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 An improved audio format version of our written content. Get your defence and security perspectives now through this podcast. Politik & Regierungen
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  • UK National Resilience

    UK National Resilience
    Oct 24 2025
    The United Kingdom's national resilience is a critical pillar of its security in an increasingly volatile global environment. As geopolitical tensions rise, particularly with adversaries such as Russia, the UK faces multifaceted threats that target its centres of gravity: key societal, economic, and infrastructural elements that underpin national stability. These centres include critical national infrastructure (CNI) such as telecommunications, water, energy, and social cohesion, which are vital to the functioning of modern society. In response to these threats, defence primes have advocated for investments in ground-based air defence (GBAD) systems, often citing Israel's Iron Dome as a model for protecting against missile and drone attacks. However, the UK's geopolitical and geographical context differs significantly from Israel, rendering direct comparisons problematic.
    While GBAD systems have a role, they are not the primary solution to the UK's immediate threats, which are more likely to involve hybrid warfare, cyberattacks, and disruptions to CNI rather than conventional missile barrages. This essay examines the challenges to UK national resilience, the limitations of GBAD as a solution, recent events targeting UK vulnerabilities, and the broader strategies needed to bolster resilience within the NATO framework.
    Understanding Centres of Gravity and UK Vulnerabilities
    In military and strategic theory, centres of gravity are the critical capabilities or assets that, if disrupted, significantly weaken a nation's ability to function. For the UK, these include CNI (telecommunications, energy, water, and transport), economic stability, public trust, and social cohesion. Unlike traditional military targets such as bases or airfields, these centres are civilian in nature but essential to national security. Adversaries seeking to undermine the UK are increasingly likely to employ hybrid tactics - combining cyberattacks, disinformation, sabotage, and economic disruption - to destabilise these assets without resorting to direct military confrontation.
    Recent events underscore the vulnerability of these centres. In 2024, reports indicated that the UK faces approximately 90,000 cyberattacks daily, many attributed to Russia and its allies, targeting government systems, financial institutions (FSI), and critical national infrastructure (CNI). These attacks aim to disrupt digital infrastructure, steal sensitive data, or sow distrust in institutions. Additionally, suspected sabotage of undersea cables in the Baltic Sea in 2024 highlighted the fragility of the UK's international communications networks, which are critical for economic and security functions. Such incidents demonstrate that adversaries prioritise non-kinetic means to degrade the UK's resilience, exploiting its reliance on interconnected systems.

    The UK's population centres are also vulnerable to disruptions that do not involve missiles. Power cuts, for instance, could paralyse urban areas, disrupting healthcare, transport, and food supply chains. The 2019 UK power outages, though not attributed to hostile action, exposed how a single failure in the National Grid could affect millions, with hospitals and transport systems struggling to cope. Similarly, social media-inspired unrest, as seen in the 2011 London riots and more recently in Southport, illustrates how disinformation or orchestrated campaigns could amplify social tensions, undermining public order. These examples highlight that adversaries can achieve strategic goals by targeting civilian infrastructure and societal cohesion rather than military assets.
    Defence Primes and the Push for GBAD Systems
    Defence primes, such as MBDA and Northrop Grumman, have seized on the growing threat perception to advocate for enhanced air and missile defence systems, particularly GBAD. They point to Israel's Iron Dome, which has successfully intercepted short-range rockets and drones, as a case study for why the UK should invest i...
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    16 Min.
  • The Most Dangerous Invention: Gwynne Dyer and the History of War

