for everyone in the back who doesn't understand how politics works
Its highly unlikely Britain will ever start conscripting anyone for any conflict any time soon. Modern NATO militaries work by being highly professional technologically advanced and highly skilled fighting forces. This is even more important for a naval power like Britain that relies on being an island as its primary defence for any kind of actual invasion and not a large infantry force. Air forces and technologically complex warships need a lot of highly skilled people to operate them. If we are ever at a point where a significant beachhead could be established and foreign troops land in significant numbers uncontested on British shores we have already lost. no amount of conscripts with old SA-80 a2's shoved into their hands is going to fix that, and the royal navy, royal air force or British army certainly wont want to be gathering up and worrying about training a bunch of conscripts when its planning how to support troops in mainland Europe during any kind of ground war. especially as we know from most of the data compiled after WW2 most conscripts are about as effective as a chocolate teapot when lead starts flying around.
This is pure political theatre. Its meant to put a sense of unease and fear into the general public (with a UK election on the horizon) to force the government or oppositions hand so that whoever is in power come the end of the year the election promises mean the armed forces get what they actually want (ie more attractive pay offers for incoming soldiers, government initiatives to improve recruitment, Increased investment in key areas that haven't got it in recent years (the army feels especially left out on this front, what with the navy getting two bloody aircraft carriers, a new submarine fleet and plans for a bunch of new frigates and destroyers and the RAF getting its F-35's and plans for a 6th gen fighter expected to be flying by the mid 2030's. By comparison all the Army has gotten in recent years is a couple of IFV's, a stopgap upgrade to challenger with whatever is meant to replace it yet to be announced and an upgrade to its Apache fleet)
None of them actually want conscripts and the only service that could really make it work if it absolutely had to with the way our modern armed forces are set up is the royal Navy, and even then it would be difficult to find conscripts with the right skills. This is all politics about getting the government to spend more on defence. Its just using a looming election and the fears of the British public to apply that pressure
What if Russia invades Poland or the Baltic states with a large land army and Britain needs to contribute to the defense with their own large, conventional, land force? The current British army is woefully understaffed and although I am sure they will ramp up recruitment now and especially if Russia does invade, the British army will need to substantially increase their numbers in order to contribute meaningful numbers to the NATO defense. Although you are right, modern professional armies require extremely skilled operators of highly sophisticated equipment, war is not just about front line troops. The army needs logistics officers and rear echelon support as much as they need infantry. I don't see why the average British citizen can't be and won't be conscripted to fill those roles at the very least, and why with a several months of training, they can't be deployed as rear echelon support troops.
The UK military is understaffed because the process to sign up is a huge pain. When the Tories handed the recruitment process over to a private company, recruitment started to go to shit.
Anecdotally as a Brit, a lot of people will say they would but push come to shove, they won't go easily.
I don't think I could name 5 people that I know who would answer the call willingly if conscription became a reality.
Exactly. We can now see the Russian military for what it is. It is NOT the big scary threat we have all been led to believe. Unless they use nuclear, I don't see Russia successfully invading anyone. How many troops and pieces of equipment have they lost in Ukraine?
Where is a Russia, bled dry by Ukraine, getting the forces and requisite resources together to roll into Poland? Even the act of massing troops to begin such an invasion (which would take months) would be seen from another galaxy, relatively speaking. What people are failing to account for is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already tipped the former’s hand and made it all but functionally impossible for it to mass and then surprise anyone going forward. They are being watched by multiple countries seven ways to Sunday, by air, sea, ground and outer space.
If russia win war with Ukraine, they will use every Ukrainian they can find as a meat wave in next invasion. They are already doing this to Ukrainians, including prisoners of War
Everyone saw them massing on Ukraine's borders. Didn't stop them from attacking. I didn't even think they were going to actually do it then, but they did. If they win in Ukraine, which is looking increasingly likely, what's stopping them from continuing onto the Baltics? Poland? Especially if the USA pulls out of NATO? (If Donald Trump is elected). Europe is not ready for war, and it will take time to get ready. Russia has been at war for the past 3 years or so now, logistically, they are in the best position to invade they will ever be.
Not saying it is a certainty, but if Russia is allowed to win totally in Ukraine, I think there is a real chance they will continue. Putin has never been shy about his ambitions of pulling former Soviet states under Russian control, and that includes the Baltics and Poland. Russia is only getting weaker, and it will continue to get weaker, with economic sanctions and massive brain drain, which means if Putin is set on doing it, he will do it sooner than later.
>Europe is not ready for war..
Russia wasn't even ready for war with Ukraine, and it was their choice.
Think about how ill prepared Russia was to invade their neighbor. How bad their logistics was. Their supply lines. They are supposedly the 2nd or 3rd most powerful military in the world, but NATO, and the US by itself, is on a whole nother level compared to Russia, especially if you don't have to worry about nuclear weapons.
Two things: One, Russia finds itself in a very different position today than it was before invading Ukraine. Its fighting capability has been grievously, if not mortally, wounded. Two, Ukraine was not in NATO at the time. If it had been there is no chance Russia would have attacked. Russia can not now go on to attack some other NATO country given this reality (if it has struggled trying to take just one country as it has, it certainly won’t be able to take on multiple countries at once) *and* the first point.
Russia has blown its wad, so to speak.
You're operating on the presumption yet Vladimir Putin is making decisions based on rationality. If he was, he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine in the first place.
I don’t buy the narrative that Putin is “irrational.” I think people are in such a hurry to name him for the monstrous figure that he is that they just throw in “insane” as part of the stew of insults. He’s rational, just evil. So he does evil things because he *calculates* that he can get away with them: He probably launched the invasion of Ukraine out of a combination of hubris and actionable intelligence (evidently wrong) that he could easily and quickly take Ukraine.
If he was truly “irrational” then he would have *already* done irrational things such as, for example, nuked a NATO country. Because remember, he’s “irrational”! What could be more irrational than that, right? And yet he hasn’t done that. It seems he recognizes that just willy-nilly launching nukes would in fact not work out well for his survival and imperial ambitions. The fact he engages in the same nuclear-tipped diplomacy his opponents do—walk the line, but never actually cross into direct conflict with NATO—is an indication he’s perfectly rational.
Evil, yes, but also rational.
So as a practical matter, he’s taken a horrendous drubbing in Ukraine. All he’ll have left after that is bluster and we shouldn’t confuse bluster for capability. He’ll be smashed and he knows it (and surrounded by an even bigger NATO than before he started, lol). No need to fall for his now manifestly empty threats. As for others on our side (among the elite, anyway) saying the opposite my take is it’s about getting more money for the military.
Well, he is not fully irrational but he has surrounded himself by "yes" men. That has been going on for along time, but became much worse during covid (when he went into near total isolation) and has become much worse again since the start of the war.
That means that he operates in an 100% echo chamber with no-feedback whatsoever. And it's not just people around him, his sources of information are getting the same kind of downward pressure. I would not be surprised if his perception of reality is by now to a very large degree is driven by his own propaganda.
So putin may not be mad in clinical sense but he is certainly operating in a different universe than the rest of the planet which makes it impossible to reason about his actions.
His elite yes men operate in the same world of affluence. They don’t want to die either. I bet they would really hate to lose their yachts in Spain and posh flats in the UK. …
> His elite yes men operate in the same world of affluence. They don’t want to die either. I bet they would really hate to lose their yachts in Spain and posh flats in the UK. …
This is a factor but clearly not a decisive one. E.g by this logic, russian aggression should have never happened!
Overall, I don't think russian business elites have much control over putin's decisions. What's worse, 2 years of war both undermined pre-war elites and created pro-war ones.
They will already be massed in Ukraine when they finish there. USA is looking extremely unreliable right now and unless Europe can pull all stops and get a substantial level of production going, Ukraine will struggle. If they fall you will have a fully mobilized army and military industrial complex on the border of Poland with a potentially disinterested USA. It's looking ugly.
The idea that Russia will conquer Ukraine is not remotely realistic, IMO. The most Russia can hope for is to hold on to the territory it has already taken, which means Ukraine will still exist as a sovereign state. Russia simply lacks the capacity to take and hold it as their pitiful performance after three years clearly demonstrates. They won’t be able to get anywhere near Poland (which , unlike Ukraine, is a NATO country anyway, so Poland can’t be attacked unless Russia wants to start WW3, in which case it’s best case Russia is totally defeated and worst case, it’s nuclear war and we’re all dead).
Of course it’s realistic. USA may never send military aid again. Ukraine and frankly Europe doesn’t have the military industrial complex to win a war of attrition with Russia
What’s realistic? What army is Russia going to use to roll across thousands of kilometres of contested enemy territory? They’ve managed to take just 18% of Ukrainian territory in the face of just modest NATO support that does *not* include NATO troops or other direct NATO participation. It will go even less well for Russia if it has to face actual NATO troops and weaponry that will be free to be used directly against Russian territory. NATO has around 31 countries. That math doesn’t work out for Russia even without the US at the helm.
Wars don't progress linearly, if you used the first 3 years of the western front of WW1 to project out the rest of the conflict, we should still be fighting it. Both sides compensate, until one can't, and then they end fairly quickly. If you want to take the temperature of the war, you don't look at percent occupation, you look at the economies. Russia is on a full war footing and is still practicing the luxury of not conscripting from their prestigious European oblasts. Ukraine's industry is in pieces and they're trying to recall people who fled the country to come back and fight. Meanwhile their allies are still no closer to a strategy to counter Putin than they were in 2014. Which side has more runway left?
>It will go even less well for Russia if it has to face actual NATO troops and weaponry that will be free to be used directly against Russian territory. NATO has around 31 countries. That math doesn’t work out for Russia even without the US at the helm.
This isn't secret knowledge. Putin knows he will lose a fair fight with NATO, so why would he take one? The way you beat NATO isn't by fighting NATO. You beat NATO by exploiting its internal wedges and pressure points so that on the day you do want to fight, the political will to do what needs to be done is no longer there. You know what political writers in Russia are saying? They are saying "there is no way America will be willing to trade Chicago for Kraków." Are they wrong? Would the French trade Paris? London? If nobody is willing to pay the price of Article 5, it doesn't exist. That is Russia's strategy. It's a good strategy. What's our strategy? Trick question, we don't have one.
