Direction from above and resource commitment are sorely lacking in Britain’s home defence against foreign state threats, according to an academic report. Making Sense of Home Defence was written by Prof Frances Tammer, Prof Harry Pitts and Gareth Stansfield from the University of Exeter with a foreword by the Director of the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security, Paul Cornish.
Prof Tammer, a former senior civil servant, described the UK’s approach to readiness as ‘looking amateur and without unifying purpose’. She said: “The UK is at a standing start, whilst many of our allies are years ahead. The UK seems reluctant to have a proper nationwide conversation about defence, whilst others are not at all reticent.”
While Prof Pitts, Deputy Director of the Centre for the Public Understanding of Defence and Security said: “The essence of any ‘whole-of-society’ approach has to be to promote a sense of there being a coherent society to which individuals belong, and that the defence of it is something worth devoting their time and effort to. Otherwise, top-down rhetoric about home defence will fail to meet reality.”
Prof Cornish said “As the SDR makes clear, the solution to the problem of improving home defence cannot be left to any one agency but must rest on closer collaboration not simply within defence, but between defence and all other departments of government responsible for home defence-related activity.”
As the report states, many UK Government reports on the necessity for home defence have been published, including the 2025 Strategic Defence Review; but the authorities have much work to do to make varied initiatives fit, the authors suggest.
Background
The military aspect of home defence—‘military aid’—can mean use of armed forces personnel and equipment in a range of domestic UK scenarios: response to civil emergencies (flooding, large-scale fires and the spread of contagious disease); protection against and/or defeat of cyberattacks; defeat of violent assaults by terrorists and others on civilians and on key points in the UK critical national infrastructure (CNI); disposal of explosive ordnance; and guarding and protection against direct attacks on military assets such as barracks, airfields, naval ports and stores of deployable equipment including weapons and ammunition.
As the February edition of Professional Security Magazine’s cover feature, ‘What might war look like’ (pictured) details, in a major war with Russia, as warned about by NATO military and political figures, the British Army would have its hands full, implying private security (as during the covid pandemic) would have much more asked of it, if only to reassure corporate, CNI and other clients.
The Exeter paper argues that a UK ‘whole-of-society’ approach (as set out in various Government documents) should ‘be no less than the reinvention of a UK strategic culture fit for the geostrategic environment of the 21st century’.
