The BBC reports:
War may be coming. Are we psychologically ready?
If the UK suddenly found itself at war, would you know what to do? Do you know what would be expected of you?
But exactly what kind of war is everyone talking about?
Nuclear war? Hypersonic missiles raining down on the UK? Imperialist Russian rolling tanks across the north German plains?
In reality no-one really think this kind of war is in store for the UK - although if it keeps up all this 'threat' rhetoric, it might be.
"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 government talks about stockpiling food and water, which is not a bad thing at the best of times, but what we should all really be thinking about as individuals is:
- what happens if there is no internet or mobile network?
- what happens if banking systems are crippled?
- what happens if drones are used to cripple energy systems?
Military leaders seem to be focused on building more ships and offensive drones etc but they won't help with the above.
As the Russians have discovered, future wars are about resilience: in the face of sanctions, being cut off from financial systems (SWIFT), reduced ability to travel etc.
Unfortunately for the west, Russian people are used to resilience and still remember the 25+ million people the Soviet Union lost in WW2 - including many civilians starved to death in the siege of Leningrad or horribly murdered by the Germans during operation Barbarossa - losses that make the sacrifices of the 'Great War' seem like a sideshow.
But Russia has critical resources to fall back on and power the country, while many western countries depend on imports or unreliable green energy with drone-vulnerable wind turbines and solar panel farms that are easy to pick off one by one.
And Russia has a sophisticated space program that may prove to be a decisive advantage in any kind of future war.
General Sir Richard Shirreff argues that Russia's initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 was the real turning point, the moment Russia revealed itself as a tenacious 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.
This is a quite extraordinary assertion that lacks any understanding of history.
First of all Russia did not invade Ukraine in 2014 - although the Ukrainian state did invade the Donbas to suppress the 'separatists'.
Secondly you only need to go back to the words of Nato’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay to understand what NATO was always all about:
‘Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down’ – those were the words of Nato’s first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, when explaining the aims behind the new military alliance (as it was then). Simple rhetoric it may well be, but Ismay’s words seem to be of haunting significance in the world we inhabit more than half a century later.
What Ismay's words tell you is that it is NATO that has been at war with Russia since NATO was founded back in 1948/49, it just doesn't admit it publicly.
The end of history did not come in 1991 and it was complacent and foolish of the west to imagine it did.