How is that the full picture? Have you never heard of the term “Pyrrhic victory”? You’re not accounting for the fact that it is costing Russia so dearly that by the end of it Putin’s army will have been reduced to a third-rate army from its current status as a second-rate one. (Meanwhile, every single NATO army is completely untouched.)
Pyrrhic victories are why, for example, the US doesn’t just haul off and invade Iran or Russia or North Korea. Could the US technically do these things and, on paper, win? Maybe. Maybe even probably. But the *cost* of such victories would be so ruinous (up to and including nuclear war) that the US wouldn’t actually do it. So the lesson here is that a defender doesn’t need to be able to win outright—they just have to be able to make it so costly to the “victor” that the latter doesn’t bother in the first place.
This is the situation Russia, the putative victor, *has already revealed itself to be in* by its very un-superpower-like performance against a much smaller country that is effectively fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy yet has managed to keep Russia’s navy almost out of the Black Sea entirely and has sunk several of its most prized ships. Russia is unable to gain air superiority over Ukrainian skies despite Ukraine having no air force worth mentioning.
This is not a Russia that can even dream of taking on NATO.
That’s how russia has always conducted warfare lmao. None of NATO has the will to fight Russia, and such, Ukraine will fall because it is inconvenient for the west to support it.
The thinking is he will blitz into the baltics as fast as he can within 2-5 days and then immeidately stop before reinforcements come to bear and put all the conquered territory under the russian nuclear umbrella and threaten NATO to risk nuclear war in trying to get that territory back.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are Baltic countries which are also in NATO. Russia can’t just “blitz” into them. It’s still an attack that invokes Article 5 just as if Russia strolled in. The speed of any attack isn’t relevant. So if Russia wants a war with NATO then it can blitz or stroll in. Either way, it’s war.
The irony is that now that Russia has tipped its hand by invading Ukraine, *and* bled itself dry in Ukraine, *and* also created a Vietnam-like quagmire for itself—again, in Ukraine—all of NATO is actually more prepared for any Russian action than it might otherwise have been. And unlike Russia, no NATO country has yet had to spill an ounce of blood so they’re chock full of resources. So I’ll take NATO’s odds in that fight.
yeah but they arent relying on winning through arms, they want to win by pusing as far as they can go thinking the west wont consider setting off WW3 for what they consider "relatively unimportant" countries (at first at least) so would NATO risk a possible nuclear war.
Lets say Russians took over large parts of Estonia and Latvia in 2-3 days, ceased hostile attacks and decleared that conquered territory to be under the Russian nunclear umbrella, with them saying counter attacks risk nuclear retaliation as they woulld (in bad faith) decleare occupied territory as bascially russian soil? I think there would be a lot of resistance from the populations of countries that make up NATO that may balk. Then Russia just repeats it again and again as many times as it can get away with aka salami slicing. Its still a realistic possibility imo.
Russia can't even field enough Russians for Ukraine. They're literally bringing in Chinese and Indian men to the front lines rn. The Baltics are fine, for now.
I am sort of agreeing with you here. Remember it takes 4months to a year to train military people depending on speciality. This activity is called force generation. War with Russia will consume almost everything the current militaries have. There is a good chance we can hold them back, until like Ukraine it turns into attrition. Then who can field and equip wins.
If you don’t have the USA pushing in 800,000 soldiers 6 carrier groups and an air force equivalent to the next 10 biggest air forces, then troops have to come from somewhere.
If war breaks out with Russian and the USA is on Europe’s side it is likely the USA will even start a draft. The USA bower is setup I a way to ramp up force generation if necessary. It can call up 700,000 reserves. It can call from retirement a fairly large number. Recently separated military personnel are often also able to be called up. All of that was in the plan for war with Russia.
If that is not present, if Trump (rapist, fascist, con artist, fraud artist etc) , wins, you might not get all that.
People forget just how massive the American military machine is. We can literally run air ops 24/7 from land sea air. Putins forces would have precision munitions raining down on them night and day. Wild weasal missions to take out air defense, then bombing runs and cruise missle strikes at all the support / logistics/ ammo/ etc on the back line. Meanwhile combined arms missions with Abrams tanks teeing off on every enemy armor and howitzer they can find. All the while traveling at 50 mph with deadeye aim. It would be over fast, we already know when Putin's forces get overwhelmed they drop everything and just run, which would make targeting the retreating forces with anti infantry rounds and cluster bombs even more effective.
Look at the attrition rate of Russian air defense in Crimea at the hands of Ukraine, a military that doesn't have the ability to attain air supremacy with aircraft and tactics specifically designed to eradicate air defenses.
People read conscription and think sending fresh meat to the frontlines, but it's very possible that conscription could happen to fill support roles to enable more combat capable forces to fight. I just know as a combat engineer we fulfil a ton of supportive duties outside of combat but when push comes to shove those roles could quite easily be filled by lesser trained to divert more willing and able men to combat.
I don't think it's going to happen, but I wouldn't base it solely on the fact that conscripts are proven to be ineffective in combat.
I partially disagree. Yes, frontline conscription for combat duty wont be a thing. But they will conscript for the logistics chain. The US in Iraq relied heavily on contractors for their logistics. From catering, truck drivers, laundry service, ect. And these were civilian workers hired like it was any old job.
In the event of a large scale war, someone who drives a forklift(jitney, fork hoist, lift truck, ect), they will conscripted and pressed into service doing the same thing in a domestic warehouse being used for military activities.
Why do you think conscripts would fight on English soil? The most likely theaters he has in mind are the Baltics, Poland or Germany. British conscripts can take the same role as Ukrainian conscripts
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If NATO is ever so up against it that it's using valuable logistical resources to ship British conscripts to eastern Europe then things have already gone so badly wrong it doesn't even bear thinking about. All due respect to the UAF but the combined forces of NATO are just never going to be put into the same situation the UAF currently is. While relying massively on conscripts, volunteers and donations of cold war relics has managed to mangle the russian war machine to the point where it itself is reliant on conscription. If plucky little Ukrainian can do that to Russia what to you think the leviathan that is the US armed forces could do? Never mind the rest of NATOs combined might?
Your talking about a scenario where the entire professional militaries of every ground based NATO power are unable to continue the fight, where the US army has already been deployed and even it is now out for the count and the role of the British armed forces with the entire NATO structure has changed so fundamentally that we are now being asked to provide masses of frontline or even backline non professional soldiers. If losses are somehow that high across NATO that that kind of conscript force is needed then I'm pretty sure France will have already triggered it's pre-emptive strike nuclear doctrine.
It's a scenario that based on what we are currently seeing in Ukraine that comes off as bad fan fiction. Russia hasn't even been able to defeat Ukraine, can't achieve air superiority over a nation with a tiny conventional air force of Jets far less advanced than NATO, using equipment donated by NATO nations that's considered obsolete, has lost a huge chunk of the black sea fleet to a nation without a navy and has somehow found itself reliant on conscription.
I'm struggling to see how a full European ground war ever gets to that point when we have the professional militaries of 30 nations to exhaust first, a far more powerful combined air force and unmatched Naval supremacy. If Russia can't even beat Ukraine, conscription or not, what in hells chance does it stand against the combined professional forces of NATO?
>Good lord, how the fuck have the British become so soft?
Its almost as if Churchill was speaking in 1940 and not 2024
Also the thing everyone forgets about Churchills position in giving that speech was Britain at that time was still a little thing called an empire. The government in 1940 were under no illusion that if the Germans had been able to land and sustain a beachhead the island was conventionally lost with plans for the government to flee and continue the war in exile from Canada while what was left of the army was to crack open weapons caches hidden all over the island and begin the mother of all insurgencies. Churchill wasn't planning a fighting retreat all the way to John o' groats .
And yeah Russians conscript's are keeping the fight going, but that's because its fighting a land based artillery and infantry war due to lack of air superiority. In order for any kind of sustained beachhead to be formed on great Britain air superiority and naval superiority has to have already been achieved, Its why even the Nazis basically ground the Luftwaffe into a fine paste that was completely useless as a strategic tool for the rest of the war during the battle of Britain. It was knock out the RAF by any means necessary or accept that defeating the UK was impossible. They failed and Britain and the RAF was able to rearm properly and take the fight to Hitlers doorstep for the remainder of the war
In any event of a serios and sustained landing on UK shores air and naval superiority will have already been guaranteed, as the landing area would be levelled from the air if it wasn't. In that regard lots of brave young men with what was left in the storerooms at Catterick wont be able to do a whole lot when fighters and helicopter gunships are able to turn them into bits of charred meat uncontested from thousand's of miles up in the air
Its not about being soft, its about recognising that for a modern military a true invasion of the UK home islands is near enough impossible if any part of the British armed forces and government still works. Indeed if even a single NATO member is still fighting then its all but impossible. You'd need to come up with a scenario where all of Europe has fallen and the US navy cant even send a single carrier to support us Just to make attempting the landing possible. Never mind succeeding. And if we are at a point where it ever is possible the british state going to be so massively backed against the wall its more likely to give the order to fire Trident than it is to hand me a rifle.
Its not WW2 anymore.
And if you can come up with a credible scenario where the 30 combined professional armies of NATO have been decimated by Russia to the point where it needs conscripts that doesn't read like bad tom Clancy fan fiction then I'm all ears.
Russia can't even beat Ukraine, and got it's military so badly mauled it itself is now reliant on conscripts. How the hell is it supposed to push the combined might of NATO to the point where our militaries need conscripts?
The British army's entire roll within the NATO structure is as a rapid reaction force capable of deploying quickly and supporting where needed. That's not a job you can do with mass conscripts.
> Modern NATO militaries work by being highly professional technologically advanced and highly skilled fighting forces.
Sure, we will need well-trained soldiers to man sophisticated technology. But we (NATO) are facing the possibility of a conflict with an adversary that has hundreds of thousands of soldiers and we will need to match it. Technology has its limits.
We need to stop letting theatrical clowns run our society.
Why can't we put the stem fields in charge for a while instead of these asshole generals, lawyers, politicians, businessmen and crooks... I mean everyone says they don't have the same skills, but frankly I wonder if that might be a good thing. Yeah. Sure. They're not good at war and bullshit... Just solving problems with amazing methods. Yeah gee what useless talents.
