“The tabloid papers in the UK suggest missile attacks on North Sea oil installations or into London are the most dangerous or the most likely threats that the UK face from Russia. They are not. The most likely and the most dangerous would be smaller, covert and unattributable acts of sabotage, conducted repeatedly, that make life noticeably more hazardous and dangerous for the increasingly fearful people of the UK.”

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This Commentary is based on more than 20 years’ experience at the most dangerous edge of counter-terrorism policing in Northern Ireland, including first-hand exposure to the negative impact of terrorism and subversion on politics and society’s trust in their government to protect them. This experience included close cooperation with the Army and Armed Forces to ensure protection of the public. An enhanced domestic role for the Army is not, however, in the UK’s strategic culture or interest. Nevertheless, the government must recognise an increased likelihood of sabotage, subversion and state-sponsored terrorism, and the surprising and unforeseen threats that they present.   

On 22 May 2024, the same day that then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced the General Election, the then Deputy Prime Minister delivered a speech at the London Defence Conference that spoke of proliferating threats, geopolitical tensions at heights not seen for decades and ongoing work with NATO on the UK National Defence and Resilience Plan. The tone encouraged a welcome spirit of openness around national preparedness. More dramatically, Dr Robert Johnson, the former Director of the Secretary of State for Defence’s Office of Net Assessment and Challenge, recently told the Financial Times “the UK has reached a situation where it cannot defend the British homelands properly”. His words have echoes of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s speech in the House of Commons on 10 November 1932. Baldwin, speaking just under seven years before the start of the Second World War, considered that the greatest cause of concern in the UK was fear of air attack. He warned: “It is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on Earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through.” Such a caution has been brought to the fore by the impact of Russian air, drone and missile attacks in Ukraine and recent reports of NATO’s air defence frailties that suggest a “major vulnerability in our security”. Closer to home, the Royal United Services Institute condemned the UK’s air defence capability as “entirely inadequate”.

However, the focus of the Deputy Prime Minister’s message was not around preparation for large scale, spectacular attacks, the like of which the UK hasn’t seen since the highpoint of the IRA’s mainland bombing campaigns in the early 1970s or the German Blitz in 1940. Instead Oliver Dowden’s focus was on launching a new gov.uk website – based on the National Risk Register – that features practical household resilience information, during which he praised Finland’s ‘72 hours campaign’, which encourages the civilian population to be self-sufficient in the first three days of any crisis. The term of reference within the speech was the impact of Covid and biosecurity more broadly – an uncontentious topic given recent history – but he also made one brief reference to the potential for attacks in the UK and the role Defence may play.

This reflects concern about the growing number of apparently state sanctioned or sponsored acts of sabotage across Europe. In early June 2024 police arrested a man for attempting to set buses on fire in Prague, an act the Czech Prime Minister considered was part of an orchestrated and funded hybrid warfare strategy by Russia. In the same month, one person was killed after an explosion at the Mesko factory, which is the largest manufacturer of ammunition, anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles in Poland and produces man-portable air-defence systems for Ukraine.

Closer to home, again in June, the ransomware cyber-attack on the NHS that caused a critical incident across several hospitals in London and forced the cancellation of more than 1,600 operations and appointments was openly attributed to the Russian-linked Qilin group. In terms of its impact on vulnerable people, a former head of the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre described the attack as “one of the worst and most distressing cyber incidents ever seen in the UK”.

In April Germany arrested two people on suspicion of plotting attacks on American military bases, Poland detained a man with information on Rzeszow airport (the hub for military aid to Ukraine), and in the UK several men were charged over an arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned logistics firm in London – all seemingly commanded by the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence organisation. There have also been acts of sabotage in the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and attempts to hack water and hydroelectric national infrastructure in the US, Poland and France. The North Atlantic Council statement on 2 May described “an intensifying campaign of activities” including “sabotage, acts of violence, cyber and electronic interference, disinformation campaigns, and other hybrid operations”.

It has been suggested that the acts of sabotage have been designed to make European governments cautious about continuing to support Ukraine ideologically or materially. The implication being that the attacks would escalate to more direct, overt and lethal assaults on critical national infrastructure or ones intended to cause mass casualties. Going back to Stanley Baldwin’s assertion that “the bomber will always get through”, it is far from clear how successful large scale attacks on civilian infrastructure are, or would be, at depleting and destroying a population’s will to fight. The ‘Blitz spirit’ was one of defiance rather than fear and it can be argued that the people of Israel, Gaza and Ukraine are more, rather than less, determined to fight off their enemy as a result of the horrors and privations they have suffered.

Therefore, from a policing perspective, the desire to see a far more dangerous effect on British society could be driving the Russian acts of sabotage. The cyber-attack on the NHS or the fire at the Berlin arms factory, initially declared an accident then publicly announced as the work of ‘Russian saboteurs’, suggests the motivations and aims are far more threatening and complex. In January, Jen Easterly – the director of America’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – commented: “The disruption of our gas pipelines; the pollution of our water facilities; the severing of our telecommunications; the crippling of our transportation systems – [are] all designed to incite chaos and panic”.

