"Caught With Our Pants Down" - Britain's Resilience Gap, With Edward Lucas

In this episode of Fault Lines, Rod Whiting speaks with broadcaster and Times columnist Edward Lucas, with more than four decades of experience covering European and security affairs, about a question the UK can no longer avoid: how prepared are we, really?

Drawing on decades covering Russia and European security, Lucas argues that Britain has spent too long assuming threats would remain distant - and that this complacency has left the country dangerously exposed.

From drone attacks launched close to home, to sabotage risks beneath the sea, to the quiet reality of ongoing “active measures” against the UK, this conversation explores the gap between perception and preparedness - and why closing it may now be far more difficult than many assume.

But this isn’t just a warning.

Lucas sets out where resilience can still be built - from strengthening cooperation with more threat-aware allies - such as the Nordics, Baltics, and Poland - to practical steps individuals can take now to be better prepared for disruption.

The discussion covers:

• What “national resilience” actually means in 2026
• Why public awareness still lags behind the threat
• The role of information, disinformation, and public disengagement
• What the UK can realistically learn from countries like Finland
• Why resilience must be built both at the national and individual levels.

Measured, grounded, and at times sobering, this is a clear-eyed look at Britain’s resilience gap - and, even at the eleventh hour, the steps that could still make a difference.

For more analysis like this, visit Fault Lines on Substack: 👇

https://rodwhiting.substack.com/

Contact: rod@rodwhiting.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

We are caught with our pants down. We don't have defense. We don't have deterrence. Our alliances are in a mess. Our public is not aware, really, of the scale of the threat it's facing. And uh we are in the worst security crisis, I suspect, in the lifetime of anyone listening to this excellent podcast.

SPEAKER_00 0:21

Hello, I'm Rod Whiting, and welcome to Folk Lines, where we explore Britain's security, defense, and resilience at a time of growing global uncertainty. In our last episode with Sam Olson, we looked at how the world is changing and how that's reshaping the risks facing the UK. Today we take a closer look at Britain's resilience and whether we're as prepared as we'd like to think we are. My guest is Edward Lucas, writer, broadcaster, and Times columnist with more than four decades covering European and security affairs. Edward, good to be with you and thanks for coming on Fault Lines. You told the National Resilience Committee that journalists can get labelled cranks for warning about things long before the wider establishment catches up. To what extent do you think that's been happening when it comes to the threats Britain now faces?

SPEAKER_01 1:17

I think that this story of our post-1991 security discussion, if one can call it that, has been the triumph of greed over prudence and the triumph of hope over experience. And there was this headlong rush into Russia in the 1990s based on the idea that Russia might be weak and disorganized, but it certainly wasn't a threat. And this came in the teeth of warnings from people who knew Russia much better than we did in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, other countries who said, watch out, the imperialist sort of itch is still there, and they're actually still scratching it, it's just they're weak, so they're not scratching it very hard. And now we are faced 36 years later with an imperialist nuclear-armed country that is at war in Ukraine, but feels it's at war with us as well. And we're caught with our pants down. We don't have defence, we don't have deterrence, our alliances are in a mess, our public is not aware really of the scale of the threat it's facing, and uh we are in the worst security crisis, I suspect, in the lifetime of anyone listening to this excellent podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

Yeah, and I think it all seems to have converged at once, doesn't it? We we've gone from being in a not very good place to being in a terrible place with uh with the advent of Donald Trump Mark II and the most extraordinary sequence of events in the in the past uh four or five months.

SPEAKER_01 2:48

Yes. I think that it was always a bit of a sort of fool's paradise, and Ukrainians have been fighting and dying since 2014, and so people who think that things went pear-shaped after 2022 just weren't paying attention. And the Ukrainians bought us time um with their bravery and sacrifice, and they brought us twelve years of time really, but and in a very intense way, um, four years of time. And we've basically wasted that time. We assumed either that they couldn't win or that they would win, or that it would come to a some kind of stalemate, but either way that Russia wasn't going to attack us, and now we see that Russia could actually attack us quite soon, and in ways that we can scarcely defend against, and we're really worried. And I get quite cross about that, because I feel that if we'd uh heeded the warnings, even after 2014, certainly for after 1990, we'd have spent a modest amount of money, shown a bit of political will, and we'd be in a perfectly safe place. This is not really the product of Russian strength, it's the product of our weakness, and that is both uh scary and infuriating.

