A really good piece by Rod Thornton. But it again perpetuates this idea of a significant change to ‘war’, which I find problematic. https://defenceindepth.co/2020/04/08/covid-19-and-why-state-resilience-in-the-united-kingdom-needs-to-be-strengthened-the-link-to-the-changing-character-of-war-and-lessons-from-russia/

As Covid-19 shows, state resilience is a problem, highlighting additional vulnerabilities to those that have been identified as we have grappled with challenges from countries like Russia and China that affect our security without involving direct attack.

Dealing with these problems involves a broad set of capabilities and other government departments changing how they look at security. That’s *not* something for the MOD to lead, and it shouldn’t be a sticking plaster to compensate for a lack of security awareness elsewhere.

To paraphrase the excellent @brooks_rosa , if war becomes everything, then everything becomes the military, and then you aren’t actually dealing with your resilience problems in society, you are just militarising partial solutions.

I also have a have a slight mental block over the apparent contradiction between there being ‘sub-threshold’ activity, at the same time as expanding the definition of war. Which is it?

So we should use our apparently better coordinated government, NSC and Fusion Doctrine to understand and then deal with our vulnerabilities, but being cautious over which have military solutions.

And as ever, I have language nitpicks. If you mean violence, say it, not ‘kinetic activity’. And I’m British, I don’t have a ‘homeland’, I have a country, and I’m interested in ‘domestic’ security. (I know the NSS mentions this twee Americanism, don’t @ me!).