War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?

War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?. Image source, Future Publishing via Getty ImagesImage caption, Richard Knighton says this moment is freighted with dangerMounting calls for increases in defence spending are rooted in a belief that the best way to prevent a war is to be ready – psychologically and militarily – to fight one.

What happened

The military and government say the risk of conflict is growing, but we may not be mentally ready for it After 80 years without war on our own soil, are we, as a society, psychologically prepared for it? Are we ready to approve large increases in defence spending, and for the sacrifices that that might entail in other areas of our national life? "So no, I don't think we are psychologically prepared… but I do think that we are beginning to recognise that war is something that is closer to us than we'd like to think".

"Being [psychologically] prepared for war is the first stage. The further east you go, the closer you get to the Russian border, the more alert a nation's people are to the threat, and the more psychologically prepared. But after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it abandoned that and has made itself, in a very short space of time, one of the most psychologically prepared countries in Europe.

The wider picture

ByAllan LittleIf the UK suddenly found itself at war, would you know what to do? The government wants us all to start preparing for severe disruption to our lives. It wants us to stockpile canned food and drinking water, strengthen our civic resilience, and plan for the possibility of war. Work has begun on the government's so-called "war book", which hasn't been updated in decades. The UK's most senior soldier has sounded the alarm. The Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton this week said the threat from Russia meant Britain was living through the "most dangerous" period of his 35-year career in the armed forces.

In 1940 the danger of a German invasion of the UK was very real. But the chances of Russian tanks rolling up Whitehall are surely negligible.

What has been reported

"It's not the tanks you need to worry about," says historian Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us. "It's the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It's the hacking into systems on which so many things depend. The possibility for asymmetric war, for cyber war, is growing by leaps and bounds. Or does the threat seem too far-fetched to be real? The Great War legacy"I think we have become used to the idea that peace is the normal state of affairs, that it's going to last," says McMillan.

Archive film footage showing Britons in 1913 enjoying days at the races or watching the cricket contrasts sharply with what followed during the horrors of World War One. Image source, Getty ImagesImage caption, The summer before World War One has come to symbolise a lack of readiness for war"In a sense it's now a bit like those Edwardian summers before 1914, when there was a lot of talk of war but the notion of actually going to war seemed so far-fetched as to be beyond belief and I think that's where we are at the moment," says retired British General Sir Richard Shirreff, a former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe.

What happens next

In 1914, recruitment stations were flooded with volunteers eager to serve their country. In Britain, that generation was raised on heroic tales of empire-building, in which war was one glorious cavalry charge, leading to swift victory and everyone home by Christmas. But the experience of what came to be known as the Great War seared itself into the popular consciousness and survives in our collective imagination. One in eight of the men who enlisted in the UK left their bones in the fields of Flanders and France, Mesopotamia and Gallipoli.

The survivors carved their unspeakable grief into the landscape with the erection of thousands of war memorials. The pain of it touched every community in the land. Image source, Heritage Images via Getty ImagesImage caption, The horrors of the war touched every part of societyThat conflict, says Margaret MacMillan, changed fundamentally the way Europe thought about war.