UK Would Struggle To Protect Itself From Attack, Say Defence Figures
Former defence ministers have raised concerns over the UK's ability to defend itself
8 min read
The UK is not currently capable of defending itself from attack, defence figures including former ministers have told PoliticsHome.
In recent weeks NATO's Article 5 has been a major political talking point in the UK and beyond, prompted by Donald Trump suggesting that he might weaken US commitment to the military alliance. This article requires NATO members to come to the aid others when attacked.
There has been significantly less discussion, however, of its little-known cousin Article 3, despite the clause being vital to NATO’s ability to “fulfil its core tasks”.
Under Article 3, member states should be able to “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack”. In other words, NATO members should first and foremost be able to defend themselves.
In response to the changing security landscape, Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently announced that plans to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP would be brought forward to 2027, and that the government aimed to hit 3 per cent in the next parliament.
However, when asked whether they felt the UK could defend itself right now, experts and former senior government figures who spoke to PoliticsHome agreed: no.
We have allowed the degradation of the ability to deal with the state-on-state threat
Given the UK's place on the world map, the idea of an enemy force landing on the British coast is considered far-fetched. However, those who spoke to PoliticsHome about the country's self-defence capabilities said there are a myriad of possible threats to consider.
Former ministers warned that those threats to the homeland could come from more aggressive cyber-attacks; targeting of subsea cables; blocking of trade routes; drone attacks and disinformation assaults. All of which they feel the UK is unprepared for.
“We have allowed the degradation of the ability to deal with the state-on-state threat,” former Cabinet minister Anne-Marie Trevelyan told PoliticsHome, adding that “the question of how we think about defending ourselves is one that's long got lost”.
Former Tory secretary of state Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Alamy)
Since the end of the Cold War, and even after the 9/11 attacks on New York in 2001, the UK’s focus has primarily been on expeditionary warfare — the sending of troops to fight in far-off countries.
Former defence minister Julian Brazier thinks that this expeditionary approach is partly to blame for our lack of preparedness and capability for self-defence.
"Part of it is because of the shortage of defence funding, but also part of it is because we have been focusing on providing forces for expeditionary warfare and not actually for defending the home base.
“It is the case that if we were to deploy a lot of our remaining small regular army to Ukraine, it would leave a very large gap in Britain," he said.
Former defence minister Tobias Ellwood also voiced concerns about a lack of preparedness. He said that the UK requires an immediate plan for every aspect of society to “step up” and “provide resilience”.
“The era of the last three decades of us enjoying relative peace” is over, the former chair of the defence committee said, adding that on the question of whether the UK can currently meet its obligations under Article 3, "we clearly recognise that the answer to that is no".
The former Conservative MP believes that a perception among successive politicians that defence doesn't win elections is party to blame.
“Governments want to get re-elected, you're not going to invest in something that people can't even see the dangers of because they're three or four years away," he said.
Richard Foord, the Liberal Democrat MP for Honiton and Sidmouth, and member of both the foreign affairs and intelligence and security committee, told Parliament in January that the UK “must not underestimate the damage that Russia can inflict on the UK without firing a bullet”.
He warned that “the UK’s relaxed approach to security has left some of our critical national infrastructure vulnerable”.
Trevelyan, who held numerous ministerial positions during her time as a Tory MP, said that while the public presumes the government is prepared for any attack, that is not the reality.
“You can have Tesco Value insurance on your car, or you can have gold-plated Admiral Platinum category, which is four times as expensive, but whatever happens, you're covered.”
“Citizens assume entirely reasonably that Admiral Platinum is what the government is doing. Turns out, not so much… and that's the challenge.”
She argued that a lack of readiness for the Covid pandemic proves this hypothesis.
Citizens assume entirely reasonably that Admiral Platinum is what the government is doing. Turns out, not so much
One area experts are increasingly worried about is an acceleration of what is known as grey zone warfare, which falls outside direct armed conflict. One example of this is cyber warfare.