SPEAKER_00 4:00

Let's talk about the um the the UK's resilience gap. Um so you've given us an idea of the sort of of issues that we that we need to be mindful of. But just how vulnerable are we? How wide a gap is there?

SPEAKER_01 4:14

Well, I'd be cautious about saying that NATO um is the right category because NATO covers everything from Finland and the Baltic states, who are perhaps the most resilient and threat aware and capable countries in the alliance. It includes countries like Italy, which may not have particularly good threat awareness when it comes to hostile states, but have the Caribbean area, which is sort of marvellously um flexible and capable force for coping with all sorts of crises, um, through to countries like Britain, which are really resting on their laurels, and perhaps also including countries like Spain and Portugal, which are um perhaps don't even have any laurels to rest on, um, and have really no threat awareness at all. Uh so there's a it's a very wide spectrum. I think that we've assumed in Britain that our if there's any trouble it'll happen further east, and our allies will mop it up before it gets to us. So our air defence is basically rests on the assumption that the um any projectiles heading our way will be shot down by the Norwegians or the Dutch or the Germans or whoever before they reach us. And if we have to do anything, our one seaworthy type 45 destroyer might have to shoot down a couple of things which it could manage easily with its um state-of-the-art uh um Aster air defence system. Um but basically this isn't our problem. And now suddenly we we realise that uh actually drones could be launched from cargo ships um in the North Sea or in the North Atlantic or the Channel, wherever, and that large numbers of cheap drones um could be flying in and hitting our critical infrastructure, or for that matter, defence installations, and we could have mass casualties, huge disruption, and we might not even know who the source of these um uh attacks was. Um the drones might be um labelled in Persian, made with Chinese components, and our intelligence services might suspect they were coming from Russia, but we wouldn't really know. So it's a new kind of warfare, and um we don't have the um kind of the systems, the kits, the training, the people um to deal with that, both in terms of stopping the attack or in terms of dealing with the aftermath.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

Yeah, I mean i th the sort of things you're talking about there, we are slowly uh learning, the the the information is slowly seeping through to the to the public consciousness, um this term hybrid war. Something we discussed at length in our last episode with uh Sam Olson. Um you speak to a lot of people in the know. Let's be clear, what do we mean by that term hybrid war, and how real is it as a threat to the UK? How seriously should we take it?

SPEAKER_01 6:50

Well, I don't like the term hybrid war or hybrid warfare, and I try not to use it. Um, and I think it's a big mistake to try and deal with problems by finding fancy new terms to talk about them. Um this sort of warfare's uh goes back a very long way. Um we have thresh warfare that is above the threshold of formal armed conflict, and then we have all sorts of um dirty tricks that we both sides in the Second World War used, for example. Um, you know, propaganda, sabotage, um economic warfare, all sorts of things that uh don't involve sort of people in uniform um firing um high explosive at each other from um platforms made of steel. And then we have also conflict in peacetime, which we're kind of used to from uh the terrorist attacks um that we suffered in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s from um Irish Republican terrorism and and also to some extent also from um uh Islamic is Islamist terror terrorism. So this isn't particularly new, and calling it hybrid warfare doesn't really help. Um if I I prefer the term active measures. But I think it's much more important to focus on what's going on and how to stop it and why it's happening than to try and um chop logic and chop turn terminology to find a sort of particularly neat description.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

All right, well let let's let's just to talk briefly about some of the things that that are going on that for some reason politicians and indeed the media are are are are still reluctant to talk about uh uh in any depth the sort of things that are going on under the sea, for example, that with the infrastructure cables.