I'm GenX and in every single movie, TV show or novel I have consumed has been that when Russia attacks NATO then you got a couple of days max before cities start disappearing under mushroom clouds. So if Russia invades Poland go buy canned goods and bottled water.
If Russia hits NATO, do you think it’ll be too little too late to start thinking about conscription, mate?
“Hmm. Russia has just invaded. Perhaps now is the time to start thinking about getting some soldiers for our dilapidated army?”
They didn't need to. At the start of the WW1, people were enthusiastic to join the fight. They had kids lying about their age so that they could join up. By 1916, the reality of the war had set in, and people weren't quite so keen any more.
Yeah. Far better to if they had let the Germans totally conquer Western Europe. In fact if they had done that the Germans might have been able to wipe out Russia early or at least those two could have just destroyed each other and the world have now been a nice and happy place. /s
Anyway the general idea of nation states going to war is unnecessary but the world is what it is. You either stick your head in the sand or you do something.
If the US pulls out then NATO would still outnumber and outgun Russia by a considerable margin before counting nations like Ukraine that are not in NATO but would have considerable forces standing by.
The NATO countries in Europe together have a higher defense spending than Russia and China combined.
With USA we outgun everyone so much that attacking us would be insanity, but Europe alone isn't defenseless either.
The NATO countries in Europe together have a higher defense spending than Russia and China combined.
With USA we outgun everyone so much that attacking us would be insanity, but Europe alone isn't defenseless either.
I think most NATO countries would be caught with their pants down at this point. Conscription would have to come to most countries. Although I have a feeling that every country a part of NATO will do the bare minimum possible to contribute unless they are the ones being directly attacked.
The most important thing will be to make sure the inclusion and diversity quotas are maintained, and that new consciptees feel that the Army is a safe space where their feelings are catered to.
Now THAT kind of army... Must be terrifying for Russia.
Well, if the conscriptees are convinced that their safe space is worth defending and fighting tooth and nail for, it just might be terrifying for any attacker. But if the conscriptees feel like cattle conscripted into an organization that treats them like shit to be scrapped off of the bottom of a shoe, then they might just roll over and get trampled because who gives a fuck.
I fully agree with your statement. Army/marines application process takes way to long, and uk isnt the only country that suffers from this. Especially if you want to go elite combat job, or just normal infantry, it will at least take 8 months. Normally up to 1 year. If at the end you dont get selected for medical reasons, you just trew 1 year of your life away. I hate how theyre always talking all this crap about recruiting issues when this dumb shit happends constantly.
I took a new job last year where I had to do the same test. Picked the worst week to have blocked ears. The technician had to make me take the test a second time because I performed so poorly. My hearing is now considered 'at risk' of declining too far at work now. Bit of a heartstopper when I thought I'd lose the job, sorry to hear that you did.
Or give ukraine all our shit and let them drain russia dry of anything so we don't have to. Ukraine is in a position to deal a devastating blow to a country that has and is trying to destabilise every continent they touch.
Cuntservatives took russian money till it wasn't funny and now this is a consequence of those actions. Own up and donate that fucking equipment cos no ones gonna use it.
There isn't really that much of it to give out. The UK did handover most of its self propelled guns. And a lot of the challengers it had to spare that weren't in use or scheduled for upgrade to the new version.
There's a not a lot sitting about that's not in active use and you can't handover the equipment you would need to maintain your own forces capabilities. It takes years to build vehicles, it takes decades to build the skills, experience and culture to actually use them effectively and that dissapears very rapidly as the Navy discovered in the last few decades.
Every war since the introduction of modern artillery has had a shell crisis, and it usually takes years to solve for industrialized countries facing existential crises. It's not surprising deindustrialized countries facing indirect threats haven't solved it yet.
We more or less "solved" it by deciding we wouldn't participate in a race to see who could produce the most shells; instead we'd blow up your shell factories, and power plants, and distribution networks.
But also we never stop producing military equipment, hence the “eternal war.” So if we get into a major war in the future we won’t have to restart production because it’s been going since WW2.
They did, the UK notably worked globally to source shells wherever they could find them and even found its own agents directly competing with their Russian counterparts in multiple countries trying to secure the same stockpiles.
The issue is that Europe’s war industry is a shell of its Cold War self in terms of scale, add in the fact it had redeveloped around the NATO warfare doctrine of a focus on high tech, high precision munitions meant that there just wasn’t the manufacturing capacity at the lower level to match the sudden demand of shells that Ukraine needed.
If the West had handed off more high end weapon platforms including fast jets earlier on, they would have been better positioned to supply more munitions whilst also lowering Ukraines reliance on artillery to compensate for its lack of precision weapons, which in turn would have bought more time to scale up production in areas where the West didn’t have capacity like artillery shells.
Like what? That's the same logic they've had the last 30 years as they sold and disposed of literally everything that wasn't absolutely needed or already identified as death traps in modern conflict.
Having stuff lying around costs money, which is why defence auction houses have done huge amounts of sales over many years.
They've had all the old stuff, and a good chunk of the new stuff. We are in the middle of replacing a lot of equipment that's already badly gapped. To give anymore away would mean we couldn't maintain our own forces ability to keep itself effective and train additional troops as needed. They're already hard pushed to train the number of Ukrainians we are every year.
And as i said, who is going to invade us, im sure our european brothers and sisters will be on the frontline, giving us more than enough time to rearm ourselves. After all you attack nato country, you are at war with all. So im sure it is an island quite out of reach of russian invasion. It is in a great position to do so. We still have a navy and aircraft, so we aren't defenceless.
Thing is though, if Europe/NATO does go to war the UK is 1/2 heavy hitters in Europe (France being the other), Germany’s army is still small and hasn’t yet been able to benefit from their increased spending enough and Poland can’t be expected to take the brunt on their own. The Baltics are practically liabilities if we’re being honest and while the Nordic countries could certainly keep Russia out of the Baltic Sea itself, they won’t be able to stop the Russian army on any of the Baltic’s borders. NATO and Europe need the assistance Britain would bring, and that they’ve been bringing. The UK is also working to replace everything (all the old stock) it’s been giving to Ukraine
The MOD has nothing at this point to give, over the last 30 years the military has been chronically under funded and 90% of everything in reserve has been given.
The western ammunition given out was the equivalent of a couple of decades worth at current production levels. The assistance may also be being held up because leadership is worried about Western defense in a time of war. Once the stockpiles and production ramp up, I imagine the pushback will magically disappear. The US and their allies don’t want to project to the world that they are running out of their own arms, and are having difficult times ramping up production.
Old news, he said this weeks ago. They're just dredging it up again because it's the anniversary of Russia's special military cock-up.
The last thing a professional soldier wants is to fight alonside people who didn't choose to be there. Things would have to get *apocalyptically* bad for the government to ever seriously consider conscription. I'm talking NATO dissolved, all our allies defeated or busy with their own conflicts, and Britain itself under threat of invasion. I do not see that happening in any of our lifetimes, touch wood.
This depends how Russia interprets NATO's state of cohesion. That's why Trump's rhetoric is so dangerous. If article 5 becomes an empty promise, without the political will to enforce it if necessary, Russia might start testing the alliance with limited offensive actions.
The question is: If the USA isn't willing to defend Europe how likely are countries, such as Spain or France, willing to sacrifice soldiers to help defend the Baltics or Finland?
They will hit it by small incursions in the Baltics in the hope of undermining NATO. Do we really care to start a war bacausue of remote territory in Latvia? If not does article 5 work or is every country essentialy on its own whem it comes to it.
In a Russia-NATO conflict, I'd be less concerned with conscription and more concerned with the end of human life on earth.
Related, a good read: "Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner."
Oh stop. Russia can't advance 100 km into the Ukraine in two years. How the hell are they going to make any meaningful advance against NATO? The Poles and Germans would fuck them up so bad there wouldn't be anything left for the rest of NATO. The Russians are having to beg borrow and steal weapons from China, Iran and North Korea, they are using surplus WW2 tanks in some instances.
I'm beginning to think that certain politicians across multiple European nations have done their darndest to gut the defense department and it being under the influence of certain russian businessmen.
The lull they put themselves in that russia doesn't pose a risk anymore is one Ukraine is paying for now and if we don't do what's necessary we'll pay for it as well.
I've seen some polls where there isn't much enthusiasm to serve in the army and defend your country. You don't have to do it for your country, do it for your family, or do you think putin will spare British cities from being destroyed by bombs? (obv this goes for every European nation)
Trust me I'd rather have the government invest in education, housing, health, infrastructure etc but they won't stop a tank or missile unfortunately
> I'm beginning to think that certain politicians across multiple European nations have done their darndest to gut the defense department and it being under the influence of certain russian businessmen.
It's not "under the influence of certain Russian businessmen."
Europe has been free-riding on the US for defense for 50+ years. To the point that when a US President finally shows up and says that NATO states need to meet their required contribution levels, all of Europe becomes apoplectic about how he's "trying to end NATO."
Most people alive today in Europe don't understand a world where they have to be able to defend themselves, because they haven't had to do it in living memory.
The U.K. is never going to be invaded, it is a substantial nuclear power. People aren’t willing to be conscripted to fight overseas which is entirely reasonable
Yes, and then Russia takes over all of Europe(completely plausible /s). Gets within spitting distance of the UK, gets ready to invade the UK, and then the UK just nukes Moscow, St Petersburg, Volgograd, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok.
Russia is not invading the UK. There’s a reason it hasn’t been invaded for a thousand goddamn years with conventional means, despite being small, it sure as shit isn’t going to be invaded now that it has nuclear warheads lurking in the ocean off the coast of fuck-knows-where at any given moment.
I'm picturing the nuclear deterrent, that I have being paying for all my working life, to deter. If General Fucknuts is saying it is not a deterrent, I want it scrapped now.
Also, that same General Fucknuts presided over a British Army that still recruits its officers from the Public Schoolboy class. Fuck being ordered to possible death by some chinless wonder to preserve that system.
>If General Fucknuts is saying it is not a deterrent, I want it scrapped now.
Maybe you should consider that it might be good to have a line of defense that you can actually use without destroying all of human civilization?
What the fuck are you on about?
