This Is Not An Exercise

A journey through the vast secret realm where Britain's military prepares for War, revealing how it shapes our country and transforms our society

Britain is one of the most militarised places in the world. An area larger than London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow combined is given over to military use, for training, weapons manufacture, bomb testing, drone operation, surveillance and much we know nothing about. Its equivalent sites around the globe – from Kenya to Cyprus to Australia – are themselves part of the 5-6% of the earth’s surface given over to military training and testing, roughly the same amount covered by rainforest. History teaches us that preparing for war is every bit as transformative as war itself, and yet what happens in this vast world is largely invisible and goes completely unscrutinised, known only to a tightly knit military-political establishment.

Tom Evans has spent more time in more of these places than any other outsider. Through a series of journeys into these scarred and uncanny zones, and encounters with the people and the violence that inhabit them, he traces the deep history and vivid present of Britain’s militarisation, as well as the lessons we can learn from them about our society and likely future. He argues that at a time of heightened insecurity and threat, we can and should reconfigure our military force so that it is genuinely defensive, and that to do so would not be a burden or a risk, but an act supportive of freedom, security, and flourishing.

Above all, he brings our attention to a hidden realm, without which we fail to understand our current system of military power and preparation, and without which we are not seriously equipped to discuss it at all.