Britain is losing its hybrid war with Russia and is unprepared for conflict, warns top former US aide
Britain is failing in its efforts to fight a hybrid war with Russia and is unprepared for a wider-scale global conflict, a top former government aide and senior analysts have warned.
As war in Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz leave the world reeling from higher oil, petrol, food and fertiliser prices, and conflict grinds on in Ukraine, fundamental planning to protect the UK is not taking place.
Fiona Hill, former director for European and Russian affairs in the National Security Council in Donald Trump’s first administration, describes the UK’s contingencies for dealing with present and future disruptions as “not fit for purpose”.
As one of the co-authors of the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review, Dr Hill will this week deliver a speech at the Imperial War Museum intended to galvanise Britain’s response to threats against its infrastructure.
In a stark interview with The Independent, she warned: “In the UK, our systems are not designed to cope with major disruptions. It is up to the leadership to come up with a plan because, at the moment, what is there is not fit for purpose.
“We have seen the effects of choke points in the Gulf, disruptions to transport. The NHS cannot cope with mass casualties, and we need to build up food supplies and systems to cope with disruption to imports.
“We don’t have archives of maps digitised and no analogue systems to use if digital systems collapse. This is an urgent national debate that needs to happen now.”
With no single minister responsible for national resilience in times of crisis, Dr Hill, chancellor of Durham University, says there is no sign the government is taking action.
Her intervention comes after her co-author of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), Lord Robertson, a former secretary general of Nato, accused the government of “corrosive complacency” over what he said was a failure to implement the review’s 62 recommendations.
His criticisms largely focused on the political conundrum faced by the government, which is the trade-off between spending on areas such as welfare versus the need to expand military capabilities.
Britain’s security officials have been increasingly warning that the country has been in a form of modern war for months. “We are now operating in a space between peace and war,” the head of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, said last year.
Russia, she said – as have the heads of the British army, navy and air force – is the principal threat.
But Vladimir Putin’s hybrid war is not confined to military targets alone – cyber attacks and assaults on supply lines, power grids and even food are also in the mix.
“There are so many soft targets around the UK it’s impossible to count them,” says Dr Hill, highlighting that the nation has no effective system even to monitor small drones that could be weaponised to “fly through the windows of the tallest buildings”.
