The title of the article is "“We have three years to prepare for war”....which is very different from "“We have three years to prepare our defences”. The topic at hand here is war not defence.
As preparing one's defences requires a total different strategy than waging wars. The first and most important line of defence is diplomacy.
Something the US, with people like Kissinger, used to understand perfectly. Brilliant and lucid minds like his have, in the US at least, been replaced by pure nitwits who think it means "first strike capability".
How stupid can a nation get? An amazing example of these nitwits in action can be witnessed in the HBO film The Pentagon Wars.