“I’ve been sitting in private committee briefings with senior officials, and they say there’s a good chance we’ll be in a war before the next election. I think that’s right, that’s my view,” Mike Martin, the Liberal Democrat MP for Tunbridge Wells, elected to parliament in the 2024 election, tells me. “There’s certainly more than a 50% chance we’ll be involved in a war before 2030.”
. Martin is a former British Army officer who served multiple tours of Afghanistan, picked up a PhD in war studies and has authored books including 2023’s How to Fight a War.
It’ll all be professional soldiers and drones though, you might think. A modern war for modern times. “Obviously if we got into a big war, we’d have conscription straight away,” says Martin.
The Ukraine war has shown how, despite all the high-tech advances, modern wars still involve soldiers digging trenches like they did in the First World War.
“Would we need to conscript? Yeah, we would. Because ultimately, we’re not at a stage yet where you can replace people with drones,” says Martin. “We’re a long way off from that. Drones are fine, as far as they go, but you still need people to occupy villages, hold ground, and all the rest of it. And that’s not going to change for quite some time.”
“Despite the fact that we are in a really precarious international situation, the government has no desire to talk about defense and security, because if they acknowledge the pretty parlous state of the British military, they open up another front of more people arguing for more spending, so they make their lives difficult.”
https://www.bigissue.com/news/politics/uk-war-mike-martin-interview-defence-spending-conscription/
I don't necessarily agree with all of these but pp's posts about drones being adequate to fight are not realistic.