2017: War with Russia by General Sir Richard Shirreff - review

From Russia with love. By Robert Fox
Ready for action: Russian soldiers march in this year’s Victory Day parade in Red Square on May 7
AFP/Getty Images
Robert Fox19 May 2016

On a sunny day in May a team of American trainers are relaxing at a bar outside Donetsk, Ukraine. They are lured to dinner by a group of friendly locals, soon revealed to be an ill-disguised band of Russian Spetsnaz special forces. One of the Americans is shot as he escapes and the rest are soon on Moscow television denounced as US guerrillas bent on fomenting war on the Russian people. Within hours the Russian president is implementing his plan for a war to unite all Russians, or rather as many as possible, and humiliate their arch nemesis, the American dominated Nato alliance.

This is the opening scenario of Richard Shirreff’s first novel, surely the best piece of superpower military fiction since Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, or the legendary Doctor Strangelove by Peter George. With breathtaking urgency — and credibility — the author, a recently retired British Nato four-star general, shows in punchy drama-documentary style the western nations getting trapped into open warfare with Putin’s Russia.

Much of the fault lies in the casual incompetence of the western leadership in security and foreign affairs. In May 2017, in the Shirreff scenario, the main battlefront switches quickly from Ukraine, where the job of russification of the east is soon completed, to the Baltic states.

In their long history, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia have had only brief episodes of real independence. But in 1994 they became full members of Nato, protected by the treaty’s Article 5, which pledges that, if invaded, the allies must be Three Musketeers and fight all for one and one for all.

However, Vladimir Vladimirovich — he is never referred to as Putin — doesn’t believe this, and he wants the Baltic states back as a natural part of his concept of “the Russian house”. Riots and bloodshed among the large Russian minority in Riga cue the main Russian ground invasion of all three states. The rest is the main drama of Shirreff’s fable, and to say more would be let off spoilers for this excellent plot like a chain of exploding IEDs.

The great strength of the tale is that it is told by an insider who really knows. The scenes inside the alliance’s headquarters are wonderfully depicted — the politics as electric as the shooting. We watch politicians and ambassadors, demurring and delaying, trying to avoid action at all costs. But all know that the war to their east could go nuclear at any second — for the nuclear option is written in to every major phase of Russia’s current military and war doctrine.

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The moral of the story is clear. The relentless hollowing out of the military and defence postures of the west have placed us all in danger. Cameron’s casually dysfunctional defence policies have cut UK military strength by half since 2010 and Obama’s posture of intellectualised disengagement has left Europe and the Mediterranean exposed. In the book the British PM is a wonderfully weasley figure, William Spencer, who is finally brought down by his own smug inertia. The characters, military and civilian, are quite brilliant in a narrative of cartoonish energy — Dick Tracy meets Raymond Chandler. Of course, some will quibble about the tank-spotting detail. This is not the point. This is a parable with a real message about our general ineptitude in the new realities of hard power.

So run the hot bath, pour the fine Malt, put Leonard Cohen on the player — and if necessary have the razor blade in reserve. Enjoy this riot of a book. And be very afraid — it really could happen like this.

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