As the United Kingdom grapples with a shifting global security landscape, a pressing question hangs over the nation: if large-scale conflict were to suddenly break out, would British civilians and institutions be ready to respond? The UK government has launched a new push to encourage widespread national preparation for potential catastrophic disruption to daily life, urging ordinary citizens to stockpile non-perishable canned goods and clean drinking water, shore up community-level resilience, and acknowledge the very real possibility of war breaking out in the near future. At the core of this new preparation effort is an update to the government’s long-overdue national contingency guide, colloquially called the “war book” — a document that has not been comprehensively revised in decades.
The UK’s most senior military leader has recently sounded a stark alarm about the current risk environment. Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton stated this week that the growing threat posed by Russia has created the most dangerous period he has witnessed throughout his 35-year career in the armed forces. While the likelihood of a full-scale conventional invasion with Russian tanks advancing on central London is widely considered extremely remote, experts warn that the modern threat landscape looks drastically different from the large-scale ground conflicts of the 20th century.
Margaret MacMillan, a prominent historian and author of *War: How Conflict Shaped Us*, explains that the greatest risks do not come from traditional armored assaults. Instead, she points to vulnerable undersea communication cables that underpin global digital infrastructure, large-scale cyberattacks targeting critical public and private systems, and the rapidly expanding potential for asymmetric and hybrid warfare that can disrupt daily life without a single foreign soldier setting foot on UK soil.
After eight decades without direct conflict on UK home soil, a critical question remains: is British society psychologically prepared to face new threats, and willing to accept the tradeoffs that come with increased preparedness, including substantial rises in defence spending that could divert resources from other domestic priorities? For many generations raised in a post-WWII era of sustained peace, the idea of large-scale conflict close to home has come to feel like an abstract, distant possibility.
“We have become used to the idea that peace is the normal state of affairs, that it’s going to last,” MacMillan notes. “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.”
This collective complacency draws troubling parallels to the period immediately before the First World War, when Edwardian Britons enjoyed peaceful summers of horse racing and cricket, with widespread dismissal of warnings that major conflict was on the horizon. Retired British General Sir Richard Shirreff, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, argues that the current moment mirrors that pre-1914 era: while talk of war circulates widely, the idea of actual conflict breaking out still feels too implausible for most people to process.
The trauma of the First World War fundamentally reshaped European attitudes toward war forever. One in eight British men who enlisted in the conflict never returned home, leaving their remains on battlefields across Flanders, France, Mesopotamia and Gallipoli. Every community across the UK was touched by grief, memorialized by thousands of war monuments that still dot the national landscape. MacMillan says that after witnessing the unprecedented horror of modern mechanized war, the long-held idea that war could be glamorous or heroic vanished forever from mainstream European thought.
This shift has spawned what Andrew Michta, a Polish-born American professor of strategic studies at the University of Florida’s Hamilton School, calls a decades-long “crisis of disbelief” among Western European leadership elites. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, most European nations dramatically scaled back military preparedness and cut defence budgets, operating under the assumption that the Russian threat had permanently disappeared. Many countries pursued deep economic and energy ties with Russia, most notably Germany’s reliance on the controversial Nord Stream gas pipelines, in the mistaken belief that political and economic integration would prevent future conflict.
Michta argues that the UK, like many of its European neighbors, suffers from extremely low psychological readiness for conflict, and that political leaders have failed to be transparent with the public about the gravity of current threats. “The Germans have totally disarmed during the last 30 years. The UK is also largely disarmed and, most importantly, mentally. There is no readiness for what’s happening because the policy elites are not addressing their publics in a way that would honestly state the gravity of the situation,” he says.
General Shirreff identifies Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine as the critical turning point that exposed Russia’s ongoing ambition to undermine Western security. “The reality is that Russia believes it’s been at war with Nato since 2014. Not a conventional war, but a war designed to undermine the integrity of target states or alliances,” he explains. Shirreff warns against underestimating Russian aggression, noting that low-profile hybrid actions targeting NATO allies — such as an attempt to seize control of the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard — are well within the realm of possibility, requiring sustained preparedness to deter and respond.
