History tells us that most big changes to national security communities occur in the wake of surprises, scandals, failures, or as reactions to large, seismic events. History also tells us that Western governments are very focussed on the here and now and that it is tremendously difficult to look to the future and plan strategically. In both cases it is easy to see why – if the system isn’t broken (or doesn’t appear to be broken), why fix it? It is errors or largescale shifts in focus that prompt change, but these tend to be short-lived and reactionary rather than thinking, holistically, about the future and where priorities might shift, challenges present themselves, or opportunities arise.
The purpose of this piece is to think about the future in a different way. Specifically, what are the challenges and opportunities for Western national security communities, and why is it so crucial that we think about the future in a strategic way? As the newly published UK National Security Strategy 2025 recently declared, “the world has changed” and we now live in “and era of radical uncertainty… where threats continue to grow in their scale and complexity”. This short paper proposes 7 challenges that will face the national security communities moving into the future.
1) Defining the threat
State hybrid threats are the one of the biggest challenges for national security communities. Much focus is on the ‘hybrid’ component of what Russia, Iran and China do, from subversion, disinformation and electoral interference, through to sabotage, cyber attacks, intimidation and assassination. Tackling these issues at a tactical level is critically important, but is there enough focus on the strategic level? What activities are normal part and parcel of statecraft? So where should effort and limited resources be best placed? And is it even useful for us to separate out the parts of hybrid warfare undertaken by states like Russia, China and Iran into ‘workstreams’ in order to deal with them? More practically, how straightforward is it to pivot priorities to something slightly amorphous like state hybrid threats?
2) War, peace, or something in between?
Related to this is the question of war versus peace versus, what? Definitions of ‘hybrid warfare’ suggest it is neither war nor peace, but a state of prolonged conflict. By extension, therefore, what does ‘winning’ look like in the hybrid domain? Is it about completely nullifying foreign state efforts? In a utopian world the answer would be ‘yes’, of course, but this is unrealistic in the real world, so what can we hope to achieve? Related to which, what is the relationship between defensive, resilience building measures, and offensive, operational ones? This raises several questions: what is our risk appetite (in both a defensive and offensive way)? Is it the activity that is the ‘threat’, or the actor? Uncertainty is likely to become the norm.
3) Responding
Taking into account all of the above, what might be done to lessen the threat? The toolkit available to national security practitioners contains a number of weapons: from soft power tools like BBC World Service, to sanctions, the rule of law, deterrence and resilience. The last few years have seen a large number of new acts of law in the UK to counter state threats, and only time will tell whether they have the desired deterrent effect. A more resilient society will undoubtedly help, and great lessons can be learnt from countries that do this well, such as Estonia, Finland and Sweden. Perhaps deterrence is the key, whether individually at a national level or, more effectively, as part of a large coalition of states (NATO being the obvious example). These all raise the question of the response: what is the red line whereby a hybrid threat necessitates a conventional military response? Or will the future be a succession of hybrid attacks and counterattacks?
4) Appetite for risk
The classic test for governments is the Daily Mail or Washington Post test – can you justify your secret decision if it were to be on the front page of the newspaper the following day? Unscientific, but certainly an effective test to employ when considering the risk appetite of government. There is a common belief that western governments should not resort to underhand tactics to fight back, but how far can this maxim apply when we are not playing the same game as our adversaries? Related to this is the question of thinking increasingly about ‘opportunities’ as much as we think about ‘challenges’. Increasingly, the risk appetite for governments needs to be about exploiting opportunities, but it also needs to look internally at vulnerabilities and how to ameliorate them. The focus, therefore, needs to go three-ways: assessing domestic vulnerabilities; monitoring adversary intentions and capabilities; and spotting opportunities to exploit.
5) Perspectives and the tyranny of the tactical
There is one lesson of history which should be top of our minds when looking at the current state threats: different countries approach national security in different ways. Most in the West tend to operate largely on short-term timescales, whilst the Russians and the Chinese tend to operate on a far longer timescale. There are myriad examples of where they will plan an operation over years, if not decades, in the hope that it will eventually pay dividends. The reality is that both of them play the long game in a way that the West rarely, if ever, has. The corollary of this is the thorny issue of getting policymaker receptivity when a ‘threat’ is slow, strategic, and not of direct importance now. How do democratic nations, with electoral cycles lasting 4 or 5 years, create strategies to counter state threats emanating from countries which plan in the far longer term?
6) Collection vs analysis
Many of those writing on contemporary security matters get fixated on the rise of open-source information, the growth of social media, the use of AI as an assessment/analysis tool, and the ‘obvious’ conclusion that the future will see a greater emphasis on intelligence analysis over collection. There is definitely some utility to this, though it obfuscates the reality that while OSINT can provide a huge amount, the really valuable information is unlikely to come from anything open source; the value of classified information is inherent in its secrecy. Nonetheless, it does raise the question of whether the preponderance between functions in the intelligence machinery is correct.
7) Diversity of subject
Lastly, we come to the thorny issue of diversity. Not in the sense that people might expect, but in the range of topics, thinking and approaches that government can employ. It is easy to become fixated on fire-fighting and focus on the current priorities of the day (the aforementioned ‘tyranny of the tactical’), but what about those slow-burn topics that might not be significant now but absolutely will be in the future? Disease is one example, climate change another. Both require expertise and engagement with the national security community in a way that has probably not been commonplace yet.
Conclusion
It is highly likely that none of the above will come as a surprise to national security communities. The point of this short piece is to encourage people to think and write about similar experiences and encourage those within government to look to the academic community for input into this strategic thinking and to help its respective communities innovate in this new geopolitical environment.
Michael S. Goodman
Professor, Director of the King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence
Department of War Studies
King’s College London
UK
