Maintaining the UK's Intelligence Edge in the Grey Zone

15 Dec 2025 12:36 PM

The UK’s intelligence community must adapt to stay ahead of intensifying hybrid threats that blur the line between war and peace.

The most immediate threat to UK national security in 2026 is unlikely to take the form of a conventional military attack by Russia against the British homeland or a European NATO ally. Instead, the UK – like a growing number of European states – faces a more insidious challenge: the gradual erosion of its resilience through a sustained campaign of sabotage, malign interference and provocation.

Much of this activity appears to be directed or enabled by the Kremlin, though typically carried out through proxies and other deniable channels. These operations, subtle and dispersed across multiple domains, are designed to discredit European governments, probe for weaknesses in their defences, drain resources and reduce capacity for coherent, timely response.

Maintaining a decision-making advantage amid this intensifying grey zone competition requires not only having access to a wider array of intelligence sources, but also new ways of interpreting them. Traditional threat assessments – grounded in detailed knowledge of state military capabilities, extremist ideologies and clear indicators of intent – are no longer sufficient. Analysts now need frameworks and tools capable of tracing opaque influence networks, mapping disinformation flows and understanding how economic, societal and technological pressures interact to produce strategic effect.

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