This month, the government chief security officer and head of the government security function in the Cabinet Office Vincent Devine told the Public Accounts Committee that the UK should be “extremely worried” about the cyber threat.
Devine explained to MPs that hostile states, later detailed in the session by his colleague as including Russia and China, “have developed capability more rapidly than we expected”.
He said the government is increasingly worried about the disruption of essential services through cyber-attacks.
Experts told PoliticsHome last month of the increased risk of such attacks on satellites, which could throw the economy into chaos.
Vital supplies could also be cut off from the UK in the event of a state-on-state war.
This could happen through the blocking of essential trade routes, according to former defence and security minister Lord West of Spithead.
Lord West, a former naval chief, told PoliticsHome that in fighting wars abroad, the UK has forgotten about “the protection of our home base”.
“95 per cent of everything we use comes by sea... that will be under threat if there's a war”.
Lord West also expressed concern about the threat to the UK's undersea cable network, which transmits billions of pieces of data, including online transactions, saying he is not confident that "infrastructure on the seabed is secure and looked after properly”.
The threat to undersea cables is something the government has spoken on unusually candidly, with defence secretary John Healey revealing in January that Britain had monitored a Russian ship in the English Channel over fears of deliberate disruption.
While West’s focus is on maritime capability, threats could also come from the air, the defence of which is seen to be a tactical weakness by many.
This week, Ukraine launched its largest drone attack of the war on Russia with hundreds reported to have targeted oil facilities in the Moscow and Oryol regions.
a major swarm drone attack in London would cripple [the UK] economically for some time
Ellwood told PoliticsHome that we have “no air defence over London” and "a major swarm drone attack in London would cripple [the UK] economically for some time”.
The threat of new technologies such as drones is a reminder of the breadth of the threat currently facing the UK.
Ellwood said it was important to recognise that “warfare has changed” to what is known as total war, “which means that every aspect of our society is vulnerable and subject to attack.”
“Every aspect of society must have plans to step up and to counter, to provide resilience, and that's way beyond what the Army, Air Force and Navy do.”
Ellwood spoke about the potential need for more AI specialists, more drone specialists and an all-society approach to make sure that the UK can defend itself.
Trevelyan said it was “glaringly obvious we don't have enough bombs and bullets for someone laying into us domestically, but that's because we have continued to assess that that likelihood is so low, that it's not worth spending the money on that”.
Lord West added that the armed forces had been hollowed out and the country did not need a Strategic Defence Review to reach that conclusion.
Labour MP and foreign affairs committee chair Emily Thornberry (Alamy)
Emily Thornberry, chair of the foreign affairs committee, is one of many figures to express concern about the risk posed to UK security by disinformation.
It is something other countries have begun work on. In France, the government has a Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference service (VIGINUM) that works to monitor and protect against foreign digital interference.
Thornberry warned last year that the UK could not be complacent about Russian attempts to influence its elections after a Romanian court annulled the country's presidential contest citing interference.
Disinformation campaigns can be used to cause economic harm or sow political tensions, even to influence the outcome of an election.
Thornberry said one of the important things to look at would be “the mechanisms that are used for promoting particular types of messages”.
Her committee is currently looking at how other countries are fighting the threat.
The forces up against us are much more advanced. We haven't even got off the benches
The Labour MP said her concern is that the war in Ukraine results in Russian President Vladimir Putin feeling emboldened to "increasingly using social media to try to manipulate people's opinions”, including those of "political elites".
“The forces up against us are much more advanced. We haven't even got off the benches," she told PoliticsHome.
Her words reflect the general sentiment of former government ministers surrounding the UK’s readiness for attack.
Trevelyan warned PoliticsHome that currently the UK cannot protect itself from “every possible threat from every level, nor for any length of time”.
However, she said that “decent year-on-year investment increases alongside trusting business relationships would shift the dial quickly”.
As Starmer prepares to publish the Strategic Defence Review in the coming weeks, senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute defence think tank Edward Arnold said it "must give confidence to NATO allies that it can meet its obligations under Article 3.”
PoliticsHome has contacted the MoD for comment.
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