If the United Kingdom suddenly faced armed conflict, would citizens know what to do? Would they understand what the state would demand of them? The government is now pushing the public to begin preparing for severe disruption—stockpiling tinned food and water, strengthening community resilience, and contemplating the possibility of war itself.
Work is underway to refresh the government's so-called "war book", a document that has not undergone substantial revision in decades. The government's resilience action plan describes the war-book update as part of a wider programme to accelerate departmental planning and oversee cross-government crisis protocols. Britain's most senior military officer has sounded an urgent warning. Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton declared this week that the Russian threat places Britain in the "most dangerous" period of his 35-year military career.
Yet what precisely is the threat? In 1940, a German invasion of British soil was a genuine possibility. The prospect of Russian armoured columns advancing down Whitehall, by contrast, appears remote.
"It's not the tanks you need to worry about,"says historian Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us.
"It's the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It's the hacking into systems on which so many things depend. The possibility for asymmetric war, for cyber war, is growing by leaps and bounds."
The deeper question remains: after eight decades without warfare on home territory, is British society psychologically equipped for it? Are citizens prepared to accept substantial increases in defence spending, and the sacrifices that might follow in other areas of national life? Or does the threat feel too distant to be credible?
How has Britain's view of war changed since 1914?
The answer lies partly in history.
"I think we have become used to the idea that peace is the normal state of affairs, that it's going to last,"MacMillan observes.
"So no, I don't think we are psychologically prepared… but I do think that we are beginning to recognise that war is something that is closer to us than we'd like to think"."
Archive film from 1913 shows Britons at the races and cricket matches, a stark contrast to the devastation that followed during the First World War. The summer before 1914 has become a symbol of unpreparedness for conflict.
"In a sense it's now a bit like those Edwardian summers before 1914, when there was a lot of talk of war but the notion of actually going to war seemed so far-fetched as to be beyond belief and I think that's where we are at the moment,"says retired General Sir Richard Shirreff, former Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe.
In 1914, recruitment offices overflowed with volunteers. That generation had grown up on tales of empire and imperial glory, where war meant heroic cavalry charges, swift victory, and soldiers home by Christmas. The reality proved catastrophically different. One in eight of the men who enlisted in Britain fell in the fields of Flanders, France, Mesopotamia and Gallipoli. Survivors memorialised their grief in thousands of war monuments scattered across every community in the land.
That conflict fundamentally altered how Europe understood warfare.
"The experience of the First World War showed just how dreadful modern war is… And the idea that war could be glamorous never really came back after that,"MacMillan says.
Why has Europe become unprepared for conflict?
Western European leadership has fallen into a decades-long "crisis of disbelief", argues Andrew Michta, a Polish-born American academic and professor of strategic studies at Hamilton School, University of Florida. He contends that Britain, like many European nations, suffers from dangerously low psychological readiness, and that authorities have failed to be candid about mounting threats.
"The Germans have totally disarmed during the last 30 years. The UK is also largely disarmed and, most importantly, mentally. There is no readiness for what's happening because the policy elites are not addressing their publics in a way that would honestly state the gravity of the situation,"Michta says.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, numerous European nations began a prolonged reduction in military readiness, slashing defence budgets in the belief that the Russian threat had vanished. Michta points to Germany's heavy dependence on Russian energy via the Nord Stream gas pipelines—which carried vast quantities of gas from Russia to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea—as evidence of a misguided belief that Berlin could manage Moscow through political and economic engagement alone.
"So you've lived through 20 years of appeasement in Europe driven by the elites' lack of willingness or courage… to articulate how the situation was changing and how rapidly."
General Shirreff identifies Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 as the true turning point, the moment Russia revealed itself as a persistent threat to Western security.
"The reality is that Russia believes it's been at war with Nato since 2014. Not a conventional war, but a war designed to undermine the integrity of target states or alliances."
"I would never take the Russians for granted. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility for them to try to unhinge Nato by, for example, attempting to take over Spitsbergen [in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard] or something else indirect."
Calls for increased defence spending rest on the belief that the best way to prevent war is to be ready—both psychologically and militarily—to fight one. Not all experts agree with this logic. Psychologist Jim Orford, professor emeritus of clinical and community psychology at the University of Birmingham, argues that belief in an external threat requires simplified thinking.
"In order to contemplate the possibility of going to war we've got to think in simplistic terms. In terms of enemies and heroes. We've got to think of Russia as an enemy. The narratives are all simplified."
"Being [psychologically] prepared for war is the first stage. Contemplating war is the second phase and then actually engaging in war is the third. I think we're well into the 'contemplating war' phase."
How are other European nations preparing?
The "crisis of disbelief" is not evenly distributed across Europe. Nations closer to the Russian border show greater alertness to the threat and higher psychological readiness. Sweden, which has avoided war for 200 years and maintained neutrality for centuries, shifted course dramatically after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It has rapidly become one of Europe's most psychologically prepared nations.
"Russia is self-evidently dangerous",Sweden's outgoing Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson told The Economist magazine recently.