However, chaos and panic are only part of the effect. If the regularity and consequence of Russian backed acts of sabotage were to increase in the UK it would have a societal impact far greater than missiles. The foreboding sense that the government is powerless to protect the country, more often than not, would provoke anger towards the government rather than the perceived state sponsor of the sabotage. In fact, the faceless nature of the sabotage is another part of the threat. Without a clear perpetrator, a culture where ‘nothing is true, and everything is possible’ perpetuates societal paranoia and conspiracy theories. This is perhaps why the German government eventually chose to attribute the Berlin arms factory to Russia rather than conceal the real offenders. Recent events such as the E. coli breakout in Devon or the power cut at Manchester airport could suddenly become unverified evidence of how the government is failing the public in the face of an anonymous enemy.

Dr Johnson suggests more spectacular acts of sabotage “a hairline below the threshold of war”, such as an attack on a Scottish fishing trawler or North Sea oil rig, are “highly likely”. This is debatable given the lack of escalation by Russia to date and a likely NATO response which Russia has steadfastly avoided in two years of war in Ukraine. Nevertheless, clarity about what the UK and NATO would do in the event of Russian escalation is itself a deterrent. And it would build trust that the government, unlike prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, has the plans in place to respond.

From an adversary perspective, reducing trust in the UK government, through the use of sabotage and subversion, is a high priority target and one that is already vulnerable. The British Social Attitudes survey, released in June 2024, records that 79 per cent of the 5,500 people surveyed were dissatisfied with how the UK is governed and requires ‘significant improvement’. The Office for National Statistics recorded that competence is a major factor in how much the population trust their government whilst the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development identified ‘responsiveness’ and ‘reliability’ as two of the five public governance drivers that influence trust in institutions.

With a tangible threat identified and the consequences on governance and society dire and long lasting, what role could – or should – the British Army have? The knee-jerk response would be an increase in armed forces personnel to supplement and support the overstretched police forces across the UK. This, however, is already in place in the form of Operation Temperer, which – should a situation require it – could see soldiers deployed to guard static sites to free up those normally stationed there to support front-line armed response police. The requirement to respond dynamically was identified following multi-vector attacks, such as in Mumbai in 2008.

However, reflective of a cultural aversion to armed gendarmerie, the Ministry of Defence has traditionally been reluctant to take on UK counter-terrorism tasks despite its extensive experience in Northern Ireland; a factor compounded in the 2000s-2010s by resource constraints from deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq. Other Whitehall departments have also resisted requesting support from Defence, seeing it as an indication of their own weakness. The philosophical and perhaps subconscious aversion to the deployment of soldiers domestically was also summed up in 2015 by Peter Hitchins, who pointed out that once deployed soldiers may become permanent fixtures (as has been the case with police officers at Downing Street’s gates and at major London airports), adding “who would have the courage to withdraw them?”. A noteworthy exception was the 18,000 troops deployed to provide security for the 2012 Olympics in London, although this was almost entirely due to a failure by the civilian contractor rather than a deliberate policy decision. In August 2011, following five days of riots in London, a petition raised to Parliament for military personnel to protect the public gained only one vote, suggesting very limited public interest in soldiers taking to the streets of the UK.

That is not to suggest that the British Army does not have a role in preventing sabotage and subversion in the UK. Stephen Covington, strategic adviser to NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe since 1989, has suggested strengthening the collective security and defence of the Euro-Atlantic area and globally, in addition to continued material and emotional support for Ukraine’s right to self-defence, will moderate and deter Russia’s malign actions across Europe. Mr Covington added that without this more conventional use of Britain’s armed forces President Putin would have freedom of action to increase his level of aggression against Western systems of government.

The lack of a military focus on preventing and dealing with acts of sabotage was underscored by Dr Patricia Lewis and Olivia O’Sullivan in a recent paper, which highlights the prevalence of non-military attacks and, interestingly, the criticality of wider societal resilience for UK security. The paper was clear, “ordinary people” are “more and more at the frontline in protecting their organisations and managing the consequences of national security threats”. This chimes with the government’s approach and the creation of a national Resilience Academy which, over the next two years, is scheduled to train several thousand people to deal with crises, and complements a four-year National Exercising Programme. In 2025 the government will conduct a major ‘Tier 1’ exercise, testing the UK’s response to another major pandemic.

The tabloid papers in the UK suggest missile attacks on North Sea oil installations or into London are the most dangerous or the most likely threats that the UK face from Russia. They are not. The most likely and the most dangerous would be smaller, covert and unattributable acts of sabotage, conducted repeatedly, that make life noticeably more hazardous and dangerous for the increasingly fearful people of the UK. They are more likely because they are already happening. They are more dangerous because repetition of the threats, whilst clearly Russian sponsored but not attributable to Russia, would incrementally decrease public trust in the government to protect them. This is particularly pertinent in an era where trust in governance is at an all-time low and where support for political parties on the extremes are growing across Europe. On the face of it, attacks on Ukraine associated locations across Europe are an attempt by Russia to discourage and disrupt support to Ukraine. They are also an attempt to sever the link between the democratically elected governments of Europe and the people they represent. People who, Thomas Jefferson was clear, it is the first duty of government to protect. However, this is not to recommend a knee-jerk reaction. The response to Russian covert military action in the UK shouldn’t be to suggest an increased domestic role for the armed forces. Dr Lewis and Stephen Covington are right – strengthening NATO’s collective security and defence across Europe is key to deterring Russian destructive actions. And the societal resilience of ordinary people is critical.