Ex-army chief: Britain must prepare for war with Russia by 2030

The former head of the British Army has issued a stark warning that the UK could face direct military conflict with Russia within the next five years — and is currently unprepared to withstand such a scenario.

General Sir Patrick Sanders, who served as Chief of the General Staff until his retirement in 2024, has urged the government to significantly bolster national defences, stressing that a war with Vladimir Putin’s Russia by 2030 is a “realistic possibility”, Caliber.Az reports, citing British media.

Speaking candidly, the 59-year-old general said Britain’s armed forces are presently “too small to survive more than the first few months of an intensive engagement”.

“If Russia stops fighting in Ukraine, you get to a position where within a matter of months they will have the capability to conduct a limited attack on a Nato member that we will be responsible for supporting, and that happens by 2030,” he warned.

“I don’t know what more signals we need for us to realise that if we don’t act now and we don’t act in the next five years to increase our resilience … I don’t know what more is needed."

Sir Patrick, who joined the Army during the Cold War when it boasted around 140,000 regular personnel, also raised concerns about ongoing cuts to troop numbers. Under previous government plans, the size of the regular Army is set to drop from just over 80,000 in 2020 to 72,500 by next year.

“At the moment, the British Army is too small to survive more than the first few months of an intensive engagement, and we’re going to need more,” he said.

“Now the first place you go to are the reserves, but the reserves are also too small. Thirty thousand reserves still only takes you to an army of 100,000."

He criticised the government’s latest Strategic Defence Review, released in June, for failing to address these structural weaknesses.

The general also disclosed that previous efforts to push for civil defence infrastructure — such as bomb shelters and protected command facilities — had been dismissed by officials as too expensive and not urgent.

“It always came down to a conversation of it being too costly and not a high enough priority and the threat didn’t feel sufficiently imminent or serious to make it worth it.

“Finland has bomb shelters for 4.5 million people. It can survive as a government and as a society under direct missile and air attacks from Russia. We don’t have that."

While emphasising Russia as the primary military threat, Sir Patrick also cautioned that Iran could strike British interests at home through the use of proxies.

By Aghakazim Guliyev