Britain’s enemies don’t need to start a war to damage our economy, they're already doing it

For years sabotage from hostile states happened elsewhere. Undersea cables were targeted by Russia, including one operation uncovered by the UK in April, and there was disruption to logistics networks across the continent, including parcel fires at depots. But the events are no longer happening elsewhere. They’re happening directly to us.

These incidents sit in the space between peace and war as a mixture of sabotage, intimidation, proxy activity, disruption and deniability.

Hostile states have learned that they do not need to launch a conventional attack to create an impact. They can pay proxies or lean on criminal networks, use online campaigns to seed confusion or division, or test infrastructure and stretch police and security services, forcing democratic governments to look inward and focus resources on domestic issues rather than international aggressors.

Even when an incident does not cause mass harm, it can still succeed in its purpose, which is to spark disruption.

And the targets of grey-zone activity are rarely limited to just military sites or government buildings. The threat is as significant and profound to everyday people just trying to live their lives. In fact, they are often more of a target than conventional institutions.

A delayed container ship, grounded aeroplanes, a compromised power station or telecoms network that deprives a neighbourhood of the ability to get online or a hospital to operate.

This is the impact of Grey-zone activity and it is increasingly targeted at the infrastructure and hubs that underpin growth and productivity. This leads to greater national dissent and disruption, which is precisely what they are aiming for.

Yet our security architecture is built on clearly defined categories: crime, terrorism, war. This activity deliberately blurs those boundaries so that by the time an incident is clearly understood, the damage may have already been done.

We need to re-evaluate what we consider significant threats and start to take clear stock of the consequences of these actions to our economy and daily way of life.

This creates a practical challenge for those responsible for protecting people, places and operations. In this climate, it is no longer enough to collect information after the fact. Organisations need to understand what is happening quickly enough to act and prevent an incident from occurring in the first place.

In Britain today, the infrastructure to solve this issue already exists, but it is barely utilised. If we are to respond to this threat, we need to get better at understanding the huge amount of data from sensors and cameras that we already have access to. Any critical infrastructure or transport hub will have anywhere from a hundred to a thousand feeds and multiple systems running at once.

From these, security teams are expected to spot unusual behaviour, hostile reconnaissance, unauthorised access or emerging incidents quickly. It’s no wonder that increasingly, it is too hard for human operators to interpret all this data in real time and frankly, too often detections are down to chance.

Operators need to be given better tools. Used properly, artificial intelligence (AI) can help operators prioritise information, identify anomalies earlier and build a clearer picture of complex environments.

We need to empower the operators who are dedicating themselves to our nation's safety and security with the capability they need to tackle this growing threat. It is not about automation, it is about enablement.

In security, human judgment remains essential in understanding context, managing escalation and holding accountability.

The time for theoretical debates on the efficacy of this technology has passed; whether we like to admit it or not, we are already in a form of war with many adversaries whose targets aren't just our armed forces and politicians but our friends and neighbours as well.

Their goal is chaos, division and disruption and they will seek to achieve it by whatever means possible. It is our responsibility to out-innovate these adversaries and support those who spend every day defending our national resilience.

The UK has world-class security services, a dedicated police force and deep technical expertise, but resilience cannot sit just at the centre of government. It has to extend across the infrastructure, venues, businesses and transport systems that hostile actors are testing. The threat is here, the target is our economy and the people of our nation.

However, our solution is also within reach; we are more than capable of overcoming this threat. It is time we took action, empowered those who seek to protect us and put our adversaries back on the back foot.

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Harry Mead, co-founder and CEO of Augur, a resilience technology company using AI to protect critical infrastructure and public spaces.

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