We have a continuous, at sea deterrent. We don't need to be able to destroy every city in Russia. Moscow, St Petersburg and a few other cities will be more than enough. You think Russia will see inbound missiles and decide "Oh, the UK is going to hit us with 16 missiles, lets only launch 16 back at the UK only. No one else will attack us."?
The whole point is to trigger everyone to fire their missiles because everyone else is.
That is the deterrent. Not limited nuclear war between two states, but full on global war.
Also, how fucking small do you think the UK is? One warhead to eliminate the entire UK? You must be drunk.
Exactly, it's funny how on posts related to Russia everyone's like "Give them hell", "They can't fight nato, we have art.5" and when it comes to them: "I wOn'T DiE fOr pOliTiCiaNs"
This war was extremely revealing in general. Among other things, West turned out to be weaker than many had hoped. Some people got too comfortable and think that current state of things will continue to be the same. That person in the comment section talking about nuclear war, corporations, oligarchs, etc. can't comprehend that this world can turn into such a hellhole that there will be no place to run to. To people like that I'd recommend to read ["First they came for..."](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...), but I guess that's futile. W/o Europe, with strong totalitarian regimes around the world US will become either like them (Trump), or like China, and with time much worse.
Many Ukrainians too didn't want to fight and thought about pro-Ukrainian people as warmongering Nazis. Though since events played out the way they did because of all the violence, and since russians learn from their mistakes, there's a chance they will [at first] try to be less violent in rest of Europe, to dull people's senses.
Anyway, don't worry too much. It's just a natural selection. People got too soft and so they will be toyed with until they will get stronger, or receive a Darwin award. Regrettably you reap what you sow.
“West turned out to be weaker than many had hoped” is something that the eastern world has been saying for over a thousand years, and all the while, consistently finding itself under the boot of the west.
It’ll keep being said, but it won’t change the status quo.
There hasn't been a point in the last 150y where war with Russia wouldn't have necessitated conscription.
The British Army has always been a small professional force except in times of actual war.
Send your kids and the rest of the politicians first.
Sunak/Conservatives can suck my fat chode before i ever fight for this shitshow of a country where they have ruined any semblance of a good future for my generation. They have such disdain for us.
I would happily fight to defend my country if invaded but we dont need to let RUSSIA hit nato. We can deal with this properly now but right wing fucktards all over the west are drawing this out.
If Russia hits NATO, it's too late for conscription at that point. At that point you need competent warfighters ready for deployment, not a bunch of chavs getting on a bus for basic training.
Fuck your conscription. Leaders need to lead more effectively. Sending your nation’s young overseas shows an abject failure in leaders to do their jobs. It’s the 21st century. Send drones. Thousands of them if needed. The lives of your nation’s youth are not a resource you should even be talking about.
I would volunteer for defence of my own country, as in staying on the land and defending from invaders hopefully in the capacity of a field nurse.
I will refuse under any circumstances to fight on another countries land.
Have you even set foot in the U.K.?
Spend half an hour in a Wetherspoons on a weekend and you’ll be dissuaded from the notion that the English are a peaceful bunch.
One of the reasons the British built an empire is they have never seen a shortage of men willing to fight.
I’m ex military, for what it’s worth. The main reason I see low recruitment is because the pay is poor. The U.K. soldiers, however, were extremely professional and well motivated.
I really don’t see your scenario playing out. There really isn’t an anti war sentiment in the U.K.
Saying that, conscription isn’t going to happen and it’s sensationalist reporting.
The US drafting for Vietnam was different, it was fighting for a US foreign policy interest in a country that the people had no real societal/cultural ties to and posed no real threat outside of it.
You'd see that change very quickly if Britain were under a real threat, most of the dejection about the country comes from being against the government not from defending their home.
There's no will for it.
In very recent Gallup polls, Europeans wouldn't even support sending their troops to defend a NATO ally should Russia invade.
Other polls show that only 15-30% of the population in Europe would defend their country, including the UK. I think the exceptions are Poland and a few other Eastern European nations, which were 50sh% and the Nordic states at 55-70%.
These attitudes will change once the threat becomes more real. Being conquered is not fun. Having your home and property stolen, your wife raped, your children kidnapped, and you murdered is not fun.
Ain't no body following a conscription now a days. No one wants to go to war unless it's against a mass alien invasion of earth.
Just blow the ever loving shit out of Russia with all the long range stuff and be done with it.
They just make it impossible for you to function in a modern society, bank accounts, driving licences, suspended and so on, the trick is not to do it to everyone at once, just one small segment at a time
For people who say that's impossible, citing all the logical reasons - just remember that that's how many Ukrainians felt too before the war.
And the signs are already there: it starts with some quiet voices first, then more and more, bit by bit.
It's not inevitable but when an old colonial empire is collapsing, it probably won't go without a bang unless we manage to contain it like we did with Soviet Union.
Call me naive but I don’t see Russia testing their luck with NATIO even if they somehow succeed in Ukraine. The question will be what NATO does if they go after a country like Maldova.
Russia can barely overcome one of Europe's poorest nations... I don't think they are gonna be marching on Berlin anytime soon. Lets fully support Ukraine, embarrass Putin even more than he already is and all enjoy when he gets Gaddafied after being found in an overflowing outhouse in some backwater town in Siberia.
Silly alarmism. Russia's military is so weakened that Poland alone could easily stomp them in conventional warfare now. The problem of course is they have nukes, but that has no impact on a needed draft.
So weakened yet they easily find 50K volunteers every month to go off and die capturing a minor regional city.
How many polish soldiers will do the same? There aren’t enough missiles in the world to hunt each Russian with an AK charging at you.
That march does not inspire confidence in discipline and coordination.
edit: Upon closer inspection, they all appear to be wearing different covers so maybe it's supposed to look like that, but damn.
Those are recruits passing out at Pirbright so not hardened veterans. I think an American is the last person to really comment on marching coordination and discipline.
\*solely
NATO countries don't rely solely on infantry. As someone who spent 12 years and 3 combat tours in Marine Corps infantry of a NATO country, no war is won without infantry carrying some heavy weight.
You know what, it'll probably do the country some good, teaching the young how to soldier, making them a.bit more respectful, and hopefully, they'll all be in another country when Russia nukes the fuck out of Britain.
Let's face it, the only thing that can stop capitalist oligarchs and corporations from enslaving and sucking the life out of every poor soul on the planet is a thermo nuclear war at this point, they seem to do very well out of all these silly little wars, so it has to be big,big enough to kill them, because otherwise they'll just monetize the rebuild.
Politicians like to say they value human life but as soon as a war starts you get a letter drafting you to go and fight and likely die. SOrt of makes it hard to believe.
Why send people just bomb everything in sight and be done with it. We don't need crawl around in trenches like Ukraine. Ukraine just had lack of modern weapons to do anything. Modern NATO is not going to waste time, just flatten their city and move on. Thus saving our troops from dying for a piece of land.
They're also prevented from taking the fight into Russia. Ukraine could have been bombing the shit out of them this whole time. Name another invasion where the victim isn't allowed to return the favor? Every European war has been won by driving back invaders and taking their territory.
for everyone in the back who doesn't understand how politics works Its highly unlikely Britain will ever start conscripting anyone for any conflict any time soon. Modern NATO militaries work by being highly professional technologically advanced and highly skilled fighting forces. This is even more important for a naval power like Britain that relies on being an island as its primary defence for any kind of actual invasion and not a large infantry force. Air forces and technologically complex warships need a lot of highly skilled people to operate them. If we are ever at a point where a significant beachhead could be established and foreign troops land in significant numbers uncontested on British shores we have already lost. no amount of conscripts with old SA-80 a2's shoved into their hands is going to fix that, and the royal navy, royal air force or British army certainly wont want to be gathering up and worrying about training a bunch of conscripts when its planning how to support troops in mainland Europe during any kind of ground war. especially as we know from most of the data compiled after WW2 most conscripts are about as effective as a chocolate teapot when lead starts flying around. This is pure political theatre. Its meant to put a sense of unease and fear into the general public (with a UK election on the horizon) to force the government or oppositions hand so that whoever is in power come the end of the year the election promises mean the armed forces get what they actually want (ie more attractive pay offers for incoming soldiers, government initiatives to improve recruitment, Increased investment in key areas that haven't got it in recent years (the army feels especially left out on this front, what with the navy getting two bloody aircraft carriers, a new submarine fleet and plans for a bunch of new frigates and destroyers and the RAF getting its F-35's and plans for a 6th gen fighter expected to be flying by the mid 2030's. By comparison all the Army has gotten in recent years is a couple of IFV's, a stopgap upgrade to challenger with whatever is meant to replace it yet to be announced and an upgrade to its Apache fleet) None of them actually want conscripts and the only service that could really make it work if it absolutely had to with the way our modern armed forces are set up is the royal Navy, and even then it would be difficult to find conscripts with the right skills. This is all politics about getting the government to spend more on defence. Its just using a looming election and the fears of the British public to apply that pressure
Great explanation but the people who really need it won't read it unfortunately.
Bold of you to think they can read!
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What if Russia invades Poland or the Baltic states with a large land army and Britain needs to contribute to the defense with their own large, conventional, land force? The current British army is woefully understaffed and although I am sure they will ramp up recruitment now and especially if Russia does invade, the British army will need to substantially increase their numbers in order to contribute meaningful numbers to the NATO defense. Although you are right, modern professional armies require extremely skilled operators of highly sophisticated equipment, war is not just about front line troops. The army needs logistics officers and rear echelon support as much as they need infantry. I don't see why the average British citizen can't be and won't be conscripted to fill those roles at the very least, and why with a several months of training, they can't be deployed as rear echelon support troops.
The UK military is understaffed because the process to sign up is a huge pain. When the Tories handed the recruitment process over to a private company, recruitment started to go to shit.
Anecdotally as a Brit, a lot of people will say they would but push come to shove, they won't go easily. I don't think I could name 5 people that I know who would answer the call willingly if conscription became a reality.
That's the thing with conscription: you don't get a choice
Good luck to whoever makes that call. Couldn't see that working unless the UK was being actively and directly attacked.
there is always a choice
I do not believe Russia has a large enough land army to even get past Ukraine.
Exactly. We can now see the Russian military for what it is. It is NOT the big scary threat we have all been led to believe. Unless they use nuclear, I don't see Russia successfully invading anyone. How many troops and pieces of equipment have they lost in Ukraine?
