General Sir Roland (“Roly”) Walker, chief of the British Army, has warned that Britain must be prepared to fight a war in three years’ time and double the lethality of its army, as the separate threats of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea come to a head, reported The Guardian yesterday. Walker, who succeeded Gen. Sir Patrick Sanders as Chief of the General Staff on June 15, told reporters at the annual RUSI Land Warfare Conference 2024 yesterday, that the West faced “an axis of upheaval” with increasing military ambition, and that a conflict involving one of the countries could lead to “a significant detonation” in another theater. The U.K. and its allies had to be ready “to deter or fight a war in three years,” he argued—what The Guardian calls “a deliberately stark judgment based on China’s hostility towards Taiwan, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and Russia’s militarization as demonstrated by its invasion of Ukraine.”
In a subsequent speech, The Guardian reports further, Walker said he had “a bold ambition” for the army “to double our fighting power in three years and triple by the end of the decade,” not with extra resources but by using technology and techniques developed on the battlefields of Ukraine, such as drones and artificial intelligence. Walker reportedly did not set out the nature of the global threats in the main body of his address, but in a briefing to reporters he argued that the interdependence between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea was growing, as seen in Ukraine, where Iran and North Korea have supplied weapons and China components to aid Moscow’s military effort. “The problem is, the ability to manage any one crisis that involves any of those actors becomes much, much harder,” because they are increasingly supporting each other with weapons, components and intelligence, the general claimed.
