Mass Criticality: Rethinking Critical Infrastructure in the UK

19 Jan 2026 01:41 PM

As digital systems become more interdependent and concentrated, a growing number of ‘ordinary’ components quietly turn into de facto critical infrastructure.

MI6’s new chief, Blaise Metreweli, recently warned that the ‘front line is everywhere’. In a separate speech, the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Richard Knighton, argued that ‘our whole nation’ must step up. Taken together, these remarks signal that the UK is now operating in a hybrid threat landscape – ‘a space between peace and war’, as Metreweli put it – where remote cyber operations and local cyber-physical attacks, including some that leverage insider access, sit alongside more traditional military risks.

In that hybrid threat landscape, adversaries are likely to reach first for tools that disrupt daily life and economic activity rather than for conventional warfare, which tends to sit higher on the escalation ladder. Yet our current definitions of critical infrastructure, still focused mainly on utilities such as electricity grids and power plants, do not adequately account for the many other bottlenecks that can now be exploited to disrupt society – some of which are so fragile that significant disruptions can occur even without malicious activity.

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