Defence review co-author warns UK looks like soft target

The co-author of the Strategic Defence Review has warned that Britain increasingly looks like a soft target rather than a hard target, telling MPs the country is extraordinarily vulnerable to foreign interference through its election system and money flowing from external sources to political candidates and parties.

Dr Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former US intelligence official who served on the SDR alongside Lord Robertson, made the comments to the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy during an evidence session on societal resilience on 27 April, saying that modern war was fought with many different methods including propaganda and that there were many ways in which British society could be weakened and exploited.

“Increasingly the UK looks like a soft target rather than a hard target,” she told the committee. “The UK is extraordinarily vulnerable through the election system and money coming from different sources that can be given to political candidates and parties.”

Hill pointed to the Swedish concept of psychological defence as a model the UK should consider, describing it as training people to deal with information warfare so that they could recognise when they were being manipulated. “There are many different ways in which British society can be weakened and exploited, so we should be thinking of how we can make the UK less of a soft target for all kinds of different operations,” she said.

Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, who led the SDR, agreed with the assessment, warning that the UK had become a proxy for the United States in the Russian domestic press, with what he described as an almost hysterical approach being taken toward the UK as the major opponent in the war in Ukraine. “We should be very wary, therefore, about the vulnerabilities in our critical national infrastructure and our military,” he said.

Hill also warned that the UK had so far failed to have what she called its Zeitenwende moment, the reckoning that prompted Germany to fundamentally reframe its approach to defence and security following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. “We had the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, which turned him into a dirty bomb spreading polonium all over London. There was the poisoning of the Skripals with enough Novichok to take out all of Salisbury. Even that did not have an effect,” she said, adding that there was “a failure to then make that jump into what that could mean for the UK.”

The comments came during a wider discussion about the UK failure to launch the national conversation on defence and security recommended by the SDR, with Robertson telling MPs he had reminded the Prime Minister on a couple of occasions about his commitment to it but that the government had not started the conversation. “I understand that there was a conversation about a conversation recently inside the Ministry of Defence, but there are no signs of it outside it,” he said.