In June 2022, a new Chief of the General Staff addressed the Royal United Services Institute Land Warfare Conference in London. He opened with a sentence that set the tone for everything that followed. "I stand here as the first Chief of the General Staff since 1941 to take up this position in the shadow of a major state on state land war in Europe." The speaker was General Sir Patrick Sanders, who had taken up the post of professional head of the British Army four months after Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine. His message was blunt. "We are the generation that must once again prepare the army for combat in Europe." Over the next two years, Sanders would become the most publicly outspoken British Army chief in a generation, warning that the country needed to mobilise, to rebuild its warfighting strength, and to prepare its people for the possibility of a major war. His tenure, from June 2022 to June 2024, was defined by that warning, and by the Army's response to the largest land war in Europe since 1945.
General Sir Patrick Sanders, Chief of the General Staff, in 2022. Credit: Ministry of Defence, OGL 3 via Wikimedia Commons.
Early life and commissioning
Patrick Nicholas Yardley Monrad Sanders was born on 6 April 1966 at Tidworth, in Wiltshire, in the garrison military hospital. He was the son of Lieutenant Colonel John Sanders. His childhood was spent in the places where a service family goes: Norway, Gibraltar and Iraq, where his father served as a defence attache. He was educated at Worth School, a Catholic independent school in West Sussex, and then went to the University of Exeter, which he left after a year. His path to the Army was not a straight one. He was first commissioned into the Royal Green Jackets as a second lieutenant on probation on 23 September 1984, as part of an undergraduate cadetship, but his commission was terminated in July 1985 when he left university without completing his degree. He then attended the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and was commissioned again as a second lieutenant in the Royal Green Jackets on 12 April 1986. He later completed a Master of Arts in defence technology at Cranfield University.
His early service was as an infantry officer in the Royal Green Jackets in Germany, Norway and the United Kingdom, during the final years of the Cold War. He served on operations in Northern Ireland, in the difficult years of the Troubles, and in the Balkans, in Bosnia and in Kosovo, as the British Army found itself committed to a succession of peacekeeping and stabilisation missions after the Cold War ended. These were the formative experiences of a generation of British officers who had joined expecting to defend West Germany against a Soviet invasion and instead found themselves policing divided communities and enforcing fragile ceasefires. Sanders learned his trade in those places, and the habits of mind he formed there, a focus on the soldier on the ground, a distrust of easy answers, and a willingness to speak plainly about hard truths, stayed with him throughout his career.
Battalion command in Iraq
Sanders became Chief of Staff of 1st Mechanised Brigade in 2002, and in 2005 he took command of the 2nd Battalion, the Royal Green Jackets. It was a command that would define his reputation as a fighting soldier. In 2007, as the battalion was reorganised to become the 4th Battalion, The Rifles, he took it to Iraq, where it was based in Basra during one of the most violent periods of the British deployment. The battalion's bases in the city came under almost constant indirect fire, and its soldiers faced roadside bombs and firefights every time they left the wire. Sanders led the battalion through that tour, and his conduct earned him the Distinguished Service Order. The citation, published on 25 July 2008, appointed him a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order "in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Iraq during the period 1st October 2007 to 31st March 2008". He had been awarded the OBE in 2004, and the DSO marked him out as one of the most decorated and operationally experienced officers of his generation.
His account of the Basra tour, given in an interview after his return, made clear the intensity of what his soldiers had endured. He described a period in which the battalion took some 2,000 rounds of indirect fire, was hit by about 100 improvised explosive devices, and faced what he called a near certainty of a firefight every time it went out. That experience shaped his later views about the Army. He had seen what it meant to ask soldiers to fight a determined enemy with limited resources, and he carried that lesson into every senior appointment that followed.
General Sanders inspects a passing out parade. Credit: Ministry of Defence, OGL 3 via Wikimedia Commons.
Brigade command in Afghanistan
In August 2009 Sanders took command of 20th Armoured Brigade. Two years later, in October 2011, he deployed with the brigade to Afghanistan as Task Force Helmand, commanding the British brigade in Helmand Province during a demanding period of the campaign. His leadership there earned him a further honour. On 28 September 2012 he was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire "in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Afghanistan during the period 1 October 2011 to 31 March 2012". The CBE, like the DSO before it, was awarded for command on operations, not for staff work. By the time he left Afghanistan, Sanders had commanded at battalion and brigade level in both of Britain's major wars of the early twenty first century, and he had done so in the two hardest places in each of them.
His staff appointments in between those commands were equally significant. He served as Colonel Army Strategy, as the Chief of the Defence Staff's Liaison Officer to the Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff in the Pentagon, and as Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Operations) in the Ministry of Defence, where he was responsible for the direction of military operations and regularly briefed the Prime Minister and the Cabinet. He also served as Director of Operations in the Ministry of Defence. These roles gave him a view of defence from the top, and they taught him how the machinery of government worked, and how slowly it could move when it needed to move fast.
