>Britain needs to increase its defence spending and cannot ignore the demand for conventional weapons while focusing on cyberattacks, the foreign secretary said yesterday.
>Amid criticism that there has been too much emphasis on cyberdangers Liz Truss said that there had been decades of western complacency over the threat posed by Vladimir Putin. She urged other European countries to spend more on defence as well.
>The British Army is being shrunk by 9,000 soldiers to 73,000, its smallest since Napoleonic times. Dozens of tanks are also being scrapped but the 148 that remain are being upgraded. By comparison Russia has a 280,000-strong army and nearly 3,000 main battle tanks; Ukraine has a 125,600-strong army and 858 main battle tanks.
>Asked if the UK should spend more on a bigger army, Truss told the BBC’s Sunday Morning: “We will need to do more, we will need to spend more and we will need to provide more support.”
>Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said Germany would sharply increase its spending on defence to more than 2 per cent of its economic output in one of a series of big policy shifts prompted by the invasion of Ukraine. The move follows years of criticism from allies, including the US, for failing to meet the 2 per cent Nato spending target.
>In last year’s integrated review of defence and foreign policy the UK pledged to spend billions on cyber-capabilities and space but conventional assets such as tanks took a hit. Highlighting the thinking behind the shift, Boris Johnson said last November: “We have to recognise that the old concept of fighting big tank battles on European land mass is over.” He said there were “better things” the UK should be investing in such as the future combat aircraft Tempest and cyber-capabilities.
>Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Commons defence select committee, said that the emergence of new threats in space and cyberspace did not mean that “old threats have disappeared”. He said: “Defending and holding ground requires force presence: mobile hard power in the form of light and heavy armour and infantry; the very things that were cut in the last Defence Review. These cuts must now be urgently reversed.”
>Ciaran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), told The Times that in the first phase of the conflict “we are seeing the limitations of cyber as a tool of war, not its centrality”. He added, however, that that could change and Putin might react aggressively to powerful sanctions.
>Nato has previously said that a significant cyberattack could fall under Article 5, the principle of collective defence under which an attack against one ally would be an attack against all member states. It is unclear how severe the attack would have to be to trigger a response.
>Martin said it was “uncharted territory”, adding that cyberwarfare was “not likely to give a clear-cut attack scenario where there is an obvious act of war”.
>Cybersecurity chiefs in the UK have warned companies and government bodies to increase their cyberdefences, although last week the NCSC said that no unusual cyberactivity from Russia had yet been detected. Ukraine, however, has faced significant cyberattacks aimed at its government websites.
>Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice-prime minister, said on Saturday that Ukraine would create an “IT army” to fight Russia’s digital intrusions. He called on hackers to protect infrastructure and conduct spying missions against Russian troops. “We are creating an IT army,” he wrote in a tweet that linked to a channel on the Telegram messaging app, which published a list of prominent Russian websites.
>Anonymous, a group for hackers, said it would support Ukraine and has already claimed an attack on the state-controlled TV network Russia Today.
>It warned Putin in a video message yesterday that a few downed websites was only the beginning: “Soon you will feel the full wrath of the world’s hackers . . . Your secrets may no longer be safe.”
>It warned that key components of the government’s infrastructure could be hijacked.
>**Thermobaric bomb threat**
>Western officials have raised the prospect that Russia could use thermobaric “vacuum bombs”, which suck in oxygen to create a devastating, high temperature blast (Larisa Brown writes).
>They have an extremely powerful blast radius and unlike conventional explosives that cause injuries from shrapnel, the blast effect of such weapons causes damage to the body’s internal organs, including the lungs.
>Footage captured by a CNN crew showed the deployment of a TOS-1 system that was being transported towards the Ukrainian border on Saturday.
>The TOS-1 — nicknamed the Buratino, the Russian version of Pinocchio, for its big nose — is a multiple launch rocket system mounted on the chassis of a T-72 tank capable of firing thermobaric rockets.
>It is one of the most feared weapons systems in Russia’s conventional armoury.
>The indiscriminate system was developed in the mid-1980s and the unguided rockets have a range of two miles.
> The TOS-1 — nicknamed the Buratino, the Russian version of Pinocchio, for its big nose — is a multiple launch rocket system mounted on the chassis of a T-72 tank capable of firing thermobaric rockets.
>
[These things are right cunts](https://youtu.be/q91yFP9E9Yg)
> Amid criticism that there has been too much emphasis on cyberdangers
We’ve had no conventional military attacks on our soil for decades, and we have had thousands of cyberattacks. I don’t know if the emphasis is wrong, but we should probably focus more on things that are actually happening than things that are just might happen.
Or spend the same amount but with companies who actually manage to come in on time, on budget and with workable equipment at the end. It is possible, just doesn’t happen often enough.
Time for another NI hike to pay for this? The workers must be squeezed even harder to pay for our leaders thirst for war.
Don’t get me wrong, but I guess members of the public should be given an easy opportunity to make donations for the military. Probably there wouldn’t be any need in spending tax money then.
Broadly speaking, the UK only remains geopolitically relevant because of the size of our economy, and our high tech armed forces (complete with Trident nuclear deterrent).
Events such as with Russia serve as a timely reminder that the UK can’t take peaceful relations for granted.
The Ukrainian government must be kicking itself for agreeing to hand over their nukes to Russia in 1996.
This war likely couldn’t have happened had they kept them.