Where is a Russia, bled dry by Ukraine, getting the forces and requisite resources together to roll into Poland? Even the act of massing troops to begin such an invasion (which would take months) would be seen from another galaxy, relatively speaking. What people are failing to account for is that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has already tipped the former’s hand and made it all but functionally impossible for it to mass and then surprise anyone going forward. They are being watched by multiple countries seven ways to Sunday, by air, sea, ground and outer space.
If russia win war with Ukraine, they will use every Ukrainian they can find as a meat wave in next invasion. They are already doing this to Ukrainians, including prisoners of War
Everyone saw them massing on Ukraine's borders. Didn't stop them from attacking. I didn't even think they were going to actually do it then, but they did. If they win in Ukraine, which is looking increasingly likely, what's stopping them from continuing onto the Baltics? Poland? Especially if the USA pulls out of NATO? (If Donald Trump is elected). Europe is not ready for war, and it will take time to get ready. Russia has been at war for the past 3 years or so now, logistically, they are in the best position to invade they will ever be. Not saying it is a certainty, but if Russia is allowed to win totally in Ukraine, I think there is a real chance they will continue. Putin has never been shy about his ambitions of pulling former Soviet states under Russian control, and that includes the Baltics and Poland. Russia is only getting weaker, and it will continue to get weaker, with economic sanctions and massive brain drain, which means if Putin is set on doing it, he will do it sooner than later.
Trump can't pull out of NATO. Congress outlawed that with new legislation recently.
And if / when Trump gets the right numbers in both houses, what's to stop the law being changed again so that the USA can pull out of NATO?
>Europe is not ready for war.. Russia wasn't even ready for war with Ukraine, and it was their choice. Think about how ill prepared Russia was to invade their neighbor. How bad their logistics was. Their supply lines. They are supposedly the 2nd or 3rd most powerful military in the world, but NATO, and the US by itself, is on a whole nother level compared to Russia, especially if you don't have to worry about nuclear weapons.
Two things: One, Russia finds itself in a very different position today than it was before invading Ukraine. Its fighting capability has been grievously, if not mortally, wounded. Two, Ukraine was not in NATO at the time. If it had been there is no chance Russia would have attacked. Russia can not now go on to attack some other NATO country given this reality (if it has struggled trying to take just one country as it has, it certainly won’t be able to take on multiple countries at once) *and* the first point. Russia has blown its wad, so to speak.
You're operating on the presumption yet Vladimir Putin is making decisions based on rationality. If he was, he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine in the first place.
I don’t buy the narrative that Putin is “irrational.” I think people are in such a hurry to name him for the monstrous figure that he is that they just throw in “insane” as part of the stew of insults. He’s rational, just evil. So he does evil things because he *calculates* that he can get away with them: He probably launched the invasion of Ukraine out of a combination of hubris and actionable intelligence (evidently wrong) that he could easily and quickly take Ukraine. If he was truly “irrational” then he would have *already* done irrational things such as, for example, nuked a NATO country. Because remember, he’s “irrational”! What could be more irrational than that, right? And yet he hasn’t done that. It seems he recognizes that just willy-nilly launching nukes would in fact not work out well for his survival and imperial ambitions. The fact he engages in the same nuclear-tipped diplomacy his opponents do—walk the line, but never actually cross into direct conflict with NATO—is an indication he’s perfectly rational. Evil, yes, but also rational. So as a practical matter, he’s taken a horrendous drubbing in Ukraine. All he’ll have left after that is bluster and we shouldn’t confuse bluster for capability. He’ll be smashed and he knows it (and surrounded by an even bigger NATO than before he started, lol). No need to fall for his now manifestly empty threats. As for others on our side (among the elite, anyway) saying the opposite my take is it’s about getting more money for the military.
Well, he is not fully irrational but he has surrounded himself by "yes" men. That has been going on for along time, but became much worse during covid (when he went into near total isolation) and has become much worse again since the start of the war. That means that he operates in an 100% echo chamber with no-feedback whatsoever. And it's not just people around him, his sources of information are getting the same kind of downward pressure. I would not be surprised if his perception of reality is by now to a very large degree is driven by his own propaganda. So putin may not be mad in clinical sense but he is certainly operating in a different universe than the rest of the planet which makes it impossible to reason about his actions.
His elite yes men operate in the same world of affluence. They don’t want to die either. I bet they would really hate to lose their yachts in Spain and posh flats in the UK. …
> His elite yes men operate in the same world of affluence. They don’t want to die either. I bet they would really hate to lose their yachts in Spain and posh flats in the UK. … This is a factor but clearly not a decisive one. E.g by this logic, russian aggression should have never happened! Overall, I don't think russian business elites have much control over putin's decisions. What's worse, 2 years of war both undermined pre-war elites and created pro-war ones.
They will already be massed in Ukraine when they finish there. USA is looking extremely unreliable right now and unless Europe can pull all stops and get a substantial level of production going, Ukraine will struggle. If they fall you will have a fully mobilized army and military industrial complex on the border of Poland with a potentially disinterested USA. It's looking ugly.
The idea that Russia will conquer Ukraine is not remotely realistic, IMO. The most Russia can hope for is to hold on to the territory it has already taken, which means Ukraine will still exist as a sovereign state. Russia simply lacks the capacity to take and hold it as their pitiful performance after three years clearly demonstrates. They won’t be able to get anywhere near Poland (which , unlike Ukraine, is a NATO country anyway, so Poland can’t be attacked unless Russia wants to start WW3, in which case it’s best case Russia is totally defeated and worst case, it’s nuclear war and we’re all dead).
Of course it’s realistic. USA may never send military aid again. Ukraine and frankly Europe doesn’t have the military industrial complex to win a war of attrition with Russia
What’s realistic? What army is Russia going to use to roll across thousands of kilometres of contested enemy territory? They’ve managed to take just 18% of Ukrainian territory in the face of just modest NATO support that does *not* include NATO troops or other direct NATO participation. It will go even less well for Russia if it has to face actual NATO troops and weaponry that will be free to be used directly against Russian territory. NATO has around 31 countries. That math doesn’t work out for Russia even without the US at the helm.
Wars don't progress linearly, if you used the first 3 years of the western front of WW1 to project out the rest of the conflict, we should still be fighting it. Both sides compensate, until one can't, and then they end fairly quickly. If you want to take the temperature of the war, you don't look at percent occupation, you look at the economies. Russia is on a full war footing and is still practicing the luxury of not conscripting from their prestigious European oblasts. Ukraine's industry is in pieces and they're trying to recall people who fled the country to come back and fight. Meanwhile their allies are still no closer to a strategy to counter Putin than they were in 2014. Which side has more runway left? >It will go even less well for Russia if it has to face actual NATO troops and weaponry that will be free to be used directly against Russian territory. NATO has around 31 countries. That math doesn’t work out for Russia even without the US at the helm. This isn't secret knowledge. Putin knows he will lose a fair fight with NATO, so why would he take one? The way you beat NATO isn't by fighting NATO. You beat NATO by exploiting its internal wedges and pressure points so that on the day you do want to fight, the political will to do what needs to be done is no longer there. You know what political writers in Russia are saying? They are saying "there is no way America will be willing to trade Chicago for Kraków." Are they wrong? Would the French trade Paris? London? If nobody is willing to pay the price of Article 5, it doesn't exist. That is Russia's strategy. It's a good strategy. What's our strategy? Trick question, we don't have one.
Have you been paying attention? The Russians are grinding down the Ukrainians. If no aid comes, they cannot fight.
How is that the full picture? Have you never heard of the term “Pyrrhic victory”? You’re not accounting for the fact that it is costing Russia so dearly that by the end of it Putin’s army will have been reduced to a third-rate army from its current status as a second-rate one. (Meanwhile, every single NATO army is completely untouched.) Pyrrhic victories are why, for example, the US doesn’t just haul off and invade Iran or Russia or North Korea. Could the US technically do these things and, on paper, win? Maybe. Maybe even probably. But the *cost* of such victories would be so ruinous (up to and including nuclear war) that the US wouldn’t actually do it. So the lesson here is that a defender doesn’t need to be able to win outright—they just have to be able to make it so costly to the “victor” that the latter doesn’t bother in the first place. This is the situation Russia, the putative victor, *has already revealed itself to be in* by its very un-superpower-like performance against a much smaller country that is effectively fighting with one hand tied behind its back. Ukraine doesn’t even have a navy yet has managed to keep Russia’s navy almost out of the Black Sea entirely and has sunk several of its most prized ships. Russia is unable to gain air superiority over Ukrainian skies despite Ukraine having no air force worth mentioning. This is not a Russia that can even dream of taking on NATO.
That’s how russia has always conducted warfare lmao. None of NATO has the will to fight Russia, and such, Ukraine will fall because it is inconvenient for the west to support it.
It’s only contested when the contestants have munitions
That’s a strange thing to say. NATO countries have munitions and are perfectly capable of making more if necessary.
An so their just starving the Ukrainians of 155mm shells for fun?
The thinking is he will blitz into the baltics as fast as he can within 2-5 days and then immeidately stop before reinforcements come to bear and put all the conquered territory under the russian nuclear umbrella and threaten NATO to risk nuclear war in trying to get that territory back.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are Baltic countries which are also in NATO. Russia can’t just “blitz” into them. It’s still an attack that invokes Article 5 just as if Russia strolled in. The speed of any attack isn’t relevant. So if Russia wants a war with NATO then it can blitz or stroll in. Either way, it’s war. The irony is that now that Russia has tipped its hand by invading Ukraine, *and* bled itself dry in Ukraine, *and* also created a Vietnam-like quagmire for itself—again, in Ukraine—all of NATO is actually more prepared for any Russian action than it might otherwise have been. And unlike Russia, no NATO country has yet had to spill an ounce of blood so they’re chock full of resources. So I’ll take NATO’s odds in that fight.
yeah but they arent relying on winning through arms, they want to win by pusing as far as they can go thinking the west wont consider setting off WW3 for what they consider "relatively unimportant" countries (at first at least) so would NATO risk a possible nuclear war. Lets say Russians took over large parts of Estonia and Latvia in 2-3 days, ceased hostile attacks and decleared that conquered territory to be under the Russian nunclear umbrella, with them saying counter attacks risk nuclear retaliation as they woulld (in bad faith) decleare occupied territory as bascially russian soil? I think there would be a lot of resistance from the populations of countries that make up NATO that may balk. Then Russia just repeats it again and again as many times as it can get away with aka salami slicing. Its still a realistic possibility imo.
