Dr Robert Seely MBE is author of ‘The New Total War’, and a former Conservative MP.
When Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch said this weekend that Britain was unprepared for conflict, she was right, but I fear the situation is worse than Kemi thinks.
Speaking at the London Defence Conference, she explained how our conventional forces have been run down. Both parties share the blame, and most defence ministers in recent times should hang their heads in collective shame – Ben Wallace excepted. However, given the state of the world, Labour’s recent inaction on defence, and the prioritising of welfare – to their client groups in particular – is inexcusable.
But it is not only the armed forces that are unready, but potentially our ability to protect our core infrastructure and even social cohesion. The recent launch of Resilience Imperative, a campaign group working on this very theme, reminded me how serious the problem is. The way to defeat the UK now would not be in battle itself – that would be almost a side issue – but to attack the functioning and cohesion of our society. The threat: that in any major breakdown of international relations, we could be dealt a hammer blow – a cyber and sabotage Pearl Harbour – prior to any conflict by adversaries who have spent years studying our weaknesses.
The UK military has three roles outlined in the 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR); first, to defend and enhance the resilience of the UK; second, deter and defend the Euro-Atlantic area; and third, shape the global security environment. Successfully attacking our resilience at home prevents us from reinforcing our armed forces in Estonia or deploying anywhere else overseas for that matter; we would be too busy keeping basic order at home.
We don’t know precisely how it would happen – the phasing, to use a military term – but we have an idea of the ingredients: cyber and possibly physical attacks on electricity supplies, a disinformation blitz to create social unrest, the destruction of internet and other communications via subsea cables, followed by other cyber strikes on health, pension payments, etc. There’d be sabotage on oil and gas supplies too, potentially a small number of critical assassinations, whilst political extremists, either ‘useful’ idiots or agents of foreign power, would do their best to bring chaos.
These acts come under various descriptions.
The SDR itself referred to several terms which cover the range of grey zone/hybrid war methods (these include espionage, political interference, sabotage, assassination, electoral interference and dis/info campaigns). The SDR’s chosen term for these tactics is ‘sub-threshold’ attacks. I’m not sure this term is entirely helpful or accurate, but it’s the one they’ve chosen.
First, the grid and cyber.
It’s very likely that China and Russia have malware in the UK’s critical national infrastructure. How do we know? Because China has done so on the US grid and the US has been public about the problem: hidden kill switches in solar panels, persistent access to the US electricity grids and hackers embedded into the US infrastructure. Russia has also embedded itself into US systems; in the highly significant 2020 SolarWinds cyber-attack, Russia maintained a persistent presence on US government servers for months. If they have done it in the US, they will have done it here.
Any sustained cyber-attack, potentially backed up with physical sabotage of the system, might knock out the grid for days, weeks or months even. Worse, it may be controlled by others with the ability to turn it off and on.
Most people are not prepared for a world without electricity; no lights, no heat, and for some, no cooking. Our just-in-time supply chain is designed for speed and efficiency, not resilience. The average person stores three days of food. Within a few weeks food might have to be rationed. We saw panic buying at the start of Covid, especially in large urban centres. How long would social cohesion survive? Judging by the rampaging mobs in south London, we seem to have enough difficulty keeping law and order even in times of plenty.
Economically, a national grid outage would cost between £13 and £50 billion a day.
Unlike in the US, there has been little public discussion of the issue here. British officials probably don’t want to admit the scale of the problem; first, it’s embarrassing and second, because then we’ll need a plan – and money – to deal with it.
Next national and international comms.
There are 65 subsea cables through which 99 percent of our information comes through. We know that Russia has been mapping them. There is a chance that they have prepositioned mines or some kind of disruptive capability on them. We know they have damaged cables in the Baltic Sea by running ships’ anchors over them. Just last week Defence Secretary John Healey announced that some of what was left of the Royal Navy had been tracking a Russian sub and its support vessels which had – again – been mapping these undersea cables that connect Britain to the rest of the world.
Our adversaries won’t even have to be in British waters to hit UK/US cables. They could find targets off the west coast of Ireland. Despite whinging about the British, Irish leaders have lived off the defence provided by the RAF and Royal Navy for the best part of a century. Their own ability to police their own waters is the square root of zero.
In the case of more limited operations the City, Britain’s largest single cash cow, could be hit. To take one example, the City relies on split-second trades and guaranteed information and money flows. Any prolonged shutdown or glitching would undermine its position, pressuring firms to move operations to locations where China or Russia would be less likely to interfere. It’s already happened to one industry. In August 2025, a Russian-sponsored hack into Jaguar Land Rover halted global production for five weeks. The hack cost £2 billion pounds and affected 5,000 businesses.