7 comments
>Britain needs to increase its defence spending and cannot ignore the demand for conventional weapons while focusing on cyberattacks, the foreign secretary said yesterday.
>Amid criticism that there has been too much emphasis on cyberdangers Liz Truss said that there had been decades of western complacency over the threat posed by Vladimir Putin. She urged other European countries to spend more on defence as well.
>The British Army is being shrunk by 9,000 soldiers to 73,000, its smallest since Napoleonic times. Dozens of tanks are also being scrapped but the 148 that remain are being upgraded. By comparison Russia has a 280,000-strong army and nearly 3,000 main battle tanks; Ukraine has a 125,600-strong army and 858 main battle tanks.
>Asked if the UK should spend more on a bigger army, Truss told the BBC’s Sunday Morning: “We will need to do more, we will need to spend more and we will need to provide more support.”
>Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, said Germany would sharply increase its spending on defence to more than 2 per cent of its economic output in one of a series of big policy shifts prompted by the invasion of Ukraine. The move follows years of criticism from allies, including the US, for failing to meet the 2 per cent Nato spending target.
>In last year’s integrated review of defence and foreign policy the UK pledged to spend billions on cyber-capabilities and space but conventional assets such as tanks took a hit. Highlighting the thinking behind the shift, Boris Johnson said last November: “We have to recognise that the old concept of fighting big tank battles on European land mass is over.” He said there were “better things” the UK should be investing in such as the future combat aircraft Tempest and cyber-capabilities.
>Tobias Ellwood, chairman of the Commons defence select committee, said that the emergence of new threats in space and cyberspace did not mean that “old threats have disappeared”. He said: “Defending and holding ground requires force presence: mobile hard power in the form of light and heavy armour and infantry; the very things that were cut in the last Defence Review. These cuts must now be urgently reversed.”
>Ciaran Martin, the former head of the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), told The Times that in the first phase of the conflict “we are seeing the limitations of cyber as a tool of war, not its centrality”. He added, however, that that could change and Putin might react aggressively to powerful sanctions.
>Nato has previously said that a significant cyberattack could fall under Article 5, the principle of collective defence under which an attack against one ally would be an attack against all member states. It is unclear how severe the attack would have to be to trigger a response.
>Martin said it was “uncharted territory”, adding that cyberwarfare was “not likely to give a clear-cut attack scenario where there is an obvious act of war”.
>Cybersecurity chiefs in the UK have warned companies and government bodies to increase their cyberdefences, although last week the NCSC said that no unusual cyberactivity from Russia had yet been detected. Ukraine, however, has faced significant cyberattacks aimed at its government websites.
>Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s vice-prime minister, said on Saturday that Ukraine would create an “IT army” to fight Russia’s digital intrusions. He called on hackers to protect infrastructure and conduct spying missions against Russian troops. “We are creating an IT army,” he wrote in a tweet that linked to a channel on the Telegram messaging app, which published a list of prominent Russian websites.
>Anonymous, a group for hackers, said it would support Ukraine and has already claimed an attack on the state-controlled TV network Russia Today.
>It warned Putin in a video message yesterday that a few downed websites was only the beginning: “Soon you will feel the full wrath of the world’s hackers . . . Your secrets may no longer be safe.”
>It warned that key components of the government’s infrastructure could be hijacked.
>**Thermobaric bomb threat**
>Western officials have raised the prospect that Russia could use thermobaric “vacuum bombs”, which suck in oxygen to create a devastating, high temperature blast (Larisa Brown writes).
>They have an extremely powerful blast radius and unlike conventional explosives that cause injuries from shrapnel, the blast effect of such weapons causes damage to the body’s internal organs, including the lungs.
>Footage captured by a CNN crew showed the deployment of a TOS-1 system that was being transported towards the Ukrainian border on Saturday.
>The TOS-1 — nicknamed the Buratino, the Russian version of Pinocchio, for its big nose — is a multiple launch rocket system mounted on the chassis of a T-72 tank capable of firing thermobaric rockets.
>It is one of the most feared weapons systems in Russia’s conventional armoury.
>The indiscriminate system was developed in the mid-1980s and the unguided rockets have a range of two miles.
> The TOS-1 — nicknamed the Buratino, the Russian version of Pinocchio, for its big nose — is a multiple launch rocket system mounted on the chassis of a T-72 tank capable of firing thermobaric rockets.
>
[These things are right cunts](https://youtu.be/q91yFP9E9Yg)
> Amid criticism that there has been too much emphasis on cyberdangers
We’ve had no conventional military attacks on our soil for decades, and we have had thousands of cyberattacks. I don’t know if the emphasis is wrong, but we should probably focus more on things that are actually happening than things that are just might happen.
Or spend the same amount but with companies who actually manage to come in on time, on budget and with workable equipment at the end. It is possible, just doesn’t happen often enough.
Time for another NI hike to pay for this? The workers must be squeezed even harder to pay for our leaders thirst for war.
Don’t get me wrong, but I guess members of the public should be given an easy opportunity to make donations for the military. Probably there wouldn’t be any need in spending tax money then.
Broadly speaking, the UK only remains geopolitically relevant because of the size of our economy, and our high tech armed forces (complete with Trident nuclear deterrent).
Events such as with Russia serve as a timely reminder that the UK can’t take peaceful relations for granted.
The Ukrainian government must be kicking itself for agreeing to hand over their nukes to Russia in 1996.
This war likely couldn’t have happened had they kept them.