We still picture the next war through a 20th-century lens, with troops shipping out, foreign battlefields, and mass national mobilisation. However, the next conflict that the United Kingdom (UK) is drawn into may not begin with an invasion force landing on a beach. Instead, it may start on an ordinary weekday with a run of small, frustrating disruptions that slowly paralyse everything taken to be normal.
Picture how it actually unfolds. A handful of unidentified drones hover over an air station in East Anglia, as they did in November 2024, and as have been seen over airports across Europe since. A substation burns out in the Midlands, with no clear record of why. An undersea power interconnector trips. A suspiciously orchestrated incident occurs near a Royal Air Force (RAF) air station. A couple of undersea internet cables go dark. A regional water company’s computer systems collapse. By morning, there are dozens of incidents across free and open European countries. Crucially, not one of them on its own is legally an act of war.
This is what the opening of a modern conflict could look like. No sirens, no declared enemy, no border crossing. Just a deliberate pattern of chaos spread across the country.
The common idea of war still stems from the 1940s and films of the Cold War. The expectation is a clear threat flying a foreign flag, giving ministers time to stand at a podium and organise a response. However, if conflict breaks out on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) eastern flank, Britain’s main role will not be on the front line: it will be the staging ground and the supply depot behind it.
In modern warfare, the rear areas are not safe. They are targeted first.
Exhaustion as a weapon
The UK’s ports, railways, power grids, hospitals, heating networks, and airports would become targets for one simple reason: everything the front needs must pass through them. The civilians depending on them would be just as exposed.
Russia has spent over four years showing how cheap this is in its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Waves of one-way attack drones, each costing less than a secondhand car, drain air defences during the day, while cruise missiles are saved for night strikes on power stations. The targets are not military units but the country’s working parts: power stations, fuel depots, junctions, ports, and increasingly civilian bridges and trains.
For a country such as Britain, where public infrastructure already feels battered after years of delayed investment, a similar approach aiming to delay and exhaust would work alarmingly well. The goal would be unglamorous but serious, making sure that whatever troops or supplies are sent arrive late and ill-equipped, while keeping people at home angry, cold, and distracted.
The UK’s vulnerabilities are hardly secret. House of Commons Defence Committee reports have pointed to the near-total absence of ground-based air defence over the British Isles. Since the Second World War, Britons have told themselves that their island geography and allies would keep them safe. However, geography counts for little against undersea sabotage and cyberattacks, and allies will be fighting the same fires themselves.
Sabotage without a signature
Much of the damage will not come from the sky. Since 2023, the Baltic Sea has seen gas pipelines and communications cables severed by anchor-dragging, always with ‘no proven intent’ established. The UK is an island of cables, and its electricity, gas, and data increasingly run along the seabed.
On land, tactics are even lower-tech. Investigations across Europe have uncovered people recruited cheaply to photograph sensitive sites or start fires. Individually, these look like petty local crime, but in aggregate, they are coordinated operations.
How easily public services can be thrown into chaos has already been demonstrated. In June 2024, a ransomware attack on the pathology provider Synnovis crippled two major London-based National Health Service (NHS) trusts, forcing thousands of operations and appointments to be postponed and prompting a national appeal for O-type blood donors. Although perpetrated by a criminal gang chasing money, it achieved exactly what an adversary would want – hospitals slowed at the moment of need. A hostile state actor would not need to invent anything new, as the vulnerability has already been shown.
Layer all of this together and the first fortnight of a war will not feel like a military attack. Instead, it will feel like a run of incredibly bad luck, hard to tell apart from a very bad week for the country. Such ambiguity is by design, not a by-product.
The trust gap
This is the least-discussed component, but the most important. When everything goes wrong, the difference between a community pulling together and coming apart is whether people believe the institutions telling them what to do next.
Volunteering in Ukraine, what struck me was not just the air defence or the generators humming outside every second shopfront, but that the streets were as clean as ever. In routinely hit Kharkiv, crews shovelled snow away and removed rubble from an overnight strike within hours, and the ordinary business of life carried on alongside them.