And from sea to land to space: satellites too are now under threat. Two Russian space vehicles have conducted manoeuvres near European satellites. Both Russia and China are experimenting with warfare in space.
Then there are Info Ops.
To fragment social cohesion and law and order, we should assume our enemies will plan highly disruptive disinformation campaigns, manipulating religions and ethnic divisions. Our liberal elites may chant kumbaya slogans around ‘diversity being our strength’, but that’s not what the Russians think.
Imagine before a partial comms shutdown, Russian cyber professionals seeding faked images of, for example, the murder of a Muslim child by Jews in Manchester or white Britons beating up Muslims. Sound far-fetched? It’s not. It is standard practise for Russian disinformation.
One of the most despicable – but successful – information operations at the start of the 2014 phase of the Ukraine war was a dramatic story of the murder and crucifixion of an ethnic Russian child in an eastern Ukrainian town, Slovyansk. In the chaos of that summer, Russia’s Channel One TV Station urgently reported that on 12 July, Ukrainian soldiers had entered the town and herded residents into its central square. There, they executed a small boy and his mother – an act of wanton brutality. The boy was then crucified. This shocking incident appalled Russians. Widely reported, it delivered a turning point in the Kremlin’s curated conflict in Ukraine, leading to a rise in recruiting into the Russian-controlled opolcheniye – volunteer brigades – willing to fight Ukrainian troops. It also confirmed to millions of Russians that Ukraine’s regime, echoing President Putin’s accusations, was indeed barbarically neo-Nazi.
It was a manifestation of evil.
It was also untrue.
The story was a pack of lies from beginning to end. There was no crucifixion, no murder, but the story spread like wildfire. It became reality. Russian political strategists even have a name for this highly incendiary information, thrown into the public areas like disinformation grenades to galvanise and incite anger – it’s called vbrosi: ‘chucked in’ information. In the UK, a worst-case scenario would see Russians or others trying to incite ethnic or religious-based violence, leading to a form of ethnic cleansing in our cities. Would it work? I hope not, but that’s not the point. They will try.
Add to this the ‘useful idiots’ in the Greens, Your Party or the left of the Labour Party (i.e. most of it), Islamists agitators (from Iran, or possibly ´Russia), and you have a wretched witches brew of the foolish, the malign and the just plain treacherous. Homegrown subversion, but potentially aided by others, would take the form of civil unrest (think Extinction Rebellion but bigger) aligned with physical, semi-professional sabotage attacks under the guise of protest group action, not unlike the pro-Palestine attacks we are already seeing.
These unhappy scenarios do not even include any direct attack on the UK.
So, what can we do?
First, education. I know it’s a dull suggestion, but my own experience is that politicians and the governing classes have a poor understanding of the changing nature of conflict. They still think in terms of ‘heavy metal’ war: planes, tanks and ships, etc. Labour a few soldiers in their Parliamentary ranks, but it doesn’t seem to have helped its thinking.
Conventional force is important and we don’t have enough of it – and with the evolution of automation and drones, conventional conflict is changing dramatically anyway – but we also need to understand other forms of power and how they might be used against us. They are interlinked. The resilience element goes from cost of energy – too high – to the defence of infrastructure – too weak – to maintaining social cohesion and shared purpose. – an unknown.
Whitehall is producing documents: security strategies, resilience documents, etc., and they are building on the work of the last Government. But with other issues in the defence area, there is a lack of urgency, a disconnect between words and actions; the downplaying of defence which has prompted former NATO chief Lord Robertson’s to warn this week of Prime Minister Starmer’s “corrosive complacency.”
Some of Whitehall’s work is just plain wrong, or the result of deluded levels of groupthink. The resilience report references a strong healthcare system and secure energy supply as evidence of resilience. Not even the most deluded Labour MP would describe the NHS as a ‘strong healthcare system’ given its deep-rooted structural flaws. Our suicidal net-zero energy policy is killing our resilience as we become ever more dependent on our potential adversary, China, for manufacturing and on Qatar and others for gas. On cue, this week the IMF told us that the UK would be the G7 nation most affected by the Iran War – if this won’t teach us to use our own gas supplies rather than import from the Middle East, nothing will. Other uncomfortable subjects are just ignored, such as the assumed loyalty of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, many from misogynistic and backward cultures, in Britain?
The best way to keep the peace is to be ready for war; si vis pacem, para bellum, as the Latin truism goes. Yet we currently live in a never-never land of promised defence spending that doesn’t then materialise. Our Government is talking the talk on defence and resilience. It is not walking the walk.
I hope we are not running out of time.