Tory government should be manoeuvrist government

The greatest challenge facing a new government may be that Britain’s national security institutions are not fit for purpose. They were built for a different era and focused on a set of now obselete threats. Notwithstanding a few exceptions, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the threats during the Cold War were slow-moving and predictable. Even in the immediate Cold War period, threats were nasty, but rarely novel.
 
Now, however, Britain faces all manner of fast-moving, asymmetric threats. Terrorists and insurgents can get inside our decision-making loop. In Helmand, the Taliban stage attacks around their media strategy, not the other way around as we do it. Countries like Russia and China can bring a range of assets to bear, many of which are not even governmental. Just think of the way in which deniable attacks were launched against Estonia’s IT infrastructure following a spat with the Moscow government.
 
The public and the media, meanwhile, struggle to understand that in the modern era there is a limit to safety – even though responding to the consequences of crises will have to involve ordinary people in a way not seen since the Blitz.