Rob Johnson (2:00)

Be, let's call it what it is.

Deborah Haynes (2:02)

There may be an attack.

Host (Sky News Daily) (2:04)

I think we just have to be cautious of the word attack.

Keir Giles (2:07)

What do we do next? You want to just take a breath before you decide exactly what the next move is.

Host (Sky News Daily) (2:13)

For every action, there will be a reaction without giving too much away. For those who haven't yet listened, October 6th was the day in the War game that that ballistic missiles struck the uk. So we thought we'd get the War Game host, our defence editor, Deborah Haynes, and a couple of the other participants back together to discuss what we learned from the exercise and how close to reality war with Russia actually is.

Keir Giles (2:36)

So to confirm, Admiral, we are not expecting that the United Kingdom is able to defend realistically against our missiles. Is that correct?

Host (Sky News Daily) (2:45)

Now that was Kier Giles, a leading expert on Russia and the Russian military, playing the role of the Russian premier. Good to have you with us, Kier. And Deborah Haynes is, of course, our defence editor and the podcast host and co creator. Good to see you too. I mean, Deborah, you first just explain the concept of the war game.

Deborah Haynes (3:02)

The idea came to me to run a war game because I was trying to think of a way to take what is actually quite a niche subject when it comes at the moment in terms of national defence, national resilience, and make it more mainstream. And so the idea was to simulate an armed attack on the UK by Russia and bring in, to make it as credible as possible, former military chiefs, former security officials, former politicians as well, crucially, to form a cabinet, a COBRA committee. And then also we brought in experts on Russia like here, and other brilliant experts who know Russia's ways of war, to become our Kremlin and to be able to not just launch the attacks on the uk, but explain why Russia is doing that.

Host (Sky News Daily) (3:58)

So it's sort of a bit like a role playing game, except the people that you brought in, you know, Ben Wallace, Jim Murphy, Amber Rudd, Jackstraw, I mean, they've all been in governments, yes.

Deborah Haynes (4:12)

Play their part, but it's completely unscripted in terms of what the British side are doing. They have no idea what is coming their way and they have to respond as they see fit. So it was to bring in these people that had very real jobs in the past to role play those jobs as part of a game, but they didn't know what was coming their way here.

Host (Sky News Daily) (4:39)

Your role in all of this was. Well, it was pivotal, wasn't it? Explain what your job was and the scenario that played out in the war game.

Keir Giles (4:47)

Well, I'm a professional explainer of Russia. I do it for a living. I tell people what Russia does, why they're doing it and often what they're going to do next. So Deborah came to me looking for other people like me, people who can think through how Russia would act under certain circumstances. And of course, people who've done this before, people who take part in this kind of war game, this kind of role play, but usually behind closed doors, it's for national governments, it's for NATO, it's trying to work out through scenarios what to do about Russia and how Russia is going to respond. And the really striking thing about this was that whoever we showed this scenario to, the scenario that had been come up for the podcast, and how Russia might act on the red side, the Russia side All of them thought this was entirely plausible and entirely in accordance with how they might expect Russia to behave.

Host (Sky News Daily) (5:35)

So, Deborah, along comes October 6th and we have strikes on GCHQ military installations, Oxford Street. As Keir said, this was a situation which was certainly believable. But in terms of where the UK found itself in this scenario, at arm's length from the United States, not yet supported by NATO, how realistic was that?

Deborah Haynes (6:01)

We played the game back in April, so October was far in the future. And it is quite chilling how even in the buildup to us playing the game, there were in, in the real world, similar events happening. So sabotage, you're seeing arson attacks, these mysterious drone sightings, and that's become much more evident in the last couple of weeks. And Russian warplanes entering NATO airspace. You know, again, this is. These are all kind of acts, aggressive acts by Russia that's testing NATO. All these kind of people sort of say sub threshold gray zone attacks are part of the toolbox in a war scenario that can be used to disrupt, to disorientate, to create chaos before or during a conventional attack. And so obviously on the 6th of October in our war game, and it is quite weird waking up today on the 6th of October in real life, very relieved that there weren't missiles raining down on the uk. But in our in seriousness, the point of the game was to show what the capability could be, what the threat might look like. And does the UK have a plan for that? Does the UK have the ability to defend that? What about being part of the NATO alliance? Article five, is that going to be. Is it automatically triggered? And it's not a shield. You have to be attacked for Article 5 to be invoked and for Article 5 to be invoked collectively. So we wanted to really test that as well.

