The cross-party Defence Committee of MPs has called for a Homeland Security Minister. Such a minister would be ‘more likely to drive through the urgent changes required to improve the UK’s current levels of preparedness and resilience’, the committee says in a report, Defence in the grey zone.
Chair of the Defence Committee, Tan Dhesi, Labour MP for Slough, said: “Our adversaries have purposefully blurred the line between peace and war. Grey zone threats pose a particularly insidious challenge – they unsettle the fabric of our day-to-day lives and undermine our ability to respond. Grey zone threats bring war to the doorstep of each and every one of us. These attacks do not discriminate; they target the whole of our society and so demand a whole of society response, in which we all must play our part.
The report called on the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to engage with the rest of government, with industry and with wider society to improve our resilience and strengthen our defences at home, he added. “This means working with businesses, schools and community groups, to increase awareness of grey zone threats and to help us all take the steps needed to protect ourselves, for example, from cyberattacks, or from disinformation. The MoD plays an important part in defending the nation from grey zone attacks, but it is only a part. We must now assume that any vulnerability will be exploited against us. The industries and technologies we rely on most are clear targets for hostile states.
“The damage repeatedly caused to undersea cables highlights the importance of protecting critical infrastructure. The UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force needs additional capabilities to provide further deterrence against Russian sabotage, and the MoD should consider increasing our military presence in the Baltic.”
The report covered the real world – such as sabotage to undersea cables – and cyber. The report noted that attackers may seek the weakest link in any organisation or network. As for the UK MoD, the committee suggests that its weakest link may lie in ‘public and private organisations that support the defence enterprise, such as industry, sub-contractors and service providers’. Here, the report quoted how last year some 270,000 armed forces payroll records on a contractor’s network were compromised.
Earlier this year the committee visited Latvia and Finland; their report quoted how Latvia’s armed forces have developed a public-private cyber unit, whereby that country’s equivalent of the MoD ‘benefit from the skilled civilian IT specialists’. As for the MoD recruiting and retaining cyber and digital skills, the committee recommended ‘direct
partnerships with private IT companies’, or drawing on ’embedded’ civilians as the UK official NCSC (National Cyber Security Centre).
You can read the report on the Parliament.uk website.