Higher command and Strategic Command
Sanders took command of the 3rd (United Kingdom) Division in April 2015. In December 2016 he was appointed Commander Field Army and promoted to lieutenant general. The Field Army was the Army's warfighting arm, and the appointment placed him in charge of the formations that would fight if Britain went to war. He held that post for two and a half years, and in May 2019 he was promoted to general and appointed Commander of Joint Forces Command. That command was renamed Strategic Command on 9 December 2019, and Sanders became its first commander under the new name. Strategic Command was a new organisation, created to bring together the capabilities that did not belong to a single service: special forces, defence intelligence, cyber operations, space, and medical services. Sanders led it through its formative two years, driving forward what the Ministry of Defence called multi domain integration, the idea that future war would be fought across land, sea, air, space and cyberspace at the same time, and that the armed forces had to be organised to fight that way.
His work at Strategic Command also placed him at the centre of the Government's Integrated Review of security, defence, development and foreign policy, and the Defence Command Paper that followed it. The Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, said when announcing Sanders as the next Chief of the General Staff that he had "played a key role in the development and shaping of the UK Government's Integrated Review and Defence Command Paper by reflecting the new and emerging threats posed by cyber and 'greyzone' warfare". Sanders himself, in a statement on his appointment, said that he looked forward to building on the work of Strategic Command, and that it had been "a privilege to lead Strategic Command in its formative two years". He was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the 2020 New Year Honours.
Chief of the General Staff
The announcement that Sanders would become Chief of the General Staff came on 24 February 2022, the same day that Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine. He took up the post on 13 June 2022, succeeding General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith. Within days of taking office, he wrote to every soldier in the Army. The letter, which was widely reported, said that the conflict in Ukraine underscored the Army's primary purpose, to protect Britain and to be ready to fight and win wars on land, and that there was now a need to deter Russian aggression through the threat of force. It was the first of a series of public interventions that would make Sanders the most outspoken Army chief in decades.
His speech to the RUSI Land Warfare Conference later that month set out his programme in full. He called it Operation Mobilise. The Army, he said, would have a singular focus: to mobilise to meet the threat and thereby prevent war in Europe. He was explicit that the Army was not mobilising to provoke war, but to prevent it. He described the scale of the war in Ukraine in stark terms, citing the numbers of Russian battalion tactical groups committed, the casualty rates, and the ammunition expenditure that would exhaust the combined stockpiles of several NATO countries in a matter of days. He called the moment "our 1937 moment", drawing a parallel with the late 1930s, when Britain had recognised the danger too late and had to rearm in a hurry. "We are not at war," he said, "but we must act rapidly so that we aren't drawn into one through a failure to contain territorial expansion."
Under Sanders, the Army led the British response to the invasion of Ukraine. The centrepiece was Operation Interflex, the UK led multinational training programme for Ukrainian recruits, which launched in June 2022. Under Interflex, Ukrainian volunteers with little or no previous military experience were brought to Britain and put through a five week course in weapons handling, battlefield first aid, patrol tactics and the law of armed conflict, before returning to the front. The programme was the largest military training effort on British soil since the Second World War. By November 2023 it had trained 30,000 Ukrainian recruits, and by the time Sanders left office the total had passed 45,000. Sanders visited the training himself, and in February 2023 he accompanied the King on a visit to Ukrainian recruits training in the UK. The Army also supplied Challenger 2 tanks, AS-90 self propelled guns, and other equipment to Ukraine, and British instructors trained Ukrainian soldiers on those systems.
The pre-war generation
Sanders's most controversial intervention came in January 2024, when he addressed the International Armoured Vehicles exhibition in London. He said that "Ukraine really matters", and he warned that the British public were part of a "pre-war generation" who needed to be ready for the possibility of war with Russia. He argued that the Army should grow to a strength of 120,000 within three years, including reserves, and he called for the nation to prepare for the mobilisation of tens of thousands of citizens in the event of war. He was careful to say that he was not advocating conscription or an immediate call up of volunteers, but that Britain needed to be able to mobilise at scale if it were required to do so. The speech was widely reported, and it provoked a debate about whether the country was ready for the kind of war that Ukraine was fighting. The Government distanced itself from any suggestion of conscription, but Sanders's underlying point, that the Army was too small for the threats it faced, was widely shared among defence analysts.
His warning was consistent with the message he had delivered since taking office. He had repeatedly argued that the Army needed to be larger, better equipped, and more ready to fight a high intensity war, and that the country as a whole needed to think about resilience, about protecting critical infrastructure, and about what it would mean to support a war effort. He also championed cultural change within the Army, speaking openly about mental health, about LGBT rights, and about the need to make the Army a place where talented people from every background could thrive. The University of Exeter, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in July 2024, noted that he was known for "his openness to technology and innovation and steering the Army through a difficult period in its history, as well as championing LGBT rights and destigmatising discussion about mental health".