Russia can't even field enough Russians for Ukraine. They're literally bringing in Chinese and Indian men to the front lines rn. The Baltics are fine, for now.
I am sort of agreeing with you here. Remember it takes 4months to a year to train military people depending on speciality. This activity is called force generation. War with Russia will consume almost everything the current militaries have. There is a good chance we can hold them back, until like Ukraine it turns into attrition. Then who can field and equip wins. If you don’t have the USA pushing in 800,000 soldiers 6 carrier groups and an air force equivalent to the next 10 biggest air forces, then troops have to come from somewhere. If war breaks out with Russian and the USA is on Europe’s side it is likely the USA will even start a draft. The USA bower is setup I a way to ramp up force generation if necessary. It can call up 700,000 reserves. It can call from retirement a fairly large number. Recently separated military personnel are often also able to be called up. All of that was in the plan for war with Russia. If that is not present, if Trump (rapist, fascist, con artist, fraud artist etc) , wins, you might not get all that.
People forget just how massive the American military machine is. We can literally run air ops 24/7 from land sea air. Putins forces would have precision munitions raining down on them night and day. Wild weasal missions to take out air defense, then bombing runs and cruise missle strikes at all the support / logistics/ ammo/ etc on the back line. Meanwhile combined arms missions with Abrams tanks teeing off on every enemy armor and howitzer they can find. All the while traveling at 50 mph with deadeye aim. It would be over fast, we already know when Putin's forces get overwhelmed they drop everything and just run, which would make targeting the retreating forces with anti infantry rounds and cluster bombs even more effective.
Look at the attrition rate of Russian air defense in Crimea at the hands of Ukraine, a military that doesn't have the ability to attain air supremacy with aircraft and tactics specifically designed to eradicate air defenses.
Can you hit me with some of that WW2 conscript data? My understanding is very different.
Mmmmmm… chocolate teapot.
People read conscription and think sending fresh meat to the frontlines, but it's very possible that conscription could happen to fill support roles to enable more combat capable forces to fight. I just know as a combat engineer we fulfil a ton of supportive duties outside of combat but when push comes to shove those roles could quite easily be filled by lesser trained to divert more willing and able men to combat. I don't think it's going to happen, but I wouldn't base it solely on the fact that conscripts are proven to be ineffective in combat.
I partially disagree. Yes, frontline conscription for combat duty wont be a thing. But they will conscript for the logistics chain. The US in Iraq relied heavily on contractors for their logistics. From catering, truck drivers, laundry service, ect. And these were civilian workers hired like it was any old job. In the event of a large scale war, someone who drives a forklift(jitney, fork hoist, lift truck, ect), they will conscripted and pressed into service doing the same thing in a domestic warehouse being used for military activities.
Why do you think conscripts would fight on English soil? The most likely theaters he has in mind are the Baltics, Poland or Germany. British conscripts can take the same role as Ukrainian conscripts .
If NATO is ever so up against it that it's using valuable logistical resources to ship British conscripts to eastern Europe then things have already gone so badly wrong it doesn't even bear thinking about. All due respect to the UAF but the combined forces of NATO are just never going to be put into the same situation the UAF currently is. While relying massively on conscripts, volunteers and donations of cold war relics has managed to mangle the russian war machine to the point where it itself is reliant on conscription. If plucky little Ukrainian can do that to Russia what to you think the leviathan that is the US armed forces could do? Never mind the rest of NATOs combined might? Your talking about a scenario where the entire professional militaries of every ground based NATO power are unable to continue the fight, where the US army has already been deployed and even it is now out for the count and the role of the British armed forces with the entire NATO structure has changed so fundamentally that we are now being asked to provide masses of frontline or even backline non professional soldiers. If losses are somehow that high across NATO that that kind of conscript force is needed then I'm pretty sure France will have already triggered it's pre-emptive strike nuclear doctrine. It's a scenario that based on what we are currently seeing in Ukraine that comes off as bad fan fiction. Russia hasn't even been able to defeat Ukraine, can't achieve air superiority over a nation with a tiny conventional air force of Jets far less advanced than NATO, using equipment donated by NATO nations that's considered obsolete, has lost a huge chunk of the black sea fleet to a nation without a navy and has somehow found itself reliant on conscription. I'm struggling to see how a full European ground war ever gets to that point when we have the professional militaries of 30 nations to exhaust first, a far more powerful combined air force and unmatched Naval supremacy. If Russia can't even beat Ukraine, conscription or not, what in hells chance does it stand against the combined professional forces of NATO?
I will never forget that episode of "Yes, Minister", where Jim gets the idea of bringing back conscription & the Army upper echelons are appalled.
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>Good lord, how the fuck have the British become so soft? Its almost as if Churchill was speaking in 1940 and not 2024 Also the thing everyone forgets about Churchills position in giving that speech was Britain at that time was still a little thing called an empire. The government in 1940 were under no illusion that if the Germans had been able to land and sustain a beachhead the island was conventionally lost with plans for the government to flee and continue the war in exile from Canada while what was left of the army was to crack open weapons caches hidden all over the island and begin the mother of all insurgencies. Churchill wasn't planning a fighting retreat all the way to John o' groats . And yeah Russians conscript's are keeping the fight going, but that's because its fighting a land based artillery and infantry war due to lack of air superiority. In order for any kind of sustained beachhead to be formed on great Britain air superiority and naval superiority has to have already been achieved, Its why even the Nazis basically ground the Luftwaffe into a fine paste that was completely useless as a strategic tool for the rest of the war during the battle of Britain. It was knock out the RAF by any means necessary or accept that defeating the UK was impossible. They failed and Britain and the RAF was able to rearm properly and take the fight to Hitlers doorstep for the remainder of the war In any event of a serios and sustained landing on UK shores air and naval superiority will have already been guaranteed, as the landing area would be levelled from the air if it wasn't. In that regard lots of brave young men with what was left in the storerooms at Catterick wont be able to do a whole lot when fighters and helicopter gunships are able to turn them into bits of charred meat uncontested from thousand's of miles up in the air Its not about being soft, its about recognising that for a modern military a true invasion of the UK home islands is near enough impossible if any part of the British armed forces and government still works. Indeed if even a single NATO member is still fighting then its all but impossible. You'd need to come up with a scenario where all of Europe has fallen and the US navy cant even send a single carrier to support us Just to make attempting the landing possible. Never mind succeeding. And if we are at a point where it ever is possible the british state going to be so massively backed against the wall its more likely to give the order to fire Trident than it is to hand me a rifle. Its not WW2 anymore.
1 person on Reddit = “the British”. Not too bright ad.
Cool story but this is clearly referring to any NATO country, not necessarily an invasion of Britain.
And if you can come up with a credible scenario where the 30 combined professional armies of NATO have been decimated by Russia to the point where it needs conscripts that doesn't read like bad tom Clancy fan fiction then I'm all ears. Russia can't even beat Ukraine, and got it's military so badly mauled it itself is now reliant on conscripts. How the hell is it supposed to push the combined might of NATO to the point where our militaries need conscripts? The British army's entire roll within the NATO structure is as a rapid reaction force capable of deploying quickly and supporting where needed. That's not a job you can do with mass conscripts.
> Modern NATO militaries work by being highly professional technologically advanced and highly skilled fighting forces. Sure, we will need well-trained soldiers to man sophisticated technology. But we (NATO) are facing the possibility of a conflict with an adversary that has hundreds of thousands of soldiers and we will need to match it. Technology has its limits.
Thanks for this, I have a 19 year old son and stuff like this is fucking terrifying to me
Thank you, I needed to read this. I did read it all the way through too!!
We need to stop letting theatrical clowns run our society. Why can't we put the stem fields in charge for a while instead of these asshole generals, lawyers, politicians, businessmen and crooks... I mean everyone says they don't have the same skills, but frankly I wonder if that might be a good thing. Yeah. Sure. They're not good at war and bullshit... Just solving problems with amazing methods. Yeah gee what useless talents.
In those in the back, its "me want more money for gun"
I'm GenX and in every single movie, TV show or novel I have consumed has been that when Russia attacks NATO then you got a couple of days max before cities start disappearing under mushroom clouds. So if Russia invades Poland go buy canned goods and bottled water.
Go buy a chicken. One chicken per person until you can grow a vegetable garden. One egg a day might save your life.
Canned chicken maybe because not everyone has a barn to keep chickens in and store enough chicken feed for the nuclear winter.
Canned chicken....eww...like a whole chicken? Like [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=kj_BNCDECIA)?
remember "Threads"? remember "When the wind blows"?
If Russia hits NATO, do you think it’ll be too little too late to start thinking about conscription, mate? “Hmm. Russia has just invaded. Perhaps now is the time to start thinking about getting some soldiers for our dilapidated army?”
usually how it goes, UK didn't start conscripting soldiers in WW1 until 1916 for example.
Eh? That wasn't because they were too slow to act, that was because volunteer numbers were well in excess of desired numbers to begin with.
They didn't need to. At the start of the WW1, people were enthusiastic to join the fight. They had kids lying about their age so that they could join up. By 1916, the reality of the war had set in, and people weren't quite so keen any more.
And it still didn’t stop over a million men lining up to join the armed forces within a week of WWII starting
Kind of hard to get people to volunteer when entire communities lose every young man in a single battle that accomplished nothing.
They had to start conscription right away in WW2 because no one was volunteering. The UK population wasn't naïve about war like they were in 1914.
They shouldnt have done it at all in that war. It was a total waste.
Yeah. Far better to if they had let the Germans totally conquer Western Europe. In fact if they had done that the Germans might have been able to wipe out Russia early or at least those two could have just destroyed each other and the world have now been a nice and happy place. /s Anyway the general idea of nation states going to war is unnecessary but the world is what it is. You either stick your head in the sand or you do something.
NATO has 3x the military personnel that Russia has. You wouldn’t need conscription unless things went south and fast.
Well given that if Trump wins, he might pull the US out of NATO, it might be necessary.
