Imagine a country where the enemy does not arrive in tanks or send bombers into the night sky, but instead slips quietly into smartphones, news feeds, group chats, social media timelines, and eventually, into the way people vote. That is the world Britain now lives in, and according to Fiona Hill, a former White House adviser and one of the West’s most experienced security experts, the United Kingdom is dangerously unprepared for it. Hill appeared before Parliament’s joint committee on national security strategy, a cross-party body of MPs and peers, and delivered a blunt warning: the UK has become a “soft target” for Russian and other state-backed propaganda. She told the committee she feared the country had become “extraordinarily vulnerable” to online manipulation that could seep directly into the electoral system. She pointed to a troubling gap—there is almost no serious public discussion about civil defence in the digital age. In her view, modern war is no longer fought only with tanks, missiles and soldiers; it is fought with disinformation, manipulation, social media algorithms, and psychological pressure. A nation that does not teach its citizens how to recognise and resist those tools leaves the front door wide open. Hill’s point is not that the UK will be conquered by bots overnight. It is that the country is sleepwalking into an era where the most important battles happen in the human mind, and too many people do not even know the battle is happening. The problem, she insisted, is partly on the societal level: people are not being trained to pause, question, and verify what they see online. They are not equipped to notice the hallmarks of a coordinated influence operation—the sudden uniformity of talking points, the emotional tug of outrage, the strange alliance of accounts pushing the same narrative. And in a democracy, where public opinion shapes policy and elections decide power, that is no small vulnerability. The phrase “soft target” was chosen carefully. Security experts use it to describe something easier to hit than a fortified object, a house with no locks, a shop with no staff. In the information battlefield, Hill argues, Britain is exactly that: a complex, open democracy with enormous digital exposure, but without the antibodies that could protect it from an organised campaign of lies.
To understand what Hill is asking for, look at Sweden. The country has an old concept called “psychological defence”—a phrase that sounds cold and technical, but actually means something deeply practical: training people to think about how they deal with all kinds of information warfare, so they can recognise when they are being manipulated. It is not about hiding the truth, banning uncomfortable opinions, or telling citizens what they may discuss. It is about building a society that is hard to fool. The idea dates back to the Cold War, when Sweden knew it was not going to outgun its adversaries and decided it would have to out-think them. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the concept was allowed to fade, as so many Cold War habits were. Then came the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and in 2022 Sweden set up a fresh psychological defence agency, designed to work openly with the public, monitor disinformation, and highlight false narratives before they take root. The agency’s work is not glamorous. It involves careful tracking of what is spreading across social media, comparing patterns, tracing sources, and speaking plainly about what it finds. One of the clearest examples came four years ago, when Sweden was hit by a nasty piece of disinformation claiming that Swedish social services were kidnapping Muslim children for corrupt purposes. The false story began in sources linked to Egypt, travelled through social media and community networks, and for a time it gained real traction—especially in immigrant communities where distrust of authorities is already a sensitive chord. It was only after sustained work by the agency and others, patiently exposing the origins and intent of the story, that the lie was called out and quashed. The point of the Swedish approach is not to tell people what to think; it is to give them the mental tools to ask better questions. When the next fabricated story appears, citizens are a little more likely to hesitate, to wonder who benefits, and to resist the urge to share the outrage. Hill used Sweden as a contrast precisely because it shows that public education is not naive or unrealistic. It is an established, working practice.
Hill was not speaking alone. She appeared alongside George Robertson, a former NATO secretary general, and together they have been pushing the British government to treat the information threat with the seriousness it deserves. They co-authored last year’s Strategic Defence Review, which recommended that the government engage the general public in a wider conversation about the risks posed by Russia, China, Iran and others. That recommendation sounds simple, but it is actually a radical challenge to the way Britain has organised its defences for decades. For too long, national security has been regarded as a specialised profession, something best left to intelligence agencies, military planners, and classified reports. Hill and Robertson are trying to break that mould. They see ordinary citizens not as a burdensome liability, but as a strategic asset. The problem, they told the parliamentary committee, is that the conversation has not begun. The review was written, the recommendation was made, and then very little happened. Robertson said, “You would have thought that it would have been a matter of some urgency.” But the urgency has not translated into action. The committee itself was convened to ask how the UK can build societal resilience in the online era, and the two expert witnesses arrived with a common message: you cannot build resilience by keeping people in the dark. You have to talk to them, explain the nature of the threat, and give them something useful to do. Otherwise, the country simply relies on a thin professional layer to defend an entire population against attacks that are aimed at all of its citizens. That is not a tenable strategy.