SPEAKER_01 8:30

So I think there's a kind of con I wrote about this in my Times column last week, there's a sort of conspiracy of silence, really, where it's in nobody's interest to talk bluntly about, or no n nobody who's on the inside wants to talk bluntly about what's going on. So if your company, maybe a defence company, and you've had Russian sabotage happening at your defence plants, and there have been a few instances in this country that I think fall into that category, you don't want to say Russian spies got in and um blew things up, set things on fire. It's much easier to say there was an electrical fire, the fire the police were called and the fire engines came and the fire went out and nobody was hurt and the damage is under control. And that is a sort of news in brief on page seven, electrical fire at defence plant. Whereas if it was Russian saboteurs successfully hit British defence plant, that's page one. And it's the same for the government. If they admitted that, as I strongly suspect, the Russians have planted sabotage devices on the seabed near our uh cables and pipelines. That's page one news. Um, Russian ships um prowling around who got chased away, maybe a page lead on page seven. And in both cases, the the point is the same. If you tell the truth, people are going to ask two questions. One is how did things get this bad? And secondly, what are you going to do about it? And the answer to both these questions is very embarrassing. They uh the things got this bad because we as a country took a holiday from history, took our eye off the ball, didn't invest enough in defence, relaxed things, chose convenience and easy money over national security. And what are you going to do about it? Uh, don't know. And so that is, and it's much easier for our guardians of our security to keep us in the sort of la la land where they say, Oh, yes, you know, there's hooligans every now and again, you know, hard to go and do something bad, and you know, we are drone here and there, but you know, don't worry, we've got a handle on it. And the result of that is that the public is not aware of the threat and therefore is never asked to consider the risks and the sacrifices they need to sh shoulder if we're going to deal with this.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Let's talk about this word resilience. Because when people hear that word, they often think of sandbags, uh emergency services, perhaps a few tins in the cupboard. What do we mean by national resilience in 2026?

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Well, resilience has both a physical and a mental element. Um, so the physical element is do you have enough stuff to cope if things go wrong? And that can be, do you have food and fuel stockpiles if you're a government? Do you have um a torch in your house and enough medicine and other stuff that you might need to survive for a few days or maybe even longer if things go wrong? And that the the wrong here can be a natural disaster, it could be a terrorist attack, it could be hostile state activity, it could be pure bad luck. But we all basically understand this. This is why we take out insurance um and we pack lots of sandwiches for a picnic, and if it's going to be wet weather, we take a raincoach. That's resilience. And the mental side is about having the pathways in our brain, really, so that we panic as little as possible. And obviously a degree of panic is inevitable when things go wrong, but you want to minimize that panic reflex and maximise the kind of training that the military have, where when a you hear a bang, you don't freeze, you follow your follow your training. And that means everything from knowing at a very local level who are the vulnerable people in your streets if there's a power outage, you know that your um you know your neighbour is on some medical device and the batteries only last for six hours, so you're going to need to do something about that. Um, at a national level, it's about knowing that you've got the ability to um get information out to the public even if the internet's down, um, that you have the health services prepped for if there's a mash- mass casualty event. So it's a it's a kind of habit of mind which turns into a habit of life. And we are good at that in some ways in Britain, but we are very bad in others, and we're particularly bad when it comes to the idea of a attack from a peer or near peer adversary using um modern weapons, and um particular enemy who knows our weaknesses and will be targeting them.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

We had a brief uh technical break there, but I wanted to pick up on how these threats are being talked about or more to the point not being talked about, Edward. Is is the real danger not that people panic, but that they shrug?

SPEAKER_01 12:53

There's a lot of shrugging going on, and it's become a bit of a habit, really. We feel very disengaged in many ways that we don't feel we're treated treated seriously as consumers, we don't feel we're treated seriously as voters, uh, we don't feel we're treated seriously as shareholders, um, we don't feel that when we go on demonstrations anything much happens. So there's a a kind of general air of of apathy, alienation, disengagement, powerlessness, call it what you will, and that affects national security as well. And of course, if you've like me have lived under a dictatorship and experience what it's really like, then you take freedom extremely seriously, and you're willing to go to enormous, the ultimate length, in fact, to defend yourself. But I think we take our what's left of our freedom and security in this country, we take it for granted, and we don't realise how much worse it could get.

