Europe is no longer the zone of peace guaranteed by 10,000 entangling cheese regulations. Is this an opportunity or a peril for Britain to restore trade ties with the European Union?
Well, yes, Ukraine shows that longer conventional warfare is back in business:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine suggests "big war is back" with large-scale conflict between nations likely to shape world politics for years to come, according to a military expert.
That's the whole point of the shift to "great power competition" as the U.S. frames it. Highlighting the need to restore capabilities relevant to facing China and Russia which were lost in the long counter-insurgency fights in the war on terror.
Indeed, well before the War on Terror I warned against thinking conventional war is inherently brief:
The [Iran-Iraq] war as a whole showed us that modern war is not inherently brief. Arab-Israeli and Indo-Pakistani wars since World War II have misled us into thinking this is the norm. Desert Storm has seemingly confirmed this view and America now seeks a small but lethal Army that will strike hard, win fast, and come home. Yet by fighting on for years when most believed the First Gulf War would have to end rapidly, the Iraqis and Iranians have provided us with a much needed lesson that wars do not just end on their own. By simply pausing instead of furiously fighting Lemming-like until all weapons and ammunition are expended, these two states fought for nearly eight years.
While many are learning this lesson because of the Winter War of 2022, I concluded it after the Iran-Iraq War--which Western analysts assumed would be an Iraqi blitzkrieg:
When Iraq's armed forces struck Iran in the fall of 1980, most observers thought that Iraq's Soviet-supplied mechanized juggernaut would smash Iran's revolution-wracked army in short order. Even the failure of the Iraqi air force to suppress the Iranian air force and the subsequent Iranian aerial riposte against targets throughout Iraq failed to reverse the expectation of a rapid Iraqi victory. With the benefit of hindsight, it is incredible to note that Iran's stiffening resistance and Iraq's mounting casualties in the early weeks of war led some to speculate that Iraq might be compelled to escalate the stakes of the war--to demand the dismemberment of Iran rather than settle for "just" capturing Khuzestan.
Oops.
This too is familiar, in light of Putin's vision for his special military operation, no?
The war that we view in retrospect as a disastrous and costly war was conceived by Saddam Hussein as a limited conflict against a fragile Iran.
Regardless of when this lesson should have been learned, the post-Russian invasion conclusion about "big war" definitely has an impact on British global strategy that had assumed high-intensity ground campaigns weren't necessary.
Britain settled for just supporting others on the Eurasian continent who need help, thus making friends and influencing people. Big carriers replaced tank brigades in the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR). Bolstering trade around the world post-Brexit made sense.
But Russian aggression on a large scale has altered perceptions. A British army on the continent that can fight a big war is not the obsolete capability it was once thought.
To be fair, the way the European Union was punishing Britain for the gall of defying the proto-imperial "ever closer union" by approving and carrying out Brexit (can't let that contagion spread!) emphasized the need for the British global shift.
But with the Russian threat revived at the moment, Britain has an opportunity to get the continentals to set aside their anger over Brexit in exchange for a restored BAOR standing on the Vistula River. After all, the EU will see Britain as more European than the hated Americans, right? The EU may even see this as a way to suck Britain back into the EU. So there is danger for post-Brexit Britain, too.
How will Britain respond? Will there be a British Army of the Vistula? Or perhaps just the British Division of the Imperial European Army of the Vistula?
NOTE: Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
