The War Before the War

Public debate about the next European war still tends to assume a familiar picture: missiles, drones and massed armour. Recent sabotage against Germany’s electricity grid is a useful reminder that the contest may not look like that at all.

German authorities have investigated two incidents within twenty-four hours: devices containing conductive material placed on high-voltage lines in Brandenburg, and an attack on a substation near Bergheim. The electricity supply largely held, although plants were taken offline as a precaution.

Taken alone, neither incident is strategically significant. Taken together with the wider pattern of activity across Europe: sabotage of substations and cables, cyber operations against energy systems, probing of undersea infrastructure and deniable maritime interference, they are harder to dismiss.

The technology changes. The method does not. An adversary attacks centres of gravity: the nodes on which daily life, industry and military mobilisation depend. It does so at several points, across several countries, and at a level calibrated to remain below the threshold likely to provoke a conventional response.

That is increasingly what the art of war looks like.

Much of the defence debate remains elsewhere. Commentators call for more tanks, more surface-to-air systems and the rapid delivery of programmes such as Ajax. These capabilities matter in a high-intensity conflict. They are considerably less useful against an adversary quietly degrading electricity grids, interconnectors, communications and, ultimately, public confidence.

The mismatch is not simply one of equipment. It is one of attention.

Britain illustrates the problem. Defence spending is rising in cash terms and the Government has set a path towards 2.7 per cent of GDP by 2027–28. Three per cent has been pushed into a later parliament, while NATO’s 3.5 per cent target sits in 2035.

The criticism of that trajectory is straightforward. It is incremental and conditional at precisely the moment when the security environment is becoming neither. Meanwhile, the day-to-day resource budgets that pay for training, exercises and readiness remain under pressure. Reservist training has been among the early casualties.

That matters more than the accounting suggests. Part-time forces are precisely the pool on which the state would expect to draw for resilience, infrastructure protection and surge capacity during a prolonged grey-zone campaign. Saving money by reducing the time in which they practise those tasks is a peculiar economy.

Ajax illustrates a related tension. Britain plainly needs credible reconnaissance and armoured capabilities for a high-intensity conflict, and bringing the programme into effective service matters. But the attention devoted to major platforms can obscure a less visible requirement: ensuring that the infrastructure on which those forces depend remains functioning in the first place.

The point is not that Ajax, or armour more broadly, is irrelevant. It is that military capability begins well before a vehicle reaches the battlefield. Electricity, communications, transport networks and the civilian systems supporting mobilisation are themselves part of the defence architecture.

This is not an argument for abandoning conventional platforms. A European war could still require armour, artillery, air defence and mass. It is an argument against confusing those things with national resilience.

That requires hardened electricity grids, protected undersea cables, rapid repair capacity, cyber defence extending well beyond the Ministry of Defence, and a reserve that is trained rather than merely counted.

Potential adversaries have already adapted their approach. The more uncomfortable question is whether Britain’s defence debate and the budget intended to underwrite it has adapted with them.