The health service may not have been ready for the pandemic, but the rest of government was even less prepared. As we brace for a potential war, it’s time policy makers listen to that warning, says Joe Hill

Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general, famously asserted that war was the “continuation of politics by other means”. But while talking about war is often good politics, the genuine preparation for war rarely is. Which can make it a hard sell, even though preparation for war is the best way to avoid one in the first place.

Unfortunately Britain’s history of crisis preparation is poor. Almost five years ago, the country was plunged into the first national lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. A viral pandemic had topped the government’s National Risk Register as the highest “non-malicious” risk for several years in the run up to 2020. But planners in government hadn’t considered the risk of non-influenza pandemics (like Covid-19). They thought the realistic death toll would be in the hundreds, when the excess death toll was over 200,000. And Exercise Cygnus, a test of our preparation in 2017, concluded that the country was not prepared for a flu pandemic, but the........

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