Robertson’s frustration was sharpened by the fact that the British prime minister had already sounded the alarm. Keir Starmer has warned that Russia could attack NATO by the end of this decade. If that warning is accurate, and it was made by a careful head of government rather than by a tabloid headline, then the time to prepare the public is now, not after the crisis begins. Robertson said there was “a great necessity to share with the country the kind of threats that we face at the moment.” But when he tried to remind the government of its own pledge to communicate more, the response was underwhelming. They simply had not started. The phrase “matter of some urgency” hung over the whole hearing. This is not about scaring people. It is about treating adults like adults. The British public is perfectly capable of understanding that there are enemies who wish to do this country harm, and that some of those enemies will use lies as a weapon. What is far more dangerous, Robertson and Hill argue, is the silence that leaves people unprepared and vulnerable. The absence of a public conversation is especially striking because information warfare does not respect national borders. It targets social media platforms, community networks, local news, and family group chats. It finds divisions and widens them. It exploits grievances, distrust, and uncertainty. A country that refuses to discuss those threats is not protecting its citizens; it is leaving them alone in a jungle without a map. And when the moment of conflict arrives—whether a physical war, a cyberattack, or a political crisis—the preparatory work cannot be done overnight. Robertson put it in stark terms: “We cannot allow the idea to be there that it is purely a matter for the armed forces to defend the country.” He called for an “all of country approach” that includes citizens directly.
Hill gave the committee a simple, memorable example of what such public education can achieve. During the Troubles in Northern Ireland, there was a long-running effort to teach people about the danger of unattended bags. The message was stark but practical: if you see a bag that looks out of place, do not touch it, tell someone, move away. That campaign did not create a society of hysterical citizens. It created a quiet, widespread awareness that saved lives. It is exactly the kind of civil defence that is now missing, Hill suggested. In the digital age, the equivalent of the unattended bag is the suspicious message, the viral rumour, the targeted lie, the strange amplification of a marginal story. People need to learn how to recognise those hazards and how to respond to them, not by retreating into fear, but by exercising caution and judgment. She said, “I think there’s too much of a worry that people are going to panic at this particular point, but you haven’t even tried to test the proposition of actually talking to people directly.” The comment was aimed at a security establishment that often treats public information as a risk to be managed rather than a resource to be used. Hill and Robertson both reject that paternalism. They believe people can handle the truth, and that they deserve the chance to try. There is, of course, a risk that talking about Russian propaganda can be used by political actors to dismiss legitimate criticism, and that is a real tension. But Hill’s answer would be that the best defence against that danger is not silence; it is more literacy, more transparency, and more opportunity for citizens to weigh evidence for themselves.
This is not just an abstract debate about strategy. It is about the future of democracy itself. The tools of information warfare have become so sophisticated that a handful of people in a distant country can stir up anger, deepen divisions, and distort political choices without ever firing a shot. If Britain is to remain a resilient and open society, it has to treat those tools as a first-order threat. That means more than unhappy briefing notes; it means building digital literacy into civic life, supporting independent journalism, encouraging critical thinking in schools, and creating institutions that work with the public rather than simply warning them from on high. It means admitting that no government can protect everyone from every lie, but that a well-informed citizenry is the hardest target an adversary can face. Hill and Robertson are not asking for a culture of paranoia or a propaganda machine of their own. They are asking for something harder: honesty, respect, and a genuine national conversation. The UK still has time to learn the lessons of Sweden, to close the gap between threat and public understanding, and to become a hard target instead of a soft one. But that time will not last forever, and the price of inattention may not be counted in soldiers or missiles. It may be counted in a broken public sphere, in manipulated elections, and in a country that no longer knows what it believes. That is the fate that Fiona Hill fears, and no amount of technical wizardry will change it unless the British people are told the truth and asked to help. In the end, her testimony is a challenge to every politician, every editor, every teacher, and every voter. The enemy is already inside the network. The only real question is whether Britain wants to learn how to defend itself before it is too late.