This paper makes the case for British intelligence as an alternative to traditional power projection. It does so within the constraints of British political-economic reality, which generate severe limitations on the UK’s alternatives. Intelligence capabilities may be the only way for the UK to meaningfully influence strategic events in the short-term considering military atrophy and political incoherence. I open by identifying the truly vexing nature of the strategic problem the UK faces, even compared to Europe. I then identify what is meant by intelligence capabilities, before moving to a discussion of British relative advantages in an intelligence context and their link with British strategy. Finally, I provide four recommendations for an intelligence-centric power projection capability: an expanded covert action capacity with a direct action focus; a drive for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) operational autonomy; investment in high-altitude and space-based surveillance; and a policy emphasis on partnerships with private sector actors.
The Hard Reality
The UK faces a particularly wicked strategic problem. It is an intensified version of the European wicked strategic problem. For Europe in general, all three pillars of its strategic model no longer exist. Cheap Russian energy, which subsidised central European industrial capacity, is gone, with the Europe-Russia relationship poisoned for a generation. Easily accessible Chinese markets, which underwrote European export revenues, have transformed, with China now competing against, and typically displacing, European commercial alternatives. Finally, the US military umbrella, which allowed Europe to spend lavishly on social welfare with little regard for hard power, is gone. Whether or not the United States remains strategically engaged in Europe’s security architecture, the European powers will have to resource and sustain their own defence. This means both increased defence spending and serious strategic thought that births military capacity. The European powers must link policy ends, strategic ways, and military means in a manner unnecessary since 1991, and for many of them, unexecuted since 1945.
The UK faces all these issues in the extreme. Its energy mix makes it chronically industrially uncompetitive — while Germany can at least consider revitalising its domestic nuclear industry, path dependencies from previous governments mean it will take another decade for the UK to meaningfully nuclearise. Indeed, both the previous and current governments have set out ambitious nuclear targets while pushing execution out 20 years. Chinese market penetration has wiped out nascent attempts at domestic electrification, with the only UK battery company collapsing in 2023 with no results. In turn, while Europe may not be particularly economically competitive compared to the United States, it at least benefits from market scale. Finally, in military terms, the UK does nominally maintain sophisticated capabilities, from its aircraft carriers to its nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines, stealth fighters, and modern tanks. But it cannot deploy or sustain almost any of these capabilities independently. This explains the continued say-do gap over Ukraine in particular, an issue over which the UK insists it remains essential, convenes a series of summits, and then commits nothing tangible. Crucially, while British taxes may be lower than those throughout the EU, the UK’s welfare state is extraordinarily expensive, significantly less marketised than even Scandinavia’s premier social-welfare states, and generates very little economic return.
A meaningful defence spending uplift may become politically viable, especially as the British government realises that a rearming Europe will not take it seriously without substantive financial increases. But even if the UK were to reach a 5%-of-GDP figure before the next parliament, which would necessitate politically improbable welfare cuts or growth-stifling tax rises, it would not be able to build a military commensurate for even local European strategic needs. Domestic industry would move too slowly. International acquisitions attempts would simply add to a global backlog for air defence, artillery ammunition, and warships. Moreover, British defence acquisition is notoriously bad, even when compared to a historically inefficient German system or US acquisition failures. The Army’s Ajax failure is the most notorious issue, given the system was literally unsafe for British infantry to use. But the Navy and Air Force all suffer the same issues. More cash, while certainly necessary, would be likely to go nowhere, particularly when defence procurement is run by a ponderous bureaucracy of 11,000, compared to just 300 for its Israeli equivalent.
The Intelligence Alternative
It is within these constraints that we may make the case for a revitalised British intelligence capacity as a form of power projection. Strategic reality demands both extreme creativity and a hard look at British strengths and weaknesses.
Of course, the British policy establishment has not accepted the reality that a half-decade of resource misallocation so compounded the previous 15 years of slow political-military unravelling as to hollow out the foundations of British national power. The British Army barely has enough tanks to outfit a Tank Regiment, with operational readiness potentially being much lower. In the recent US-Israel-Iran War, the UK had to pull the destroyer HMS Dragon from its maintenance period to defend its Cypriot base. In 2018, the UK deployed just under 200 armored vehicles, various small ships, and logistics and fighter aircraft to Oman under a major joint exercise, admittedly an operation four times smaller than its 2001 exercise with Oman, but still a major force. This would be impossible today.