SPEAKER_00 13:43

So how do we turn this around? I mean, I I am seeing efforts by quite a f a few people now to to try and raise the awareness of this issue and get it onto the front pages. And slowly we're starting to see more and more uh questions asked now and in prominent places about what's happening with our defence and and resilience. But it seems we have a long way to go and we don't have much time to do it.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Well, I agree it's slowly, and I'm afraid we've left it awfully late. We may have left it too late, actually. I mean I'm I'm not at all optimistic about this. And I think we've had many chances to get things right, and we are we've left it too late to rebuild our defences, even if the government today said they were going to provide the money and start building, you know, lots of drones and buy lots of advanced air defences and reintroduce conscription, um, build a huge civilian reserve, all those sort of things. Even if they started today, it won't be ready for years. And Russia won't wait till we're ready. This isn't like a football game where they both decide to wait until the referee blows the whistle. Russia's attacking us right now. And what makes things so dangerous is the closer we get to um getting our act together, the greater the incentive on Russia to attack us quick and derail everything before um it's too late. So we're in a kind of you know, not quite a Thucydides trap, but one of those um things that people study in in game theory, um where um the thing we need to do to defend ourselves actually puts us in greater danger. Um so I think it's going to be very difficult. Um the best chance we've got is to focus on deterrence and to do it with allies, because combined we are much bigger and stronger than Russia, and and the more allies you have on a team, the more capabilities you have. So I think there is a narrow path back to security, but I don't see the government adopting it with any urgency.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

So uh you you mentioned the word deterrence there, and I think th this idea of framing resilience as deterrence, uh it it is much easier to persuade people to prepare for every um eventuality than to go straight to man the barricades.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

Yes. I think that the sort of catastrophizing is uh easily overdone and can make people think, well, that threat is so implausible, and some of my adversaries say, oh, come on, you don't really believe that Russia's gonna you know Russian tanks are going to be crunching down Whitehall. And put like that, of course, absurd. There's no way that the Russian military could physically conquer Europe. But then one has to look at what Russia's trying to do. Russia's trying to play divide and rule. And they're doing quite simply. I think that the uh they play divide and rule both within alliances but also within countries. And if there's a demographic, racial, religious, ethnic, linguistic, regional, whatever tension in a country, they will see if they can try and exploit it. And um, you know, it's not just the Russians. We saw the Iranians, um, all those Scottish vehement cyberNAT, Scottish nationalist accounts with their venomous anti-English propaganda. And when Iran's internet was knocked off the air, all those accounts went silent. It turned out they were coming from Iran. Um, one of the most vitriolic anti-Lithuanian accounts, pretending to be Polish, actually comes from Sri Lanka. Um so there's a you you can do do these attacks from all over the place. Um, but the aim is to divide and rule and make Britain into a weak, divided country that can be pushed around by Russia and by by others. And I think they're on the way to succeeding with that. And that that's what we need to alert people to. And I feel I've done everything I can really. I've um written the basic the same article every week for about 20 years. Um I've published several books on the subject. I go on the radio and on podcasts like this, I even ran for parliament. And I at the end I feel I've basically been wasting my time. I don't think any of it's made any difference, and we're still tumbling towards disaster.

SPEAKER_00 17:36

Put simply, it's not just about coping after cyberattackers switch the power or internet or or the banking system off. It's it's about making sure nobody thinks it's worth the effort, yeah?

