assembled at the Doolally transit camp, rioted when told their demobilisation was delayed so that they would be deployed on imperial policing duties. 

The post-war role of the British army was to maintain as much as the British empire as was compatible with servicing the wartime debt owed to the US and this entailed a big army to police the colonies.

Aside from a big garrison in northern Europe under US command and British participation in the Korean War, Britain intervened militarily to overthrow governments in Guyana and Egypt. The tradition continued in to the 21st century with the Iraq war in 2003 and the bombing in Libya in 2011. 

Vicious wars — accompanied by widespread torture, collective punishment, targeted assassinations and local populations herded into concentration camps — were fought with a mixture of regular army, special forces and conscript soldiers in Kenya, Malaya, Aden and Cyprus.

Imperial wars since then have been fought with regular forces. The US and Britain were defeated in Afghanistan. Today the US military in Iraq and occupied Syria are under missile and drone attack from indigenous forces.

The war party in our ruling class has been forced reverse its propaganda. Where a year ago the Russian army was supposedly a corrupted behemoth with outdated equipment, demoralised troops, riven by rival formations and falling back before Ukraine’s “morally superior” volunteer military, today it is transformed into an existential threat to European security with the capacity to capture Milton Keynes.

We need to parse each bombastic brass hat utterance.

Sanders banging on that the Russian threat could not be confined to its near neighbours or former Soviet republics — and that this means a conscript army would be needed to deter a Russian threat to the rest of Europe — is not compatible with the evident fact that Russia’s foreign policy is centred on its own security. 

The root of Russian anxieties — that Nato’s betrayal of its pledge to Gorbachev not to expand eastwards is a threat — are well documented and lie behind its conviction that the present Ukrainian regime is Nato’s proxy.

The whole Establishment narrative about a reintroduction of conscription is psychological war as much against the British people as against Putin.

Where Sanders says of a European conflict: “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,” he is ramping up a demand for more military spending.

This is where the actual geopolitical schemes of the war party join with the institutional imperative of all military organisations to maximise their resources.

This, and the incapacity of the Nato powers to maintain munition supplies to Ukraine, is what lies behind anxieties about the arms bonanza heaped on Ukraine threatening to “leave us temporarily weaker.”

There is a sharp contradiction between the drive to boost global force projection with highly vulnerable aircraft carriers and the pressure for a bigger ground war fighting capacity. One expression of this is the rivalry between Sanders and the chief of defence staff, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin.

Foreign intervention and a global war-fighting strategy compels force protection in which the evident need to protect offensive capacity is compromised by the necessity to maintain security for the force itself. The whole enterprise is both ridiculously expensive and highly profitable.

If Britain is itself an unsinkable American aircraft carrier the nominally sovereign Cyprus is the similarly unsinkable base from which the RAF has flown dozens of flights in support of Israel’s Gaza offensive.

The geometry of war is changed. Post-colonial Yemen is no longer a fuelling depot for the Royal Navy and insurgent Yemenis command the Red Sea. These people fought the British colonial powers from 1839 until 1964 when the British army was driven out. Today Yemeni asymmetrical warfare tactics against the shipping of Israel’s allies reprise this humiliation they inflicted upon the British army. 

A Britain free of imperial ambition, free of Nato and focused on a productive green economy of sustainable economic growth — with capital export controls to compel investment in employment, infrastructure, housing and skills — would have no use for a foreign war fighting capacity.