Something curious is happening in Britain. War is moving from the specialist vocabulary of generals and defence planners into ordinary public conversation, and the British people are increasingly being invited to imagine themselves not merely watching another foreign conflict on television but participating in one.
The BBC has now joined that conversation with an extraordinary question: "War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?" The emphasis is revealing. The question is no longer simply whether the British Army has enough ammunition, whether the Royal Navy has enough ships or whether NATO can deter Russia. It is whether the civilian population possesses the psychological resilience necessary for what may be coming.
Jacob Rees-Mogg supplied the more colourful version only days later. Britain may face war in the next few years, he said, and people may have to join the armed forces, do their duty and perhaps die for their country. There is nothing inherently absurd about the concept of national duty. If Britain were attacked, somebody would indeed have to defend it.
But there is a rather large question missing from this increasingly martial conversation.
Why?
Not why should Britain defend itself if attacked. That is easy. The interesting question is why British boys, and presumably girls, given modern equality, are being psychologically prepared for a major European war in the first place.
The British Government's language has changed dramatically. Its Strategic Defence Review called for Britain to move to "warfighting readiness." The Defence Investment Plan published this year commits almost £300 billion over four years. Ammunition stocks are being rebuilt, drones and autonomous weapons are receiving billions, nuclear capabilities are being strengthened and the armed forces are being redesigned around lessons learned in Ukraine.
The Government's answer is deterrence. Keir Starmer has explicitly said that Britain is preparing for war because it wants to avoid war. His argument is the familiar paradox of deterrence: weakness invites aggression, while a heavily armed NATO convinces an adversary that aggression would be suicidal.
There is considerable historical precedent for that argument. Nuclear deterrence may have helped prevent the Cold War from becoming World War III, while military weakness has sometimes encouraged aggressors rather than pacified them. A government that ignored genuine military threats would be failing in one of its most basic responsibilities. But accepting the case for deterrence does not answer every question raised by the present campaign of psychological preparation.
Russia has been fighting Ukraine since February 2022. Britain and other NATO states have supplied Ukraine with weapons, money, intelligence and training while carefully avoiding direct war between NATO and Russia. The central strategic objective has been to support Ukraine while preventing the conflict from crossing that line.
If British civilians must now contemplate fighting and dying themselves, something in that strategic calculation has apparently changed.
What is it?
The Government says intelligence assessments suggest Russia could attack NATO as early as 2030. That is an important claim and deserves serious attention. Yet it immediately produces further questions. Under what circumstances does London believe Moscow would attack NATO? Which NATO state is thought most vulnerable? What Russian objective would justify deliberately triggering Article 5 and confronting an alliance containing three nuclear powers?
These are not arguments for complacency. They are precisely the questions that should be asked before a society moves psychologically from peace to war.
There is also another possibility that deserves examination. The danger may arise not simply from a predetermined Russian intention to attack NATO, but from escalation itself. Wars acquire their own momentum. Each side responds to what the other side has just done, usually describing its own action as defensive while regarding the opponent's response as aggressive.
Weapons become longer ranged. Restrictions are relaxed. Targets move deeper into enemy territory. Military advisers acquire larger roles. Intelligence assistance becomes more extensive. One supposedly unacceptable step becomes normal, establishing the starting point for discussion of the next one.
Nobody needs to believe Moscow is benevolent to recognise the danger. Russia invaded Ukraine and bears responsibility for starting the present full-scale war. But acknowledging that fact does not abolish the responsibility of Western governments to calculate how far escalation can safely proceed when one of the participants possesses thousands of nuclear weapons.
This is where the media discussion becomes strangely incomplete.
If you tell a population that it may need to fight a major war, psychological preparedness is certainly relevant. So are recruitment, civil defence, food supplies, energy security, industrial capacity, ammunition production and protection of infrastructure. Britain would be foolish to discover these deficiencies after a war began.
But before asking whether an eighteen-year-old in Manchester is psychologically prepared to fight Russia, someone might ask what sequence of political decisions could put him on a battlefield against Russians in the first place.
That is the £64,000 question.
The answer cannot simply be "Putin." Foreign policy exists precisely because hostile powers exist. Diplomacy is not something conducted between countries that already agree with one another. It exists to manage conflicts between governments whose interests and values may be profoundly opposed.
Nor can the answer simply be "NATO." An alliance is an instrument of security, not an explanation requiring no further examination. NATO's purpose is to protect its members. Decisions taken in pursuit of that objective can still be debated in terms of their risks, costs and potential for escalation.
Perhaps Britain's leaders possess intelligence demonstrating that confrontation has become substantially more likely. If so, the public deserves as much explanation as national security permits. A government contemplating the possibility that its citizens may someday have to fight has an obligation to explain not merely the danger but the strategy intended to prevent that outcome.
There is a peculiar inversion taking place otherwise. The population is asked whether it has sufficient psychological resilience for war before there has been an equally prominent national discussion about how such a war might begin.
The British establishment increasingly talks about readiness, resilience, mobilisation, defence production and sacrifice. Ministers speak of warfighting readiness. Defence spending rises. Newspapers and broadcasters ask whether civilians are psychologically prepared. Public figures rediscover duty and remind citizens that previous generations sometimes had to die for their country.
All of those subjects may become necessary if Britain faces an existential threat. But there should be one subject before them.
Why would Britain be at war?
What precisely is the scenario? What decisions could prevent it? Which decisions might make it more likely? Where are Britain's red lines, and where does the Government believe Russia's red lines lie? What is the diplomatic strategy accompanying the military one?
Preparing the armed forces for the worst is prudence. Preparing infrastructure against sabotage and cyberattack is common sense. A serious country should possess ammunition, functioning armed forces and plans for emergencies whether war arrives or not.
Preparing a population psychologically for war is something different. It begins to alter what people regard as imaginable and ultimately what they regard as normal. Perhaps that psychological preparation is now justified. Perhaps the intelligence really is grim enough that governments would be negligent not to undertake it. The public cannot know everything known inside Whitehall.
But if you are going to tell Britain's young people that history may shortly require them to exchange university, apprenticeships, families and ordinary life for uniforms, trenches and drones, they are entitled to something more substantial than an exhortation to rediscover the stiff upper lip.
Before asking whether the boys and girls are ready for war, Britain should have a much louder conversation about how it intends to keep them out of one.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cmn0jke547r5o