Nato lacks the resilience to maintain a protracted conflict with Russia, a top Royal Navy admiral has warned.
Mike Utley, who serves as a high-ranking maritime commander of the defence bloc, said that the West needed to be prepared for a range of types of warfare, from military to cyber attacks.
While the alliance has superior capabilities to Russia’s war machine, Mr Utley warned that, as it stands, they may not endure a conflict for any length of time.
However, he added: ‘But nations have very much recognised that and are prepared to invest in those capability sets to grow our resilience.’
The Royal Navy admiral told Bloomberg that he was a ‘realist’ and understood that Nato nations would not be able to direct ‘every penny’ towards defence and that ‘prioritisations’ would have to be made.
Mr Utley said that international interdependence on key assets such as technology and supply chains would add further complications to any war.
Explaining it would be a marked difference from the Cold War, he said: ‘This challenge is going to get more complicated, more persistent and isn’t going to go away.’
In its maritime strategy published earlier this year, Nato identified Russia and terrorism as its two greatest threats.
It also acknowledged ‘systemic challenges’ posed by China, citing Beijing’s military buildup in the Arctic and its partnership with Putin as causes of concern.
Nevertheless, Mr Utley said he remained convinced Nato was heading in the right direction as governments wake up to the need to bolster defence.
Russia has continued to test Nato’s defences throughout the year, sending ships into British waters and dispatching drones into Poland.
Nato’s ‘Baltic Sentry’ operation was launched this year to help protect key undersea cables using data and cutting-edge technology to identify and intercept threats.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation was formed in the aftermath of the Second World War and comprises 30 European countries as well as Canada and the US.
While the latter has historically been the bloc’s main contributor, Donald Trump’s national security strategy has sown doubts over his regime’s commitment to investing in European security.
Trump’s national security document set out a drastically different worldview from that of his White House predecessors, expressing willingness to work with formerly perceived hostile nations such as Russia and China, while predicting Europe faces ‘civilisational erasure’.
But Nato’s Secretary General Mark Rutte said that thanks to the US president, the bloc is ‘stronger than it ever was’.
He told the BBC earlier this week that Trump was good news for ‘collective defence, for Nato and for Ukraine’.
Several European countries have yet to meet targets to spend two per cent of gdp on defence.
Members have pledged to increase this figure to five per cent by 2035.
World War III concerns
Concerns have mounted over a possible fresh global conflict amid several areas of tension, including the Israel-Gaza conflict, Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and the situation in Venezuela amid US escalation.
Today, Ukraine’s forces struck a Kremlin-linked oil tanker part of Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’ in the Mediterranean, with Vladimir Putin vowing to retaliate during his annual, hours-long press conference.
Air Chief Marshall Sir Richard Knighton revealed that the UK is working on an ‘Iron Dome’ system similar to that pioneered by Israel.
President Trump has also unveiled plans for a £130 billion ‘Golden Dome’ to intercept ballistic and cruise missiles.
It comes as experts say that cyber attacks would form a major part of an outbreak of war, causing some similar impacts to the pandemic, such as panic buying.
Researcher Dr Pia Hüsch warned that Britain could face a combination of ‘kinetic’ or physical attacks such as by missiles, together with cyber warfare.
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