Britain should prepare for hostile powers to target its everyday infrastructure, Defence Secretary Wes Streeting warned on Thursday, describing the threat as “state-sponsored terrorism” and calling for a national conversation about resilience in the face of emergencies.
Source: The Guardian via Europe Says
Streeting was speaking in Telford, in the West Midlands, where he opened a new factory making tank gun barrels. The factory, owned by the German manufacturer Rheinmetall, is part of efforts to accelerate rearmament in the face of Russian military threats, The Guardian reported.
“Terms like hybrid warfare and grey zone threats do not accurately capture or convey to the general public what I prefer to describe as state-sponsored terrorism,” he said. “So in the face of those threats, which are not hypothetical but real, and not somewhere else but increasingly here, we have to step up and take seriously our national resilience as well as our national defence.”
Households and businesses should ask themselves whether they are prepared, whether they are ready, and how they would respond if everyday services — payments, power or supply chains — were disrupted.
He said the public should think about how they would respond to hybrid warfare risks, including cyber-attacks that could knock out the payment systems businesses rely on or cause supply chains to collapse, and he placed those dangers alongside natural risks such as flooding and wildfires.
Reporting of the same warning said Britons should prepare for possible food shortages if hostile-state action disrupted everyday life, and that people should keep basic supplies such as food, water, medicine and wind-up radios at home.
Source: Express reporting via CDN
Why Europe is talking about sabotage
European states have become increasingly vocal about the threat of sabotage by hostile powers, particularly Russia, which can cause disruption or directly threaten safety while stopping short of open war. Incidents cited in that wider debate include an explosives-laden drone found next to a Ukrainian cargo plane at Germany's Leipzig airport in August, and a series of unexplained explosions and fires at defence facilities, The Guardian reported.
Streeting also emphasised that the public should be prepared for sabotage actions that stop short of outright war, alongside conventional national defence. Reports of his remarks said he pointed to rising defence spending as part of the same rearmament push.
What is solid
- Defence Secretary Wes Streeting spoke on Thursday at the opening of a Rheinmetall tank gun barrel factory in Telford and warned of hostile-state threats to everyday infrastructure.
- He used the phrase “state-sponsored terrorism” for hybrid threats such as cyber-attacks on payment systems and supply chains.
- He asked households and businesses to consider how prepared they are for disruption, including from natural emergencies such as flooding and wildfires.
What is only claimed
- Responsibility for specific sabotage incidents cited in the wider European debate, including the Leipzig airport drone, has been alleged by officials but was not established as proven fact in this reporting.
- How quickly any disruption would affect food or other supplies is a warning scenario set out by ministers, not a reported incident.
The warning matters beyond Britain: undersea cables, payment networks and energy supply chains are shared across Europe and the Atlantic, and governments across the continent have been raising the same resilience questions as the war in Ukraine continues.