Repeated British attempts to join a European defence-industrial community, even if they succeed at the cost of a high price tag, will not rapidly generate deployable military capabilities either for local northern European contingencies or contingencies in the Mediterranean. The alternative, an “Allied by Design” force, is an exercise in faux strategic creativity. Such a force would require a host of “enablers”, from command-and-control satellites to heavy lift and air-to-air refuelling aircraft, a robust maritime surveillance capacity, and key electronic warfare equipment. The UK does have many of these capabilities today. But becoming the baseline enabler for an Anglo-European military system is no cheaper than simply revitalising British sovereign capabilities. It also requires British allies in Europe to accept a distinct asymmetry of risk, where the UK trades skin-in-the-game for capital investment.
Sovereign British intelligence capabilities provide an alternative for power-projection. They cannot replace traditional hard power. But over the next decade, they provide an effective tool to link policy ends and military means through human and technical collection, and human and technically-executed action, that can fill a core gap in allied capabilities. It also allows the UK to retain its prised relationship with the Anglophone powers. Crucially, it relies on capabilities that in whole or in part already exist.
We might divide power-projection relevant intelligence capabilities along two lines, their means and their function. Intelligence means are split into human and technical capacities, the latter including various forms of signals intelligence (SIGINT), the purview of the U.S. National Security Agency and the UK’s GCHQ. Intelligence functions are divided into collection, defined as the generation of insights on a target actor, and action, the execution of tangible activities to modify the political, strategic, operational, or tactical environment. Both these functions can be broken down at various degrees of granularity. There are politically-directed covert actions, ranging from white and black propaganda campaigns to influence operations, that are distinct from direct action, or from enabling missions.
This typology deliberately does not mention analysis. Intelligence analysis is central to any intelligence organisation. It is the means by which information is translated into insights that inform policymakers and direct covert action. However, analysis is taken to be downstream from collection as a structural and functional matter. British intelligence analysis, in public at least, appears to be as professional and competent as that of any other Western power.
Few intelligence programmes are restricted to human or technical means alone. Nor is the line between collection and action always clear. However, the specialised capacities needed for different sorts of human and technical collection and action, even if they are integrated in practice, require specific, individual development — much like air-land or air-naval combat require individually developed capabilities even if they are integrated tactically and operationally.
The UK’s Comparative Advantage
Good strategy pits strengths against weaknesses. This is true whether a strategy is sequential or cumulative, attritional or destruction-focussed. It is also equally true of strategy for alliances as it is against adversaries. The United States has outsized leverage over NATO not simply because of its raw military expenditure or the size of its air and land forces, but because it can bring to bear sophisticated enablers that, given their expense, the European powers do not field. Leverage matters between partners and against adversaries.
In turn, we may take as our definition of strategy the link between policy ends and military means through a specific way of doing things. The means available fundamentally shape policy ends and strategic ways, just as the levels of war are in fluid interaction. For our purposes, this means we should answer both what British ends might be and identify what means it has, with a focus on British intelligence.
The UK has as a primary end the prevention of invasion and subjugation by a hostile European power. Yet this end alone, the longest-standing national interest in modern history, does not generate requirements for strategy. As an island nation with limited resources and, particularly today, constrained industrial capacity, the UK must shape the world around it actively and persistently, or risk being caught in a situation like the present one, where it loses the ability to direct events and leverage its strengths. One fundamental strength is the truly Eurasian-spanning character of the UK’s political perspective and strategic culture. The UK is the only power apart from the United States that in the past two centuries has maintained serious interests in Europe, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia. Relative geography, technology, and contingent strategic factors create differences in British and American interests. But they occupy positions and play roles more similar to each other than to any other international actor. This is the foundation of the “Special Relationship”.
The UK still keeps this legacy of Eurasian-wide interest alive through its political-military engagement in Europe, its limited-number, dependent, but still sophisticated conventional and nuclear capabilities, and its relationships in the Middle East and Asia. Relationships in these regions are overwhelmingly intelligence-centric, whether formally through partnerships with Australian intelligence, or informally through commercial, foreign office, and legacy historical contacts in the Arabian Gulf and Hong Kong. No European power has anywhere near these sorts of relationships, most of which are human, not technical, “INT” derived.
Nor does the UK ignore European issues or the Russia problem. The SIS and British Special Forces have been aggressive, forward-leaning, flexible, and operationally essential to the Ukrainian war effort. They have built strong relationships with Kyiv’s intelligence services, which have emerged as the most effective organisations combating the Russia problem considering access to their target, and with significant affordances in Africa and the Levant. Different European services do have human intelligence strengths. The Dutch have built a strong relationship with Ukraine. Germany’s intelligence and security services provide essential capabilities against Islamist threats, despite their counterintelligence difficulties when attacking the Russia problem. The Baltic, Nordic, and Polish services focus heavily on the Russia problem. France nominally maintains a specialty in Africa — although recent events have called French placement and access into question. But only the UK’s SIS can provide something approximating the full package of geographical coverage and capability.
