Soldier of fortune

The threat which shaped Western European and US defence planning, force structures and military-technological developments for nearly half a century is no more. It is not just a question of the potential adversary's ideological commitment, cohesion or competence, but also of contiguity. The demise, first of the Warsaw Pact and then of the very Soviet Union, and the development of democratic states friendly to the West in the zone between Germany and the Russian Republic, have made direct military confrontation with the inheritor of most of the Soviet Union's military machine pretty well impossible, except, perhaps, at sea or in space. The intention has disappeared and, more important for defence and security planners, so has the capability. The Crimean War of I853-6 makes an interesting comparison with present circumstances. The only way Britain and France could get at Russia was via the Baltic and the Black Sea. Their war devolved primarily into a limited operation to capture the port of Sevastopol. Now Russia, which still has most of the former USSR's war-making capacity, is even more difficult to get at, as Sevastopol and the Crimea are in Ukraine. More pertinently, it is even more difficult for Russia to get out. Defence planning and the allocation of resources to defence have therefore changed fundamentally. Priorities now have more in common with those of the Age of Reason than with those of the Cold War, or than with strategic planning in the late nineteenth century. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, and especially from I945 to about I989, European nations measured

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• New Times for the Military

  Christopher Dandeker•British Journal of Sociology•1994

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