The July sun beat down on Devon and Cornwall, a landscape defined by cream teas, rugged clifftops, and the gentle lapping of waves, yet inside the air-conditioned halls of the University of Exeter, we were building a nightmare. Over two days, a team of academics, military strategists, and cybersecurity experts constructed a digital doppelgänger of Vladimir Putin’s secret state. Using only open-source data, we trained an AI model to think like his finest hackers, assassins, scammers, and propagandists, then—by mutual agreement—unleashed it upon the local emergency services. It felt profoundly foolish for a moment, like accusing a beloved grandparent of being a spy in a friendly game of Cluedo. But the objective was brutally serious: to test the resilience of a Western democracy against a full-spectrum hybrid attack. The police did their duty, arresting the simulated saboteurs; the fire brigades raced to simulated explosions; councils prioritized vulnerable virtual populations; and the army stepped up to offer military aid to the civil authority. Yet, decisively, comprehensively, we lost. We didn’t lose because the local heroes were incompetent; they were, in fact, magnificent. We lost because of the sheer velocity and psychological precision of the assault. The bombs were a distraction. The real invasion was targeting our collective minds, and in that virtual wargame, we had no defense against the ensuing might of digital panic and fatalistic despair.
When the dust settled on the simulation, the grim truth became visceral: the physical sabotage is merely the drumbeat, while the cognitive dissonance is the symphony. Putin’s strategy, rooted in Clausewitz’s ancient maxims, recognizes that you don’t need to destroy a nation’s infrastructure if you can break its collective will to resist. He exploits the very fabric of our free societies—our willingness to question, our legal rights to free speech, our institutional hesitancy to act decisively. We found, to our horror, that our legal codes make it almost impossible to suggest, until explicit charges are formally laid, that an attack on a synagogue or an airbase might be linked to a foreign state. This is not a bureaucratic quirk; it is a paralysis born of fear of overstepping constitutional boundaries. Our intelligence agencies, embroiled in a culture of obsessive secrecy and ambiguity, refuse to publicly attribute attacks, leaving local police, fire and rescue teams—the safest and most generous people in the country—completely unprepared to explain to a terrified public why their social media feeds are boiling with hatred and why their electricity just flickered without warning. The result is a fragmented mosaic of 42 Local Resilience Forums, each operating under different rules, none holding the authority to fight back against a coordinated cognitive assault.
This isn’t some abstract academic cautionary tale confined to research papers; it is happening right now, at this very moment, and you can almost hear the ticking of the clock. Just this year we have seen arsonists strike Latvia’s railway system, posting videos boasting of Russian support, bomb-carrying drones buzz a French aircraft carrier off the coast of Sweden, German police swoop to foil an assassination plot against the boss of a military drone company, and an explosive-laden drone discovered near a Ukrainian transport aircraft. The sheer brazenness of these attacks is breathtaking, operating on a timeline that makes the conclusion inescapable: Russia is already at war with Europe. But it’s a war fought with cryptocurrency exchanged for petty criminals hired via encrypted “gig economy” apps, and it is a war that is devastatingly effective in stirring the pot of extremism. The hatred they fuel on the far right, among Islamist radicals, and even within a festering antisemitic segment of the left, is statistically more virulent and widespread than anything Hitler ever achieved with Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcasts in the second world war. It is a war waged not with tanks and bombs, but with bots, deepfakes, dragged subsea cables, and jammed GPS signals—all serving a single, central purpose: to turn our own society against itself.
In response to this overwhelming attack, there is a thrilling, if modest, shift toward what I have long advocated for: a “militant democracy.” The government, seemingly shedding its decades of caution and liberal tolerance, has started to take bold steps. The recent exclusion of Andreas Malm—a respected environmentalist who horrifically aped the language of Hamas and described their atrocities as “heroic”—is a clear, tangible line in the sand. Malm, who weeks after the October 7th massacre consumed videos of the attacks like a drug, will not be touring British campuses spewing his bile. But banning a lecturer is like throwing a pebble into a hurricane. The Online Safety Act is woefully weak, and its regulator, Ofcom, appears to be next to useless, more a paper tiger than a protective guardian. The real problem, as our Exeter research starkly revealed, is that our entire administrative structure is designed to facilitate destabilization rather than defend against it. We have built a system that prioritizes our own freedom from institutional inconvenience over our collective freedom from psychological warfare, creating a perfect playground for hostile powers who understand the rules of the game better than we do.
The most disheartening moment of our research came when we turned the AI on ourselves, creating a virtual “Blue Team” of fictional executives to manage a crisis. We fed the machines every rulebook, every law, every standard operating procedure, and professional standard currently in existence, and set them loose to do what real people have to do in a crisis. The result was a perfect digital replica of “The Blob”—a bureaucratic nightmare. My virtual team spent weeks asking for permission, deferring up the chain of command, citing the risk of public scandal, and absolutely refusing to take ownership of the emergency. Every real-life catastrophe, from Covid to Grenfell, shows this is a feature, not a bug, in the British system of disaster preparedness. However, in every real wargame I’ve run or participated in, the human beings eventually break the chains of process and find each other, acting with raw human empathy and improvisation, working around the official system to achieve effectiveness. But we cannot rely on heroic improvisation in a time of national crisis. We need properly funded, supported Local Resilience Forums, staffed by civil service expertise, that can learn from each other and propagate knowledge across the system. We need, across officialdom, something equivalent to a coherent national doctrine—a playbook for how to fight back against the manipulation infecting our public square.
As we stand on the precipice of a new era, we must accept a terrifying personal truth: the front line is no longer a distant trench; it is the smartphone in your pocket. The confusion you feel when you scroll through arguments, the rage that bubbles when you see a provocative headline, the helplessness when you can’t tell friend from foe—these are the exact emotions engineered by Moscow and Tehran to break our societies. The Defence Readiness Bill, set to be introduced next year, and the review of the Civil Contingencies Act offer a sliver of hope, but legislation is not a substitute for national spirit. We need a radical cultural awakening—a militant, unbending defense of our democratic institutions. We must learn to recognize the attack, name it, and defeat it in our own communities and in our own hearts, because if we don’t, the quiet horror we simulated in Exeter will become the deafening soundtrack of our real, daily lives. We must stop being passive recipients of information and become active, discerning citizens. For Putin, and for the Iranian regime, we are the weak link in the chain. The only way to fortify that link is to realize that our collective will, and our ability to resist manipulation, is the ultimate, and perhaps the only, defense we truly have.