While growing numbers of analysts and military leaders call for increased defence spending rooted in the principle that the best deterrence to war is credible readiness, not all observers agree with this framing. Jim Orford, emeritus professor of clinical and community psychology at the University of Birmingham, argues that the framing of Russia as an existential enemy relies on oversimplified, binary thinking that normalizes the progression toward open conflict. “Being [psychologically] prepared for war is the first stage. Contemplating war is the second phase and then actually engaging in war is the third. I think we’re well into the ‘contemplating war’ phase,” he says.
Levels of preparedness vary widely across Europe, with nations closer to the Russian border consistently reporting higher levels of alert and psychological readiness. For example, Sweden, which maintained centuries of neutrality and avoided war for 200 years, completely reversed its policy after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, rapidly emerging as one of Europe’s most prepared nations. Outgoing Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson emphasized in a recent interview that “Russia is self-evidently dangerous… We don’t know when it [the war in Ukraine] ends, but how it ends will define the security situation in our part of the world for at least a generation.”
Sweden operates a partial conscription system that requires all high school graduates to register for military service, with top candidates selected for up to 15 months of compulsory training before returning to civilian life, where they remain part of a large national reserve force. Minna Alander, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies, notes that there is widespread public buy-in for the system: “It was almost an internet joke in 2022 and 2023 that everybody wished for a call up. Sometimes people get frustrated if they haven’t been called up for a long time. It’s an expectation for sure.” The country also pre-identifies civilians with critical skills — such as civil engineers specialized in electricity infrastructure — to ensure rapid activation in the event of national disruption.
The three Baltic states of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia, which only regained independence from Russia in the 1990s, also maintain high levels of vigilance, hosting multi-national NATO battlegroups to bolster their eastern defences. But much of Europe now looks to Finland as a leading model for mass societal psychological preparedness and civic resilience, a system built on decades of hard-won historical experience.
Finland lost 90,000 of its 100,000 Nordic World War Two fatalities in the 1939-1940 Winter War against the Soviet Union and the 1941-1944 Continuation War, leaving an indelible mark on national memory. Today, Finland shares a 1,287-kilometer border with Russia, and abandoned its own long-standing neutrality to join NATO alongside Sweden in 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Finland’s system relies on universal male conscription, with voluntary service open to women, and all service members join the national reserve after completing their active duty. This structure eliminates the divide between professional military and civilian society, tying every family to national security efforts. “If conscription is done well, it ties every single family into national security thinking. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather and your sons, they all go to the same military service,” explains retired three-star General Arto Raty, former permanent secretary of Finland’s Ministry of Defence. “We bind the whole of society into supporting the military. Every single hospital has its crisis tasking. Every water supply agency. And interestingly, the most publicly trusted organisations in Finland today are the military, the defence forces and the police. That is not the case in most countries.”
Since 1960, the Finnish military has also run annual crisis management training for national leaders across all sectors, including members of parliament, cabinet ministers, private sector CEOs, public utility leaders, health service executives, NGO leaders and clergy, to ensure all key decision-makers understand how to operate during a large-scale crisis. With a total population of just 5.5 million, Finland maintains a 23,000-strong professional force and a trained reserve of nearly 1 million, able to mobilize 280,000 reserve troops at short notice. In 2025, Finland spent 2.5% of its GDP on defence, compared to the UK’s 2.3% the same year.
With the prospect of full-scale conventional war still seeming remote to many, should the rest of Europe invest the significant resources required to adopt the Finnish model? General Shirreff argues that the UK’s current 70,000-strong professional force is insufficient for the threats the nation could face, and that some form of national conscription will be required to build the necessary capability. He suggests the Norwegian model, which registers all school leavers for conscription, requires a year of training, and gives employers preference to candidates with national service experience, could help shift British public attitudes toward preparedness.
Ultimately, Shirreff says, political leaders have a responsibility to be transparent with the British public. “The case has to be made honestly by political leaders who must really look the population in the eye and say ‘this has got to be done for us to be secure’,” he argues.