SPEAKER_01 17:48

Well, that's the Finnish approach. And what Finland has done is made itself it's like it's trying to make a dent in a squashboard. You uh they have extraordinary levels of resilience on both the human and the physical side. And so they can survive the aim is for six months, but probably longer, with stores of food and medicine and so on. They can switch all their gas-powered power stations over to diesel, and they have a lot of diesel stockpiled. And so it just looks really unattractive from a Russian point of view. And and as I've um pointed out in some of my previous pieces, for the past year, the whole of 2025, Russia was running a full-on propaganda attack against Finland, and nobody noticed because the Finnish press just refused to engage. Um, if you have in other countries, if you have a Russian propaganda attack, then people start demanding their politicians should answer these terrible slurs, and the media competes and politicians compete, and Russia's able to exploit political competition to turn nothing into something. And in Finland, they're able to make a sort of impervious wall around their information system, which is very impressive. But we can't all do that. That's the result of 50 years of Finland living next to Russia, and Finland's always lived next to Russia, but 50 years of a comprehensive national defence programme, and before that the Winter War and the Continuation War. So I I just don't think we can get to a Finnish level of resilience just like that. So I think the um the question for us then is can we do it with with other sorts of deterrents? And that's why I was mentioning um working together with allies. It's much Russia finds alliances very troubling. Um they don't really have any allies, at least not allies that will voluntarily make sacrifices for each other, which is what in my my definition of an alliance. And we do still just so I think the best thing to do is to get together with the Nordics, the Baltics, the Dutch, uh the Poles, the other threat-aware capable countries, and say, let's do a deal that if one of us faces one of these sub-threshold attacks, the others will pile in with a sub-threshold response. And that will be risky and there's a danger of escalation, and you know, n none of this is going to be um is going to be great. But there's at least a chance that that can work, whereas what we're doing at the moment is just uh not going to not going to work.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

For the person listening to this at home, what is your message to them?

SPEAKER_01 20:14

I think first of all, resilience starts with the individual. So um, you know, download one of the many excellent pamphlets that other countries give their citizens and go through the checklist. There are you know Sweden, Poland, the Baltics, they all do them in English as well. Do you have what what stockpiles do you have at home? What plans do you have for a crisis? What would you do if you wake up in the morning and there's no power and no internet? Um, how do you contact what's the meeting case in a in an emergency for family members and what's the fallback if um that's not available? And put pressure on your elected representatives to get their act together. We actually have a national resilience strategy, but it's not got any political backing behind it. So I guess if every MP started getting letters saying what are we doing, they might put some pressure on the government. But as I say, I'm not optimistic. I don't think it's uh it it's very late. It's like asking the Londoners during the Blitz, what do you do to stop the German bombers getting through? And the answer is um cross your fingers and pray.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

You were talking to the National Resilience Committee. A committee level, uh I'm not optimistic that that's going to have enough clouds. Isn't it time to make the person responsible for resilience a secretary of state? Have it at at ministry level.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

I think this is like just like the idea that we can sort sort this out by giving it a new label. Finland doesn't have a you know particular minister for national defence. It's an in it's a whole of government resource. I mean that there may be a someone who's got the sort of bureaucratic penholding responsible responsibility, but it's a whole of government and whole of society approach. Um and one thing I did suggest in a recent column was that we should use the joint expeditionary force as a framework for trying to focus attention on. This and that Britain, as the nominal leader of the Jeff, should actually show some leadership and say, um, let's do an annual Jeff report on subthreshold attacks, and this will force different ministries and agencies and other bodies to get out of their silos, um, stop being so paranoid about secrecy and say bluntly, this is what happened this last year, this is why it happened, this is how it happened, um, this is who did it, as far as we can tell, and this is what we're doing about it. I put this idea out there. But as I say, I think our government is very distracted with its own things, you know, weak economy, internal political divisions, different scandals. And what we need is a very high degree of focus and decision-making right across government. Every minister should be thinking my number one job, whether I'm in education or environment or local government or energy or whatever, um, my number one job is national security. What am I doing to make sure that we are safe? That's what people most of all want. And we kind of get that when it comes to terrorism, and we you know we kind of get that when it comes to cyber attacks, but we uh we don't get it when it comes to hostile state activity.

SPEAKER_00 23:12

Edward, very good to talk to you. You've been listening to Fault Lines with me, Rod Whiting, and my guest, Times columnist Edward Lucas. Edward, thank you so much for your time.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

Well, thank you for having me.