War is not just missiles, defence experts warn Britons

The authors of last year’s defence review have warned that the British public fails to understand it is already experiencing the early stages of conflict, because people associate war with missiles and kinetic attacks rather than the cyberattacks, infrastructure threats and supply chain disruptions that are already targeting the country on a daily basis.

Dr Fiona Hill, who co-authored the review, told the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy that this was a fundamental failure of narrative. “When you say that Russia has declared war on Europe, people think that war is actually only something kinetic in the sense of missiles flying, ballistic missiles, the kinds of things that we are seeing in both the case of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran and Russia’s attack on Ukraine,” she said.

“They are not thinking of those very things we are already facing. That is honestly a fault of the narrative about the kinds of warlike and wartime scenarios we are facing.”

Hill told MPs the scale of ongoing attacks was significant, saying there were tens of thousands of cyberattacks on a daily or sometimes weekly basis, risks to critical national infrastructure, attacks on undersea cables and vulnerability to the gas pipeline from Norway to the UK. She pointed to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz as an example of how quickly supply chains that most of daily life depended on could be disrupted. “It would be very easy to have most of daily life brought to a halt, but that is not being explained to the British public,” she said.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who led the review, agreed that complacency was widespread and not limited to government. “There is a belief that we are safe. We have a moat around the British Isles; we are a long way from trouble; we do not think that we could possibly be attacked,” he told the committee, adding that day by day cyberattacks and attacks on undersea cables were happening. “It would be horrible to think that it would take an actual crisis, an actual attack on the United Kingdom, before we woke up to the kinds of threats that are facing us,” he said.

Hill also addressed the shifting posture of the United States, warning that the defence review had factored in a change in American behaviour regardless of who won the 2024 election, with the US no longer wanting to take the lead in providing for European defence. President Trump, she said, had “simply ripped off the Band-Aid here and gone basically to dark in terms of support for the transatlantic alliances, just much quicker than one might have anticipated”, describing his current approach as unconstrained and uninhibited in a way his first term had not been.