"We don't know when it [the war in Ukraine] ends, but how it ends will define the security situation in our part of the world for at least a generation."
Sweden operates a system of partial conscription in which all school leavers must register for military service. The armed forces select and conscript the most suitable candidates, who then complete up to 15 months of compulsory training before returning to civilian life, employment or higher education. Upon completion, they join the country's substantial reserve force.
"There's a lot of citizen engagement,"says Minna Alander, an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies think tank.
"It was almost an internet joke in 2022 and 2023 that everybody wished for a call up. Sometimes people get frustrated if they haven't been called up for a long time. It's an expectation for sure."
"Sweden has, for example, been identifying civil engineers with some relevant skills in, say, electricity supply who could be exercised in case of disruption. So Sweden can access this pool of civil engineers [who know] what they could do and how they could be activated."
When asked whether Russia should be viewed as a potential aggressor even after the Ukraine conflict ends, Kristersson replied,
"Yes. We have a few hundred years experience of this… We know Russia pretty well."
The three Baltic republics—Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia—possess similarly deep historical knowledge of Russia, having regained independence from Moscow only in the 1990s. German troops, now stationed in Lithuania by invitation, bolster defences against the eastern threat. A thousand British troops lead a multinational force in Estonia for the same purpose.
Finland, however, offers perhaps the most instructive model for mass psychological readiness and civic resilience. Its approach to defence and security stems from historical trauma. Of the 100,000 Nordic citizens who died in the Second World War, 90 per cent were Finnish, killed in the Winter War of 1939–40 against the Soviet Union and the Continuation War that followed from 1941–44.
Finland today shares an 800-mile (1,287 kilometres) border with Russia. After Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Finland abandoned its historic neutrality and joined NATO alongside Sweden.
Finland maintains universal male conscription, with some women also volunteering to serve. Upon completion of service, conscripts become part of Finland's reserve force, closing the gap between professional military and civilian population.
"If conscription is done well, it ties every single family into national security thinking. Your grandfather, your great-grandfather and your sons, they all go to the same military service,"says retired three-star General Arto Raty, former permanent secretary of Finland's Ministry of Defence.
"We bind the whole of society into supporting the military. Every single hospital has its crisis tasking. Every water supply agency. And interestingly, the most publicly trusted organisations in Finland today are the military, the defence forces and the police. That is not the case in most countries."
The Finnish military runs annual crisis-management courses for societal leaders—MPs, government ministers, CEOs of private enterprises and public utilities, health service officials, NGOs and churches.
"We train them in crisis management, so that they understand how society will work in a crisis. We've been doing it every year since 1960."
Finland, with a population of 5.5 million, maintains a professional defence force of 23,000. Britain, with a population of 66 million, has 70,000 active personnel. Yet Finland also possesses a trained reserve force of nearly 1 million and can mobilise a reserve army of 280,000 at short notice. In 2025, Finland spent 2.5 per cent of its GDP on defence, comparable to the 2.3 per cent spent by Britain in the same year.
Should the rest of Europe follow Finland's model when the prospects of conventional war with Russia appear vanishingly remote?
"An army of 70,000 is simply not going to cut the mustard in the sort of war we are going to have to face,"General Shirreff argues.
"So I don't see how we could generate the military capability needed without some form of call-up."
He suggests the Norwegian model might help shift British attitudes toward war.
"There, every school leaver is registered for conscription… and they go and do a year's training after which they go on to university and when, later, they are competing for jobs, if they've got national service on their CV, they're seen as the best candidates… That's the sort of thing we should look at."
"The case has to be made honestly by political leaders who must really look the population in the eye and say 'this has got to be done for us to be secure'."
What is the UK government doing to prepare?
The government has begun accelerating its crisis-planning efforts. The UK government is accelerating central crisis-planning and updating the "War Books" that set out how departments would respond to conflict and threats against the UK mainland. This update represents a significant shift in institutional preparedness.
In June 2026, the Prime Minister announced a Defence Investment Plan worth £298 billion over four years. The plan includes £15 billion in new funding and a rise in defence spending to 2.7 per cent of GDP by 2029. This represents a substantial escalation from previous commitments. Annual defence funding will rise from £54 billion under the previous government to almost £80 billion by 2029, according to the defence plan.
The Ministry of Defence's 2026–27 budget stands at £68.3 billion, with £4.7 billion of the £15 billion uplift still awaiting confirmation. The government has also published a Defence Nuclear Enterprise annual update to Parliament on 15 September 2026, signalling renewed attention to strategic capabilities.
These measures reflect broader European concerns about sustained conflict. NATO defence planners have warned that Europe cannot sustain prolonged war with Russia due to weak public readiness and rising pro-Kremlin populist movements, underscoring the urgency of the psychological and military preparations now underway.
What happens next?
Budget 2026 is expected to confirm the remaining £4.7 billion of the defence uplift. Further parliamentary updates on the Defence Nuclear Enterprise are now underway following the September 2026 annual report. The government's campaign to prepare citizens for cyber-attacks and severe weather, announced earlier in 2026, continues to roll out alongside these institutional changes.
