Are we ready for war? Welcome to The i Paper’s opinion series in which our writers tackle a grim question that, until recently, few had thought to consider.

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It cost the British Government £1.5bn to keep businesses in the supply chain of Jaguar Land Rover afloat after a cyber attack took down its production lines for weeks. The impact was so severe that British GDP itself took a tangible hit.  

The attack was claimed by a criminal group. But nobody I know in the world of security and defence believes anything other than it was Russia. It’s the same with the fire that took out Heathrow in March 2025, the hacking attacks in October 2023 that made the British Library catalogue unusable, and numerous other suspicious events.

Professionals call it “hybrid warfare”. Blaise Metreweli, the head of MI6, has described it as a “space between peace and war”. However you want to label it, the truth is we are not ready for it, and as a society, we are wide open to the effects Russian hybrid aggression is trying to create.

It was in 2013 that the Russian general, Valery Gerasimov – now the head of the military – outlined the doctrine of “New Generation Warfare”: once it had selected a “victim state”, Russia would coerce and destabilise it through military pressure, psychological warfare and low-level social and political interference to the point where it could exert “reflexive control”.

In layman’s language, reflexive control means getting the people, leaders and mass media of a country to start thinking and acting in a way that leads to their defeat – without a shot being fired.

In its first iteration, the Gerasimov Doctrine was about preparing a state for military conquest. It was practised relentlessly against Ukraine. Today, the character of Russian hybrid warfare has mutated. Instead of being a stage in the preparation for war, the hybrid methods have become the war.

The reason for that is simple: they are far more effective than conventional military threats. When Russian bombers make regular practice runs for an attack on Britain, causing........

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