Host (Sky News Daily) (7:42)

Kieran, I'll be absolutely honest, I lost count of the number of times the hairs on the back of my neck went up listening to the series. But one of the things that struck me the most was the amount of discussion that took place on the British end of the war game about the legality of what was going on and the absence of those discussions on the Russian end.

Keir Giles (8:03)

Well, yes, when we listened back to the final podcast, we, meaning the Russian team, what also struck us was the very different atmosphere in our room to the British responding to this. You may have heard us being very calm, methodical, measured. We had a plan. Whereas, perhaps unsurprisingly, when it took the British side, the blue side, by surprise, there was a certain amount of flap and a great deal of Discussion which, to the red side, was more or less irrelevant to what we were trying, trying to do. Because looking at this whole scenario, what the Russia players saw was an opportunity to neutralize the UK as an adversary and potentially also neutralize NATO as well. So there is an interest for Russia in trying to make sure that the UK shuts up and in demonstrating that NATO is not actually going to help the rest of Europe. And those are the twin opportunities that we were working towards throughout the course of this scenario.

Host (Sky News Daily) (8:55)

Deborah, obviously, I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't listened just yet, but what did we Learn about the UK's state of readiness for an attack such as this?

Deborah Haynes (9:04)

Hard to give a clear answer without giving too much away. But I mean that we're not ready, and that's no secret. You've had MPs reports and ministers also acknowledge that we are not ready right now to fight high intensity warfare for a sustained period of time. We actually recorded the war game before the Defence Review came out. But before the release of the War Game, you had the government's defence review setting out plans to rebuild its ability to fight war against a peer competitor at scale. And yet there is no sense of urgency. In the language there's urgency, but in the action it's still inertia. And then you also had the National Security Strategy, which came out as well as the podcast was being released, and it says for the first time in a long time that the UK needs to be actively prepared for a direct attack on the home front, which is very stark language coming from the government. And yet there isn't the same communication happening with the public about what that means in terms of readiness. And the game really does reveal how, when you don't have the conventional capacity to deter, and if there is hesitancy on behalf of your strongest allies, in particular the United States, then the leap from doing nothing to launching a nuclear attack to try to deter or to save your country from further attack suddenly becomes very narrow kirt for those who.

Host (Sky News Daily) (10:56)

Say that this is a bunch of hypotheticals that exist at the extreme end of a range of possibilities. I mean, how would you reply to that?

Keir Giles (11:06)

There's a lingering perception in this country that in order to be a problem, enemy aircraft, be they Russian or whoever, actually have to be directly overhead. But that's a very outdated perception. They're launching missiles at Ukraine from thousands of kilometers away, and if we think thousands of kilometres from targets in the uk, that's way up in the Arctic. Russia is looking for ways that it can do damage to NATO and to the European alliance overall. And that doesn't necessarily mean attacking the countries that are nearest to it, because if it can find a political return on investment that justifies the amount of resources and effort and risk that we're going to challenging a major NATO partner, then it might just do that.

Host (Sky News Daily) (11:47)

So Deborah, the War Game demonstrates that drum that Donald Trump has been banging for many a year now, that we and other NATO allies have simply ignored the threat for far too long and have under invested in our military.

Deborah Haynes (12:00)

That was one of a key purpose of the game was just to illustrate what the reality of that looks like. If people in a democracy aren't informed about specific areas, for example defence and what hollowed out armed forces actually means, then how can they possibly make an informed choice? The combined economies of NATO.

Host (Sky News Daily) (12:22)

So are we then kier in your mind edging towards, perhaps even slipping towards an inevitable conflict with Russia?

Keir Giles (12:29)

We've known for some time that the only thing that is stopping us saying that we're in a state of war with Russia is the timidity of European leaders not admitting that Russia has been waging war on us in every possible domain for years. The patterns of cyber attacks and arson and sabotage and murder and the electronic warfare that's being waged across Northern Europe, they're all aspects of how Russia is normalizing a situation where it's able to carry out hostile acts that do cause significant disruption and do cause fatalities across Europe without it being recognized publicly. That these are tantamount to acts of war and they need a response. We see this playing out at the moment with the complete failure it seems to put in place defences against drones shutting down airports across Scandinavia, across Germany, plenty of examples from the past where this has happened, but no response from the West. So why on earth would Russia not continue to do it?

Host (Sky News Daily) (13:23)

Okay, well let's get a couple of reflections from the other co creator of the War Game, the man who came up with this scenario that played out, Dr. Rob Johnson, Director of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University and formerly of the Ministry of Defence. Rob, what exactly, exactly is the purpose of an exercise like this?

