The UK is facing the highest level of threat from Russia since the Cold War, the chief of defence staff has said in a chilling warning for the country.
Stressing that Britain faces its “most dangerous period” in decades, Sir Richard Knighton said the country needs to prepare for “longer conflicts” like in Ukraine.
The threat comes as Russia is “definitely raising the stakes and risks crossing a line,” through cyber attacks, assassination attempts, “or trying to smuggle technology and reckless sabotage,” he said.
His comments come ahead of the long-awaited publication of the Defence Investment Plan in the next few weeks, which has been subject to many delays. But the defence secretary, John Healey, said it could be published before the Nato summit in early July.
Sir Richard told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday: “This is the most dangerous time I have known in my working life.
“And it is important that society and all of us recognise and understand that, and that may mean that we need to make different choices and different priorities.”
The defence investment plan, known as the DIP, was originally slated for publication last autumn but has been repeatedly delayed. It will set out a plan for how money is spent on defence and comes amid growing calls, including from US President Donald Trump for the UK to increase its defence spending.
The chief of the defence staff added: “In my 35-year career, this is the most dangerous period that I have known.
“And as a consequence, it is important that we enhance the capability and the readiness of our armed forces alongside our allies to deter our adversaries from doing something daft.
“Over the last two decades we have been preparing for shorter wars and for conflicts that are confined and limited, what we need to ready ourselves for is potentially much greater, longer conflicts, as we’ve seen in Ukraine.”
Sir Richard said drones and autonomous systems would become “increasingly important in the future of warfare” and are an area where the UK must invest more in and “enhance our capability”.
Ministers have been repeatedly criticised over the delay to the DIP, with Commons Defence Committee chairman Tan Dhesi saying Britain’s military and defence industry “need to know where we stand and where we are going”.
Last month, the former head of the armed forces claimed the UK needs a decade to rebuild its defence.
UK’s military, Jock Stirrup, who was chief of the defence staff during the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown premierships, warned the UK is “badly exposed”.
Speaking to The Independent at the time, Lord Stirrup said: “We are badly exposed as a country.
“We need to replenish stores, munitions, all the sort of consumables of war, which were already far too low, which, of course, have been reduced significantly because of the number that we have rightly given to Ukraine.
“But secondly, we need, in this country and throughout Western Europe, an agile, innovative and rapidly scalable defence base, defence industrial base. And by defence industrial base, I don’t just mean traditional defence companies.”
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