In turn, the UK is by far Europe’s most capable technical intelligence actor. Only GCHQ can execute the full gamut of cyberspace operations at high intensity. GCHQ also maintains intimate operational relationships with Australia’s Signals Intelligence Organisation, giving it organic access to information in Asia as well.
British intelligence is reliant on the United States, creating short and long-term political risks. However, this is more relevant for technical than human intelligence, considering the unacknowledged but extensive financial integration between GCHQ and the NSA. Yet this does generate some alliance leverage. NSA operations would not be crippled without GCHQ, but the very process of disentangling US and UK technical collection — even bracketing implications for other FIVE EYES partnerships — would generate meaningful costs.
Four Steps
Generating an intelligence-centric power projection capability entails four steps cutting across human and technical intelligence capabilities.
First, the UK should pivot SIS to a covert action focus, including the creation of an organic direct action capability. SIS does execute covert action. But there is less systematisation of covert action in the UK than in the US, a result of different resourcing, different risk tolerance, and different capacities. Building a covert action capability would require investment in new case officer and operations officer training infrastructure, alongside an empowered operations leadership. It also requires internalising significant amounts of UK Special Forces experience in Ukraine. Rather than functionally renting covert action capability, including direct action, from UK Special Forces, SIS should integrate this capability directly into its structure. This will ensure it can both continue its campaign in Ukraine and sustain a similar effort elsewhere.
Second, the UK must prioritize a long-term transition toward operational independence for GCHQ to mitigate the strategic risks inherent in its current technical interdependence. While the “Special Relationship” remains a cornerstone of British power, the extensive financial and structural integration between GCHQ and the NSA creates a vulnerability where British technical collection is effectively tethered to American priorities and political will. To address this, the UK should invest in sovereign high-end signals intelligence (SIGINT) and cyber-effect capabilities that can function outside of US-provided architectures. This shift is not intended to sever the Five Eyes partnership, but rather to ensure that the UK maintains “sovereign leverage”. By developing proprietary offensive cyber tools and independent data processing frameworks, GCHQ can provide unique contributions to the alliance while ensuring that British policy ends are not limited by political changes in Five Eyes capitals. This autonomy is a necessary prerequisite for a state that seeks to project power through technical excellence in an era of fragmented global digital governance.
Third, the UK must shift its investment strategy to emphasize sovereign Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance assets, specifically by leveraging space-based capabilities to rectify current technical shortfalls. While the UK possesses sophisticated conventional platforms, its lack of independent, high-altitude, and space-based surveillance limits its ability to deploy or sustain these capabilities without external support. Currently, no European power maintains a serious space-based intelligence capability with global coverage, leaving a critical gap that the UK is uniquely positioned to fill. By developing sovereign satellite constellations and high-altitude persistent sensors, the UK can transition from a “dependent” actor to a “baseline enabler” for broader security architectures. This investment provides a technically-executed means of linking policy ends to strategic ways, ensuring the UK can monitor and influence Eurasian-wide contingencies without total reliance on the American orbital umbrella.
Fourth, the UK should use private sector partnerships to improve its intelligence capabilities. This applies to both human and technical capacities, and to collection and action. London remains a global financial hub that generates opportunities for specific financial actors that approximate merchant banking. It also creates access to readily available capital for otherwise unfunded ventures. Defence tech startups have only unclear strategic promise at best, and at worst push cash down irrelevant developmental pathways. By contrast, British intelligence can leverage capital to generate real capacity, whether that entails funding parastatal entities in the aftermath of the Ukraine War or bespoke collection outfits. Capital access generates the incentives for blended grey zone partnerships.
A Time for Realism
Intelligence-led power projection is not a full substitute for hard power. But the UK’s predicament is politically, societally, economically, and strategically more daunting than that of its European neighbours. The result is a need to leverage British strengths, maximising effectiveness in the tools that it can currently employ. Intelligence capabilities are the most viable British tools for rapid expansion.
Revitalizing British power requires a political class willing to engage in an active public dialogue over security and defense, thereby bearing the costs of rearmament. But for a middle power beset by a host of internal difficulties and facing severe structural constraints, intelligence capabilities can maintain, perhaps not the penumbra of Empire, but the ability to shape the world around it.