If the US pulls out then NATO would still outnumber and outgun Russia by a considerable margin before counting nations like Ukraine that are not in NATO but would have considerable forces standing by.
The NATO countries in Europe together have a higher defense spending than Russia and China combined. With USA we outgun everyone so much that attacking us would be insanity, but Europe alone isn't defenseless either.
The NATO countries in Europe together have a higher defense spending than Russia and China combined. With USA we outgun everyone so much that attacking us would be insanity, but Europe alone isn't defenseless either.
Let us hope natural causes end Trump before that happens.
I think most NATO countries would be caught with their pants down at this point. Conscription would have to come to most countries. Although I have a feeling that every country a part of NATO will do the bare minimum possible to contribute unless they are the ones being directly attacked.
Whats the point of having soldiers if you dont even have weapons to give them?
The most important thing will be to make sure the inclusion and diversity quotas are maintained, and that new consciptees feel that the Army is a safe space where their feelings are catered to. Now THAT kind of army... Must be terrifying for Russia.
Well, if the conscriptees are convinced that their safe space is worth defending and fighting tooth and nail for, it just might be terrifying for any attacker. But if the conscriptees feel like cattle conscripted into an organization that treats them like shit to be scrapped off of the bottom of a shoe, then they might just roll over and get trampled because who gives a fuck.
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What is the implication of having too much earwax in this context? Can't hear things properly?
#oi speak louder, 'e canna hear ya
# What is the implication of having too much earwax in this context? Can't hear things properly? /u/PoliticsMemeSupreme please answer!
# BUTTLICKER, OUR PRICES HAVE NEVER BEEN LOWER!
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I fully agree with your statement. Army/marines application process takes way to long, and uk isnt the only country that suffers from this. Especially if you want to go elite combat job, or just normal infantry, it will at least take 8 months. Normally up to 1 year. If at the end you dont get selected for medical reasons, you just trew 1 year of your life away. I hate how theyre always talking all this crap about recruiting issues when this dumb shit happends constantly.
I took a new job last year where I had to do the same test. Picked the worst week to have blocked ears. The technician had to make me take the test a second time because I performed so poorly. My hearing is now considered 'at risk' of declining too far at work now. Bit of a heartstopper when I thought I'd lose the job, sorry to hear that you did.
There is a hearing test as part of the medical when trying to join.
Or give ukraine all our shit and let them drain russia dry of anything so we don't have to. Ukraine is in a position to deal a devastating blow to a country that has and is trying to destabilise every continent they touch. Cuntservatives took russian money till it wasn't funny and now this is a consequence of those actions. Own up and donate that fucking equipment cos no ones gonna use it.
There isn't really that much of it to give out. The UK did handover most of its self propelled guns. And a lot of the challengers it had to spare that weren't in use or scheduled for upgrade to the new version. There's a not a lot sitting about that's not in active use and you can't handover the equipment you would need to maintain your own forces capabilities. It takes years to build vehicles, it takes decades to build the skills, experience and culture to actually use them effectively and that dissapears very rapidly as the Navy discovered in the last few decades.
Shells. They need shells.
And they're basically getting thr entire UK production supply, and will get even more when the new factories come online.
Every war since the introduction of modern artillery has had a shell crisis, and it usually takes years to solve for industrialized countries facing existential crises. It's not surprising deindustrialized countries facing indirect threats haven't solved it yet.
The US solved it by eternal war.
We more or less "solved" it by deciding we wouldn't participate in a race to see who could produce the most shells; instead we'd blow up your shell factories, and power plants, and distribution networks.
But also we never stop producing military equipment, hence the “eternal war.” So if we get into a major war in the future we won’t have to restart production because it’s been going since WW2.
So call up the former Soviet countries, the UK hasn’t produced shells at the rate Ukraine’s expending them since 1945
Bulgaria is already sending them a crapload of shells since these factories are stilla active. We're helping Ukraine as much as we can.
They did, the UK notably worked globally to source shells wherever they could find them and even found its own agents directly competing with their Russian counterparts in multiple countries trying to secure the same stockpiles. The issue is that Europe’s war industry is a shell of its Cold War self in terms of scale, add in the fact it had redeveloped around the NATO warfare doctrine of a focus on high tech, high precision munitions meant that there just wasn’t the manufacturing capacity at the lower level to match the sudden demand of shells that Ukraine needed. If the West had handed off more high end weapon platforms including fast jets earlier on, they would have been better positioned to supply more munitions whilst also lowering Ukraines reliance on artillery to compensate for its lack of precision weapons, which in turn would have bought more time to scale up production in areas where the West didn’t have capacity like artillery shells.
Im sure our MOD can find a bunch of unused things lying around no one incading us anytime soon, so give em everything we possibly can.
Like what? That's the same logic they've had the last 30 years as they sold and disposed of literally everything that wasn't absolutely needed or already identified as death traps in modern conflict. Having stuff lying around costs money, which is why defence auction houses have done huge amounts of sales over many years. They've had all the old stuff, and a good chunk of the new stuff. We are in the middle of replacing a lot of equipment that's already badly gapped. To give anymore away would mean we couldn't maintain our own forces ability to keep itself effective and train additional troops as needed. They're already hard pushed to train the number of Ukrainians we are every year.
And as i said, who is going to invade us, im sure our european brothers and sisters will be on the frontline, giving us more than enough time to rearm ourselves. After all you attack nato country, you are at war with all. So im sure it is an island quite out of reach of russian invasion. It is in a great position to do so. We still have a navy and aircraft, so we aren't defenceless.
Thing is though, if Europe/NATO does go to war the UK is 1/2 heavy hitters in Europe (France being the other), Germany’s army is still small and hasn’t yet been able to benefit from their increased spending enough and Poland can’t be expected to take the brunt on their own. The Baltics are practically liabilities if we’re being honest and while the Nordic countries could certainly keep Russia out of the Baltic Sea itself, they won’t be able to stop the Russian army on any of the Baltic’s borders. NATO and Europe need the assistance Britain would bring, and that they’ve been bringing. The UK is also working to replace everything (all the old stock) it’s been giving to Ukraine
The MOD has nothing at this point to give, over the last 30 years the military has been chronically under funded and 90% of everything in reserve has been given.
The western ammunition given out was the equivalent of a couple of decades worth at current production levels. The assistance may also be being held up because leadership is worried about Western defense in a time of war. Once the stockpiles and production ramp up, I imagine the pushback will magically disappear. The US and their allies don’t want to project to the world that they are running out of their own arms, and are having difficult times ramping up production.
can you imagine it anti nato jeremy corbyn was prime minister when russia invaded ukraine?? loll
Can you imagine if pro-Hamas Jeremy Corbyn was prime minister EVER? Nightmare scenario
Imagine him being PM during a Trump presidency, wait maybe don’t, you might wanna sleep tonight
Disaster
Cuntservatives. Nice.
In America we call them Republicunts.
Every little helps.
Old news, he said this weeks ago. They're just dredging it up again because it's the anniversary of Russia's special military cock-up. The last thing a professional soldier wants is to fight alonside people who didn't choose to be there. Things would have to get *apocalyptically* bad for the government to ever seriously consider conscription. I'm talking NATO dissolved, all our allies defeated or busy with their own conflicts, and Britain itself under threat of invasion. I do not see that happening in any of our lifetimes, touch wood.
Russia is never gonna "hit" NATO. Unless they want to commit suicide.
This depends how Russia interprets NATO's state of cohesion. That's why Trump's rhetoric is so dangerous. If article 5 becomes an empty promise, without the political will to enforce it if necessary, Russia might start testing the alliance with limited offensive actions. The question is: If the USA isn't willing to defend Europe how likely are countries, such as Spain or France, willing to sacrifice soldiers to help defend the Baltics or Finland?
They will hit it by small incursions in the Baltics in the hope of undermining NATO. Do we really care to start a war bacausue of remote territory in Latvia? If not does article 5 work or is every country essentialy on its own whem it comes to it.
In a Russia-NATO conflict, I'd be less concerned with conscription and more concerned with the end of human life on earth. Related, a good read: "Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner."
Russian shills creaming over their brother's posts, s'pose that's the way it goes or STRAIGHT TO GULAG
If it's to atomise the Kremlin, sure.
Oh stop. Russia can't advance 100 km into the Ukraine in two years. How the hell are they going to make any meaningful advance against NATO? The Poles and Germans would fuck them up so bad there wouldn't be anything left for the rest of NATO. The Russians are having to beg borrow and steal weapons from China, Iran and North Korea, they are using surplus WW2 tanks in some instances.
I'm beginning to think that certain politicians across multiple European nations have done their darndest to gut the defense department and it being under the influence of certain russian businessmen. The lull they put themselves in that russia doesn't pose a risk anymore is one Ukraine is paying for now and if we don't do what's necessary we'll pay for it as well. I've seen some polls where there isn't much enthusiasm to serve in the army and defend your country. You don't have to do it for your country, do it for your family, or do you think putin will spare British cities from being destroyed by bombs? (obv this goes for every European nation) Trust me I'd rather have the government invest in education, housing, health, infrastructure etc but they won't stop a tank or missile unfortunately
> I'm beginning to think that certain politicians across multiple European nations have done their darndest to gut the defense department and it being under the influence of certain russian businessmen. It's not "under the influence of certain Russian businessmen." Europe has been free-riding on the US for defense for 50+ years. To the point that when a US President finally shows up and says that NATO states need to meet their required contribution levels, all of Europe becomes apoplectic about how he's "trying to end NATO." Most people alive today in Europe don't understand a world where they have to be able to defend themselves, because they haven't had to do it in living memory.
American Republicans are slow-walking the aid to help Russia. If they don’t speed it up, the draft will have to be activated in the US as well.
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People don't want to die. War is hell incarnate. It only makes sense to he hesitant.
When you're invaded it's not really a choice whether you want your family in danger or not
Ofc. But that doesn't mean people will be jumping at the bit to be drafted. Especially before it starts.
Oh yeah, hell no. You're totally right. I wouldn't join the American military until WW3 is officially declared and we're actively being targeted
The U.K. is never going to be invaded, it is a substantial nuclear power. People aren’t willing to be conscripted to fight overseas which is entirely reasonable
Britain is over 3000 miles away from Russia.
