Military Model Scene

Title: Never Ready
Author: Kenton White
Publisher: Helion & Co
ISBN: 978-1-914377-08-2

Number 16 in the Europe @ War series from Helion & Co, considering Britain's Armed Forces and NATO's Flexible Response Strategy, 1967-1989. A 94-page soft-cover book and this one in full colour throughout, only a few black & white images.
The book is adapted from the author's PhD thesis and considers the British part in NATOs planned Flexible Response during the Cold War period. It then gets into the Geopolitics of the Cold War period and the Threat Assessment from 1967. That resulted in a plan for NATO, and the role Britain would have played in it, which influenced the equipment we were to use at sea, in the air and on the ground. It looks at British plans for alerts, for recruitment, reserves, training, logistics and war reserves among other things. All three services were going through reorganisation and re-equipping, while politicians wanted to reduce defence spending. A constant challenge. The main idea was to try and resist any assault without needing to resort to the use of nuclear weapons. Period documents now available show what we expected to happen. There are then a couple of Case Studies, using both the Falklands War of 1982 and the Gulf War of 1991 to see how well we did cope with actual operations. In the conclusion there are questions about whether we could have accomplished the role we had taken on in the event of a war breaking out in Western Europe, and using data from the case studies, opens up some challenging questions.
As it is we never did face a shooting war, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc so all those plans were never tested. The book is well illustrated throughout, with lots of Cold War era British ships, aircraft and military vehicles. There are also plenty of maps to illustrate the various plans and, as usual for the series, a section of 7-pages of neat colour profiles in the middle of the book. I think for many of us who remember going through the period of the Cold War will find this interesting reading.
Thanks to Helion & Co for this review copy.

Robin