Increasingly concerned about the drums of war

In his annual threat update this month, Sir Ken McCallum, the Director General of MI5, named Russia as the UK's 'aggressor number one', with Iran close behind: Iran-linked activity led to some 50 arrests in the past year, much of it aimed at Jewish communities and military sites. His argument was that the threat would come mostly through what he described as hybrid warfare (sabotage, cyber attacks and disinformation) rather than outright kinetic attacks on UK soil, but that shouldn't be discounted completely. Others call this the 'Grey Zone', a term that denotes all malicious activities a state can organise against another, just short of having soldiers firing guns and warplanes firing missiles. This can be acts of state sponsored terrorism, attempting to incite social unrest through social media or even hacking infrastructure so that it fails. Ships from Russia's 'shadow fleet' have already been accused of cutting power and internet cables in the Baltic Sea and the Russian spy ship Yantar has been caught loitering over and mapping our own undersea cables and pipelines. The prevented attack on RAF Fairford was, in the Prime Minister's words, 'almost certainly directed' by Iran's Revolutionary Guard, and Iran has also been linked to alleged plots against Jewish communities, from a planned Yom Kippur attack in Manchester to a wave of arson attacks in London. Yet to be linked with aggressive states are drones at airports briefly halting departures at Heathrow in September, as well as the ransomware attack on check-in systems that hit Heathrow and other European airports. Our infrastructure has also shown it can fail on its own, from the substation fire that shut Heathrow in 2025 to an investigation into claims that blackout risks on the National Grid were played down. The cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover stopped its production lines for nearly six weeks and, according to the Cyber Monitoring Centre, cost the UK economy an estimated £1.9 billion and hit more than 5,000 businesses. In France, the government summoned Iran's ambassador after Iranian state accounts spread false content about the recent student riots, exactly the kind of stirring up of social unrest online that MI5 warns about.

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It doesn't take a great conceptual leap to suggest that such activities could grow in volume, especially if we consider the potential of China as an increasing aggressive actor if it decides to move against Taiwan. It is also not a great leap to consider these actions getting worse in severity, such as hacking bringing down payment networks or even the utility grids. While the chance of actual missile and bombs being directed at Britain is considered small, we also have to consider that both Poland and Germany have found drones either carrying out reconnaissance or carrying explosives, which have been blamed on Russia. Germany alone has recorded more than 1,000 suspicious drones this year. What this all means is that it is not scaremongering to consider there to be an increased risk of terrorist and hacking attacks on British infrastructure and vital networks.