General Sir Nick Carter: UK couldn’t cope if Russia attacked

Army chief General Sir Nick Carter will call on the Government to boost defence spending today as he warns that Britain would struggle to combat Russian forces.

In a speech - approved by Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson - at the Royal United Services Institute, the general is expected to highlight Russia’s cyberwarfare capabilities and long-range missile strike capacity, and its ability to quickly deploy large numbers of combat troops.

“Our ability to pre-empt or respond to threats will be eroded if we don’t keep up with our adversaries,” Carter will say, according to excerpts from the speech, published by The Guardian.

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It is “highly unusual” for a serving senior officer to speak so frankly about threats, says The Times , which reports that the general will say “Britain would struggle to withstand Russian forces on the battlefield”. The intervention “appears designed to raise public awareness of the scale and urgency of the challenge”, says the paper, “and to ratchet up pressure on Philip Hammond to award more money to defence”.

BBC defence correspondent Jonathan Beale says the likelihood of British forces leading a direct military confrontation against Russia seems extremely remote. “That’s why Britain is part of Nato,” he says, but some of the UK’s weapons are outdated. “While Russia’s been developing new Armata tanks, the British Army’s Challenger 2 hasn’t been modernised for 20 years.”

Russia may also present a threat to the UK through hybrid warfare, says The Guardian’s defence correspondent, Ewen MacAskill, through “the use of deniable acts of disruption, primarily cyberattacks on the UK that could disrupt essential services or interference in the democratic process, such as in elections”.

The general’s comments “reflect concerns among the top brass and some politicians that defence spending is being too tightly squeezed because of wider fiscal austerity”, reports Reuters.

The UK spends 2% of GDP on defence, according to The Guardian, but the Ministry of Defence wants that figure to rise to at least 3%.