General Sanders (second from left) with the Australian and American army chiefs at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington, on 11 March 2024. Credit: United States Department of Defense, public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Retirement and legacy
Sanders was succeeded as Chief of the General Staff by General Sir Roland Walker on 15 June 2024. He formally retired from the British Army on 31 December 2024, after a career of forty years. In retirement he has remained a prominent voice on defence. He co-hosts a weekly geopolitical podcast for The Times and The Sunday Times, "The General and the Journalist", and he has taken on a series of advisory roles, including as Strategic Defence Adviser to Santander Bank and as Non-Executive Chairman of Herminius Strategic Intelligence. He was awarded the Commander of the Legion of Merit by the United States in 2024. In September 2026 he was created a life peer as Baron Sanders of Hallingdal, of Hallingdal in the Kingdom of Norway and of East Knoyle in the County of Wiltshire, and he sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.
Sanders's legacy is still being argued over, and it will be some time before a settled judgement is possible. His supporters point to the fact that he took over the Army at the moment when the post Cold War era ended, and that he forced a debate about warfighting readiness that the country had avoided for thirty years. Under his leadership, the Army trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, accelerated its modernisation, and began the difficult work of preparing for a kind of war that many had assumed would never come again. His critics point to the fact that the Army continued to shrink during his tenure, that recruitment remained a persistent problem, and that his public warnings sometimes sat uneasily with the Government's position. What is not in doubt is that Sanders changed the conversation about defence in Britain. He was the first Army chief in eighty years to take office in the shadow of a major land war in Europe, and he used that position to tell the country, plainly and repeatedly, that it needed to be ready. Whether the country listened is a question for the years ahead, but the warning itself, delivered by a soldier who had led men under fire in Basra and in Helmand, carried a weight that few others could match.
Sources
- GOV.UK, "General Sir Patrick Sanders KCB CBE DSO ADC Gen", biography, https://www.gov.uk/government/people/patrick-sanders
- GOV.UK, "General Sir Patrick Sanders appointed new Chief of the General Staff", press release, 24 February 2022, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/general-sir-patrick-sanders-appointed-new-chief-of-the-general-staff
- British Army, "Chief of the General Staff opens the RUSI Land Warfare Conference", speech transcript, June 2022, https://www.army.mod.uk/news/general-sir-patrick-sanders-chief-of-the-general-staff-opens-the-rusi-land-warfare-conference-with-his-speech/
- University of Exeter, "General Sir Patrick Sanders honoured by the University of Exeter", 22 July 2024, https://news.exeter.ac.uk/university/general-sir-patrick-sanders-honoured-by-the-university-of-exeter/
- University of Exeter, honorary graduates, "General Sir Patrick Sanders KCB CBE DSO ADC Gen (LLD)", 16 July 2024, https://www.exeter.ac.uk/about/honorarygraduates/archive/hongrads2024/2024/timetable/ceremony4/
- Newcastle University, "Defending the UK in unprecedented times by General Sir Patrick Sanders", 13 February 2025, https://www.ncl.ac.uk/university-events/public-lectures/past-lectures/archive/defending-the-uk/
- Defence IQ, "Lieutenant General Patrick Sanders, Commander Field Army", https://www.defenceiq.com/events-internationalarmouredvehicles/speakers/lieutenant-general-patrick-sanders
- The Centre for Army Leadership Podcast, Episode 35, "Leading the British Army with Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders", 3 August 2023, https://armyleadership.podbean.com/e/episode-35-chief-of-the-general-staff-sir-general-patrick-saunders/
- Defence Equipment and Support, "DE&S supports 30,000 Ukrainian recruits trained in largest UK military training effort since Second World War", https://des.mod.uk/des-supports-30000-ukrainian-recruits-trained-in-largest-uk-military-training-effort-since-second-world-war/
- House of Commons Library, "Timeline of British military assistance to Ukraine (2022 to present)", Research Briefing CBP-9914, 11 August 2026, https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9914/CBP-9914.pdf
- GOV.UK, "Commander Strategic Command, General Sir Patrick Sanders' Speech at the Air and Space Power Conference", 15 July 2020, https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/commander-strategic-command-general-sir-patrick-sanders-speech-at-the-air-and-space-power-conference
- The London Gazette, issue 65173, 8 September 2026, creation of the barony of Sanders of Hallingdal, https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/65173
- UK Parliament, "Lord Sanders of Hallingdal", member profile, https://members.parliament.uk/member/5482/career
- Wikipedia, "Patrick Sanders (British Army officer)", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Sanders_(British_Army_officer) (used for leads and cross-checking only; all key facts verified against the official and reputable sources above)
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