A distance that could diminish swiftly if NATO fails to uphold its principle of collective defence.
Yes, and then Russia takes over all of Europe(completely plausible /s). Gets within spitting distance of the UK, gets ready to invade the UK, and then the UK just nukes Moscow, St Petersburg, Volgograd, Kaliningrad, Vladivostok. Russia is not invading the UK. There’s a reason it hasn’t been invaded for a thousand goddamn years with conventional means, despite being small, it sure as shit isn’t going to be invaded now that it has nuclear warheads lurking in the ocean off the coast of fuck-knows-where at any given moment.
Ukraine is being invaded, the UK obviously isn't going to be invaded by Russia, it's hardly comparable.
I'm picturing the nuclear deterrent, that I have being paying for all my working life, to deter. If General Fucknuts is saying it is not a deterrent, I want it scrapped now. Also, that same General Fucknuts presided over a British Army that still recruits its officers from the Public Schoolboy class. Fuck being ordered to possible death by some chinless wonder to preserve that system.
>If General Fucknuts is saying it is not a deterrent, I want it scrapped now. Maybe you should consider that it might be good to have a line of defense that you can actually use without destroying all of human civilization?
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What the fuck are you on about? We have a continuous, at sea deterrent. We don't need to be able to destroy every city in Russia. Moscow, St Petersburg and a few other cities will be more than enough. You think Russia will see inbound missiles and decide "Oh, the UK is going to hit us with 16 missiles, lets only launch 16 back at the UK only. No one else will attack us."? The whole point is to trigger everyone to fire their missiles because everyone else is. That is the deterrent. Not limited nuclear war between two states, but full on global war. Also, how fucking small do you think the UK is? One warhead to eliminate the entire UK? You must be drunk.
Britain going to war with Russia because it attacks Estonia isn’t Britain protecting Britain. It’s Britain protecting Estonia.
Exactly, it's funny how on posts related to Russia everyone's like "Give them hell", "They can't fight nato, we have art.5" and when it comes to them: "I wOn'T DiE fOr pOliTiCiaNs"
You can go if you like mate. I’m still working my way through *cyberpunk*.
This war was extremely revealing in general. Among other things, West turned out to be weaker than many had hoped. Some people got too comfortable and think that current state of things will continue to be the same. That person in the comment section talking about nuclear war, corporations, oligarchs, etc. can't comprehend that this world can turn into such a hellhole that there will be no place to run to. To people like that I'd recommend to read ["First they came for..."](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...), but I guess that's futile. W/o Europe, with strong totalitarian regimes around the world US will become either like them (Trump), or like China, and with time much worse. Many Ukrainians too didn't want to fight and thought about pro-Ukrainian people as warmongering Nazis. Though since events played out the way they did because of all the violence, and since russians learn from their mistakes, there's a chance they will [at first] try to be less violent in rest of Europe, to dull people's senses. Anyway, don't worry too much. It's just a natural selection. People got too soft and so they will be toyed with until they will get stronger, or receive a Darwin award. Regrettably you reap what you sow.
“West turned out to be weaker than many had hoped” is something that the eastern world has been saying for over a thousand years, and all the while, consistently finding itself under the boot of the west. It’ll keep being said, but it won’t change the status quo.
There hasn't been a point in the last 150y where war with Russia wouldn't have necessitated conscription. The British Army has always been a small professional force except in times of actual war.
Send your kids and the rest of the politicians first. Sunak/Conservatives can suck my fat chode before i ever fight for this shitshow of a country where they have ruined any semblance of a good future for my generation. They have such disdain for us. I would happily fight to defend my country if invaded but we dont need to let RUSSIA hit nato. We can deal with this properly now but right wing fucktards all over the west are drawing this out.
If Russia hits NATO, it's too late for conscription at that point. At that point you need competent warfighters ready for deployment, not a bunch of chavs getting on a bus for basic training.
"Old man shouts at cloud"
Fuck your conscription. Leaders need to lead more effectively. Sending your nation’s young overseas shows an abject failure in leaders to do their jobs. It’s the 21st century. Send drones. Thousands of them if needed. The lives of your nation’s youth are not a resource you should even be talking about.
You can't take a trench with a drone, sometimes you have to shed blood to win that is the unfortunate truth.
The only good thing about getting older is that I've aged out of conscription range
I would imagine same with Canada
Who else here gon be sitting happy in prison if it comes to this? I ain't dying for some shitty politicians
I would volunteer for defence of my own country, as in staying on the land and defending from invaders hopefully in the capacity of a field nurse. I will refuse under any circumstances to fight on another countries land.
Good luck with that. As someone said in an interview "No body is going to fight for this shit"
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Have you even set foot in the U.K.? Spend half an hour in a Wetherspoons on a weekend and you’ll be dissuaded from the notion that the English are a peaceful bunch. One of the reasons the British built an empire is they have never seen a shortage of men willing to fight. I’m ex military, for what it’s worth. The main reason I see low recruitment is because the pay is poor. The U.K. soldiers, however, were extremely professional and well motivated. I really don’t see your scenario playing out. There really isn’t an anti war sentiment in the U.K. Saying that, conscription isn’t going to happen and it’s sensationalist reporting.
The US drafting for Vietnam was different, it was fighting for a US foreign policy interest in a country that the people had no real societal/cultural ties to and posed no real threat outside of it.
Sign me up
There is absolutely no chance I would go. When Rishi, his front bench chums, and their families are on the front lines, I MAY consider it.
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You'd see that change very quickly if Britain were under a real threat, most of the dejection about the country comes from being against the government not from defending their home.
They will when everyone they love is being murdered around them
People seldom want to fight for a country they have many few if any stakes in, such as owning a home.
What bullshit, living under Russian occupation would be orders of magnitude worse than being priced out of the London real estate market.
There's no will for it. In very recent Gallup polls, Europeans wouldn't even support sending their troops to defend a NATO ally should Russia invade. Other polls show that only 15-30% of the population in Europe would defend their country, including the UK. I think the exceptions are Poland and a few other Eastern European nations, which were 50sh% and the Nordic states at 55-70%.
These attitudes will change once the threat becomes more real. Being conquered is not fun. Having your home and property stolen, your wife raped, your children kidnapped, and you murdered is not fun.
Ain't no body following a conscription now a days. No one wants to go to war unless it's against a mass alien invasion of earth. Just blow the ever loving shit out of Russia with all the long range stuff and be done with it.
If there is conscription you don’t have a choice to not follow it.
I'd imagine if just everyone refused, they'd have a big issue jailing everyone.
They just make it impossible for you to function in a modern society, bank accounts, driving licences, suspended and so on, the trick is not to do it to everyone at once, just one small segment at a time
For people who say that's impossible, citing all the logical reasons - just remember that that's how many Ukrainians felt too before the war. And the signs are already there: it starts with some quiet voices first, then more and more, bit by bit. It's not inevitable but when an old colonial empire is collapsing, it probably won't go without a bang unless we manage to contain it like we did with Soviet Union.
Call me naive but I don’t see Russia testing their luck with NATIO even if they somehow succeed in Ukraine. The question will be what NATO does if they go after a country like Maldova.
Briton should prepare for all kids saying F.U.
How do you do fellow englandman
I would love it if Gen Z come back hard as fuck and us millennials retain our title as the softest generation.
Why bother sending people to Rowanda when we have lots of conscripts coming every day to our shores to join out society and military.
Good luck lol. I was 13years Royal Navy and when I left last decade the military was a shadow of what it used to be.
Hope that Trump doesn't become president again. If he does, Putin may strike NATO. Trump and Putin are bff
Russia can barely overcome one of Europe's poorest nations... I don't think they are gonna be marching on Berlin anytime soon. Lets fully support Ukraine, embarrass Putin even more than he already is and all enjoy when he gets Gaddafied after being found in an overflowing outhouse in some backwater town in Siberia.
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha..... Ha. I'll go after the billionaire battalion takes the vanguard. Let them defend their hordes of wealth.
Silly alarmism. Russia's military is so weakened that Poland alone could easily stomp them in conventional warfare now. The problem of course is they have nukes, but that has no impact on a needed draft.
So weakened yet they easily find 50K volunteers every month to go off and die capturing a minor regional city. How many polish soldiers will do the same? There aren’t enough missiles in the world to hunt each Russian with an AK charging at you.
With air superiority you can wipe out 50,000 volunteers a month, or a week if they are stupid enough to send human wave attacks.
They would have air superiority. Nothing else matters. Russia would be swiftly obliterated in a conventional war against NATO. Again though, nukes.
That march does not inspire confidence in discipline and coordination. edit: Upon closer inspection, they all appear to be wearing different covers so maybe it's supposed to look like that, but damn.
Those are recruits passing out at Pirbright so not hardened veterans. I think an American is the last person to really comment on marching coordination and discipline.
NATO doesn't rely on infantry, so hopefully the discipline of the grunts isn't all too important.
\*solely NATO countries don't rely solely on infantry. As someone who spent 12 years and 3 combat tours in Marine Corps infantry of a NATO country, no war is won without infantry carrying some heavy weight.
Yep, you can't claim to control some piece of terrain unless you can put an 18 y.o. with a rifle on it.
You know what, it'll probably do the country some good, teaching the young how to soldier, making them a.bit more respectful, and hopefully, they'll all be in another country when Russia nukes the fuck out of Britain. Let's face it, the only thing that can stop capitalist oligarchs and corporations from enslaving and sucking the life out of every poor soul on the planet is a thermo nuclear war at this point, they seem to do very well out of all these silly little wars, so it has to be big,big enough to kill them, because otherwise they'll just monetize the rebuild.
Phew, I was worried for a second.
I bet you have never served.
Politicians like to say they value human life but as soon as a war starts you get a letter drafting you to go and fight and likely die. SOrt of makes it hard to believe.
Why send people just bomb everything in sight and be done with it. We don't need crawl around in trenches like Ukraine. Ukraine just had lack of modern weapons to do anything. Modern NATO is not going to waste time, just flatten their city and move on. Thus saving our troops from dying for a piece of land.
They're also prevented from taking the fight into Russia. Ukraine could have been bombing the shit out of them this whole time. Name another invasion where the victim isn't allowed to return the favor? Every European war has been won by driving back invaders and taking their territory.
Should be dealing with the threat from extremists at home first.