The greatest weakness in British defence and strategy has been hidden in plain sight for decades. It is a failure in policy for which even our close allies are now criticising us.
This is our woeful preparation for defending our homeland – including what every one of us might have to do were the unthinkable to happen.
Yet increasing acts of violence on British soil and across Europe have changed the game and are now forcing a reckoning at the highest levels of the military.
Senior members of the armed and security forces, officials, analysts and practitioners alike are now drawing up plans for how we defend ourselves. Finally, they are acknowledging our lack of provision for and understanding of homeland defence – and are taking steps to address it, including tearing up the long-neglected “war book” to prepare for invasion, and even looking at splitting the Army into separate forces to protect ourselves at home and abroad.
Hybrid attacks are on the rise across Europe – many blamed on Russia and its proxies. Only this week the Netherlands was hit by what appeared to be a major act of sabotage across its rail network. Commanders and defence officials fear that an attack like this – or worse – on the UK is only a matter of time.
Last year’s cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover should have been a warning. It was dismissed first as an accident, but appears to have been sponsored by Moscow. The whole operation cost the company just shy of £2bn and the British economy as a whole a further £2bn.
Britain’s ports and airports, railway and road hubs and junctions are vulnerable. Roughly 95 per cent of all imports come to the UK by sea, as do nearly 50 per cent of food requirements. Energy comes by ships or pipelines that have been receiving unhealthy attention from Russian submarines and the dedicated spy vessel, the Yantar. Russia can strike what is known as a “single point of failure”. This could be the blocking of navigation channels to a major port like Milford Haven, Felixstowe, Grangemouth or the Port of London. Supertankers conveying oil and gas, like most road transportation, rely on GPS for navigation – which is an old satellite navigation system and highly vulnerable in the hackers’ wars to come.
Military and civil planners believe the government needs to act now to configure forces and volunteer services and specialists for home resilience and defence. They see promises to aspire to spend 2.7 per cent of GDP on defence in two years’ time, maybe, or 3.5 per cent by 2035, as of little value. Preparation for civil protection and defence needs to happen now.
The government is sending a confusing message. Last year’s Strategic Defence Review called for a “national conversation” involving “the whole of society” about homeland defence. This year it has cut back resources for reserve forces, a fundamental for civil protection, and shows little willingness to support cadet forces. Last week Luke Pollard, the minister for defence procurement and innovation, announced that the Government was cancelling the second phase of the RAF’s Project Guardian, a vital command system for air defence of the UK, to save £9.47m.
Felixstowe port could be a prime target for a hostile actor (Photo: Dan Kitwood/Getty)Yet at the same time, Pollard gave a written statement that the Ministry of Defence was rewriting its war books – reviving an old practise of the two World Wars and the Cold War but abandoned in 1991 – to prepare civil society for what to do and what would happen if there is an attack on Britain. That is a sign of how seriously this is now being taken.
While homeland civil defence did get mentioned in the big Tony Blair defence review of 1998, and through a succession of reviews this century, no one in Whitehall seemed over-keen on the subject. Only a few years ago, I was informed that a senior serving military commander “didn’t believe that home defence was the business of the British Army of today”.
None of today’s senior commanders would agree – quite the reverse. There is now real concern that there are no dedicated formations and commands dedicated to homeland defence. They are concerned that Scandinavian allies especially have been far more adroit in preparing civilian populations for the latest hybrid threats from drones, cyber attacks and the like. “We have no homeland naval force and command as such and no homeland army,” said one official only this month. “The Army and Navy need to be prepared for what is facing us now, and not what happen in four or five years’ time.”
All three services are now looking at building up home forces, a mixture of regulars, specialists in cyber and electronic warfare, and reservists. The Army could be split into the 1st Army for expeditionary, overseas operations, and the 2nd Army for homeland defence. It must be accompanied by a supporting civilian structure.
Soldiers from 16 Air Assault Brigade on exercise on Salisbury Plain this year. Homeland defence will need sustained and reasonable finance, writes Robert Fox (Photo: Finnbarr Webster/Getty)One veteran commander has suggested privately to me that the country needs to build up a new, realistic, civil defence apparatus. “We have had to do it before, during the Cold War, and we knew how to make it work – a skill I fear we may have lost now. We had Civil Defence and they had the kinds of equipment we have used in previous emergencies, such as the Green Goddess fire engines used in fuel strikes.”
Homeland defence will need sustained and reasonable finance – and not the penny-pinching approach of successive governments to reserves and volunteers – which have been bottom of the pile. It shouldn’t cost that much extra – we just need to spend what we have already. There is also a bigger problem that we can trace back to 2010, when for the first time, the nuclear programme was taken out of central funds and put into the defence budget. So, too, were the budgets for the security services such as MI5 and MI6. This is why comparison with the budgets of close European allies such as Germany or Italy is a false narrative. Take nuclear and the spooks out of the defence budget, you will find Britain is spending roughly the same, or less, than Italy on conventional defence, which is somewhere around £48bn to £50bn.
So, what is to be done? Obviously the first thing is to get nuclear out into a separate budget and ministry. Otherwise, the drain of soaring nuclear budgets will continue to threaten the credibility and effectiveness of conventional forces and reserves.
Secondly, there has to be a separate combined command for home forces, reserves and supporting agencies. The increase in threats to economic and social stability from climate change, fires and weird weather to cyber, drone and even biological attacks make this a necessity.
The latest noises from Moscow have to be taken seriously. Vladimir Putin has declared 2027 to be his “year of geography” when Russia will absorb Ukraine. His generals have called for a mobilisation of 800,000 extra troops by spring. Foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian ideologue Alexander Dugin – dubbed “Vladimir Putin’s brain” – have once more declared Nato to be the main enemy.
And Britain is still part of Nato. It must act like it.
Key context
While experts do not see a major Russian attack on a Nato country as probable in the near term, fears are rising that Moscow could escalate its current campaign of sabotage. Suspected Russian “grey-zone” attacks against British and other European targets have surged in recent months This month, a British man was in court accused of planning to sabotage a drone factory in Wiltshire on the instructions of Russian intelligence. That follows other attacks including arson at a warehouse housing equipment for Ukraine in 2024 But officials see the threat of Russian hybrid attacks rising following reports of British-made drones being used for Ukrainian strikes inside Russia last month. The Russian embassy in London said this would “inevitably carry consequences”. Escalation could involve a major cyber attack on critical British energy, banking or transport infrastructure, or even a kinetic attack on undersea cables and pipelinesHence then, the article about putin has changed the game and the uk is scrambling to overhaul homeland defence was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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