This is not sentimentality, but a signal that repeats daily that someone is still in charge and that governance has not withdrawn. Shelters work the same way. Hotels open their basements to strangers, and the metro serves as a communal refuge rather than a privilege for those who can afford better. None of this was improvised overnight. It rested on a habit of turning up, built before the invasion began, and on people believing that what had been promised would still be there in the morning.
The lesson from Kharkiv is that resilience is not something a government creates after a crisis begins, but a relationship constructed long beforehand. People queued calmly for shelters, adapted to outages, and carried on with daily life, not because they were uniquely stoic (although an element of that is hard to deny), but because years of visible effort, from officials and neighbours alike, had created confidence that somebody would show up tomorrow and the day after. Trust is not an abstract value; it is reinforced daily by services that work.
The UK suffers from far thinner reserves of trust. Faith in official advice has not recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic. Anger at privatised water and energy companies means that people distrust the organisations that would be trying to fix outages. Many local councils, responsible for emergency planning on the ground, are either insolvent or being reorganised and merged. If an emergency notice goes out tomorrow, the institutions responsible for responding will have to rebuild public confidence while simultaneously managing the crisis itself. That belief cannot be manufactured during an ongoing emergency.
Bringing resilience home
Much harder than acquiring better air defence and Counter-Uncrewed Aerial Systems (C-UAS) is the task of talking honestly to the public. The UK has no warning system its people would recognise, no shelter policy, and no expectation of a civil role in a crisis. Sending emergency alerts via phones is one thing, but it does not suffice for a whole-of-society response. Living memory of the Blitz and Cold War civil defence has largely faded. Ukraine has learnt this under fire and through invasion – a traumatic way to learn. Britain is asking hospital staff, train drivers, utility workers, and council officers to hold the rear area together without ever telling them that they are part of the plan.
National resilience cannot be run from a government desk. It has to start in homes, ordinary workplaces, local depots, transport hubs, community halls, and the local resilience forums that nominally protect the UK’s citizens.
The solution is not to turn Britain into a garrison state, but to normalise the everyday work of preparedness, and to be as inclusive as possible in doing it. This could begin with a national conversation on resilience that reaches every sector and community, a recognised national warning system, regular local resilience exercises, and a clearer role for communities in emergency planning.
Equally important is investing in the councils and community services that people encounter every day. These mundane signs of competence are what convince people that society is holding together, and matter just as much as missiles, radars, and defence budgets.
That the UK will not be invaded is a reassurance that keeps being offered, and while true, it is beside the point. The systems that the country runs on are exposed, and an adversary’s ability to disrupt them is greater than ever. This will in turn weaken Britain’s ability and willingness to respond. The real question is whether a public that has been told nothing will recognise an attack for what it is, and whether, when the notice comes through the door, anyone will believe it.
Philippe Lefevre is a Lecturer in Intelligence, Security, and Resilience at Buckinghamshire New University and a PhD candidate at the University of Surrey. His work focuses on the social contract in wartime, civil-military relations, and national resilience. He is an Army Reservist and helps run charities supporting Ukraine.
To stay up to date with Britain’s World, please subscribe or pledge your support!
What do you think about this Memorandum? Why not leave a comment below?
The U.K. general staff has a better idea of what we’re facing than the public does. Much of their focus right now is on diversifying supply chains, building industrial capacity and working with small/medium businesses. Sir Rolly Walker’s recent speech made it sound like a conversation with the public about resilience is imminent rather than something needed.
No matter what, the priorities will remain Dreadnaught and the nuclear deterrent, then AUKUS, then Tempest.
The current lack of air defense is a deliberate choice. The U.K. is Ukraine’s closest ally and so there is a huge partnership on drones, AI and EW technologies. It makes no sense to stockpile drone interceptors when they can be shipped straight to Ukraine. They’re worthless every 3 months anyway because the tech changes that fast. There is no good solution for ballistic missiles. It would be pointless to join the bidding war for a tiny number of Patriots and a European solution just isn’t ready yet.
This is an excellent article and in my opinion really gets it. It's good to see the argument made that resilience is crucial. In my view it implicitly recognises that spending billions to meet an arbitrary defence spending target to appease a rogue US President is not necessarily going to keep the UK safe from attack.