    The Most Dangerous Invention: Gwynne Dyer and the History of War
    Oct 22 2025
    Why Short Histories Matter
    War has long been the domain of soldiers and scholars: studied by the few, practised by the fewer, but suffered by the many. In the absence of lived memory, the risk is that societies forget what war really means.
    This fading memory matters. The 20th century saw war reach its historical zenith through extreme industrialised conflict. It was a time of mass mobilisation, unprecedented global integration, and civilian populations on the front and rear lines like never before. But today, nearly a century later, no full generation left alive can truly compute the scale of destruction the first half of the 1900s wrought outside of study, media, or memory.
    Total war is often abstract. It is reduced to historical footage, elevated by academic study, rendered across film and games, or reflected through anecdotes by those who have experienced conflict in our lifetime. That makes public understanding not just desirable, but necessary. As Great Power Competition returns, we risk confronting future war without a logical and emotional foundation needed to respect its costs.
    That is the challenge Gwynne Dyer takes up in The Shortest History of War. If war must be made intelligible to the many and not just the few, then its complexity simplified is key. His message is clear: violence certainly exists in nature, and fighting is too common across the animal kingdom; but war is something distinctly human. It is an institutional practice born of hierarchy, sustained by coercion, and shaped by political purpose.
    What the Book Gets Right: The Impressive Scope
    Dyer's narrative unfolds in broad chronological arcs, but its power lies in rejecting determinism. War, he argues, has never been inevitable and has always been enabled. Elites choose it, institutions entrench it, and ideologies justify it.
    Going as far back as historically plausible for a self-respecting scholar, Dyer systematically dismantles romantic myths of honourable violence and the noble savage. Instead, he traces how conflict has been shaped by degrees of industrialisation across millennia, various forms of nationalism before and after Westphalia was even a thing, evolving methods of bureaucracy long before Mandarins, and even game theory as a thought experiment.
    These are forces, Dyer outlines, which rhyme across history, reinforcing the institutional logic of violence and escalating its lethality. War is not some immutable condition of humanity - it is a social technology. A political invention, forged in the surplus of early agriculture and sustained by organised power ever since.
    One of the book's most striking passages illustrates the intense changes in just the last few centuries. Outlining the use of phalanx-style tactics, Dyer observes that a well-trained army from 1500 BCE (if rearmed with iron instead of bronze) could plausibly hold its own against one from 1500 CE. Yet within just a century of that, the military revolutions of the 17th century made such continuity impossible. The accelerating pace of change, particularly in our lifetime, has transformed war's destructiveness beyond recognition. Where war once meant hours of bloody attrition with swords or muskets, today it can mean a nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile capable of erasing cities in minutes. The gap between what war was and what it could become has never been wider.
    Nowhere is this institutional absurdity clearer than in Dyer's analysis of Cold War nuclear doctrines. Mutually assured destruction (MAD), he writes, was not strategic brilliance but a global suicide pact rationalised into orthodoxy. What began as deterrence hardened into doctrine - a logic so widely accepted that he says its contradictions became invisible. But The Shortest History of War is not a book about tactics, doctrines, or battlefield dynamics. It is not concerned with how wars are fought, but why war became possible at all.
    Dyer is philosophical as any other scholar of war, but he nonetheless br...
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    12 Min.
  • The Challenges Of Littoral Warfare For The UK: A Critical Perpective

    The Challenges Of Littoral Warfare For The UK: A Critical Perpective
    Oct 17 2025
    The views expressed in this Paper are the authors', and do not represent those of MOD, the Royal Navy, RNSSC, or any other institution.
    The transformation of the UK's Commando Forces (CF), anchored in the Littoral Response Groups (LRGs) and the CF concept, represents an ambitious shift in British expeditionary warfare. However, its viability is undermined by structural and doctrinal disjoints that question its ability to operate effectively in contested littoral environments. Chief among these issues are: the persistent disconnect between the British Army and Royal Navy (RN); inconsistencies between UK Joint Theatre Entry Doctrine and emergent CF operational concepts; and the historical realities of military operations in littorals - especially the Baltic - which highlight the need for mass and endurance over rapid raiding.
    The Army-Navy Disconnect: An Enduring Structural Weakness
    CF transformation seeks to create an agile, distributed force capable of operating in complex littoral zones. However, its success is constrained by the systemic disconnect between the RN and Army. Despite their transformation into a high-readiness raiding force, the CF remains reliant on 17 Port and Maritime Regiment RLC (17P&M) for strategic lift and sustainment. Recent analysis underscores 17P&M's indispensable role in enabling amphibious operations, yet it is a relatively misunderstood, under-resourced, and neglected capability within the broader amphibious force structure, and one that remains firmly under an Army Op Order.1
    The Army's focus on land-centric deterrence in Europe - particularly through the NATO Allied Rapid Reaction Corps and recently deployed Allied Reaction Force - suggests limited institutional buy-in for amphibious operations beyond logistical support. Ironically, it is the Army's reliance on 'red carpet' port-to-port transfer of forces that underpins its continental strategy, as evidenced in the seaborne deployment of 1UK Div to Romania via Greece2 and the recent signing of a 'strategic agreement' with Associated British Ports to expand staging options beyond Marchwood military port.3 This absence of a unified Army-Navy vision for expeditionary warfare leaves the UK in a precarious position: a CF designed for high-intensity littoral raiding, but dependent on an Army-enabled logistics structure that remains geared towards continental land warfare.
    Similarly, the CF's raiding focus risks confusing the amphibious shipping requirement by ignoring the Army's need for logistical mass, as well as other doctrinally recognised amphibious operations such as Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Relief.[not
    Doctrinal Incoherence: Joint Theatre Entry vs. Commando Force Operations
    The UK's Joint Theatre Entry Doctrine emphasizes securing lodgements to facilitate force build-up and follow-on operations. Historically, this has required large-scale amphibious capabilities, pre-positioned logistics, and joint enablers. Yet, the emergent CF concept of operations prioritizes distributed, small-unit raiding without a clear pathway to sustained presence or operational endurance. This is accentuated by naval-centric command and control; the CF is a maritime force element composed of naval platforms and personnel optimised to support a maritime - rather than land - campaign plan.
    Critiques of raiding highlights its fundamental limitations: it is resource-intensive, difficult to sustain, and often a tactic of operational necessity rather than strategic advantage.4 While raiding can disrupt adversary activity, it cannot replace force projection or control of key maritime terrain, both of which require relative mass and sustainment. By orienting the CF around raiding without a credible joint force integration plan, the UK risks investing in a force that is tactically innovative but strategically irrelevant.
    Moreover, this raises a crucial question: if the UK's future amphibious posture is designed for raiding rather than securing and holding terrain, how d...
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    8 Min.
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