Rob Johnson (13:41)

I think the thing to say about why these things are important is that we can find faults and we can fix them. If you look at the range of analytics that we use in professional war games, the stuff that we do for government, the military, for commerce, in that analytics you can find where there were gaps, things that we missed, items we did not have, and the crucial one in this war Game was we didn't have what they call a war book. This is the document that we held at national level and then also at local government level that we had until 2004 that could give a set of instructions so that everyone knew what to do in a crisis. I think if you look at it today, I know they're rebuilding one at the moment in the government, but today, I'm afraid if we came under a Kyiv style attack, we would be struggling a little bit. We're not as efficient as we should be. And this war game is designed to bring to the public attention and to get government thinking about what we need to do in the case of emergency. And I think what people have said to me who work in government felt that it was. It was realistic, it was plausible, if unlikely. And I know it's initiated behind the scenes, although they won't permit me to take part in it. But I know behind the scenes they're taking this podcast really seriously. And apparently I'm told that action's being.

Host (Sky News Daily) (15:03)

Taken just in terms though, of the content of the war game on this occasion. How much of what happened on the fictitious October 6th is of relevance to where we find ourselves geopolitically, defensively, as of this moment?

Rob Johnson (15:19)

Well, there are some things that are definitely realistic and happening right now. I mean, we begin the podcast with a number of events which are pretty much replicating what's going on now with attempted assassination, you know, and other forms of sort of interference below the threshold of war, as they call it, or sometimes they call it the gray zone. Do we? That's absolutely plausible. And I think that Russia does constitute an existential threat to the United Kingdom. This isn't any longer a story from the Cold War, a Tom Glancy novel. This is. This is the real thing. I think there are some things that people say, well, what about nuclear weapons? The UK in reality would deter this kind of attack because the retaliation by the NATO alliance would be so overwhelming that Russia would never attempt it. Okay, that's fair. But Russia is mobilized for war. The UK isn't. It's now seasoned, has plenty of experience, which we really have from the last 30 years of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. Well, I think, on balance, I think the threat is very real. The government is taking that threat very seriously, I'm pleased to say. The only problem is we're not really spending enough money. I'm not moving fast enough to deal with a lot of threats we face.

Host (Sky News Daily) (16:38)

Thanks, Rob. Deborah, just a final thought from you then. Rob was just saying that there are people in government, people who are government adjacent as well, that have listened and have agreed with much of yours and care's analysis. So what on earth are they doing about it?

Deborah Haynes (16:51)

There's definitely an exceptional understanding of the problem.

Deborah Haynes (16:57)

However, and there's lots of very brilliant minds who absolutely understand, know what needs to be done. But unfortunately, the Ministry of Defence, it's lost its way for such a long time now that even though the signals are flashing red in terms of the alarm bells and the need to change.

Deborah Haynes (17:21)

It, still and again, it does boil down a lot to funding. And you've got to face the reality that the government has made its choices about how it wants to spend money immediately. And yes, it's talking about increased defence spending, but for the next couple of years there is no new money. And when there is no new money, then there is no significant rush to change. And while there's lots of exquisite examining of the problem and planning about what needs to happen, we are the uk, it seems, falling behind our European partners, who do seem to be working much faster at trying to rebuild and prepare for what many military chiefs and political leaders are saying could be a real chance of large scale war, larger scale than we're seeing. Even in Ukraine, people talk about 2027, 2028. It's not something long off in the distant future. And when we've got a strategic defense review with a timeline of a decade, which is what the UK has, then it's clear that those dates don't match.

Host (Sky News Daily) (18:39)

My thanks to Deborah, Keir and Rob and of course to you for listening. No doubt you'll be keen to catch up with the war game if you haven't already. It's still available, should be just a search away on your podcast app. And if you're new to the Daily and like what you've heard, a follow means that every day around 5pm you'll get all you need to know about one of the biggest stories in the news. Just last week we covered the Chancellor's speech to the Labour conference, the Government's attempts to take the fight to reform uk, the first female Archbishop of Canterbury, and much, much more. The Daily is back again tomorrow.

Deborah Haynes (19:20)

Hello, Nish Kumar here and Coco Khan.

Host (Sky News Daily) (19:22)

And we're dropping in from pod Save the uk.

Deborah Haynes (19:24)

We're your weekly fix of political news from a staunchly progressive perspective and we.

Host (Sky News Daily) (19:29)

Cover a variety of topics from infighting in the Labour Party to infighting in your party to infighting in the Conservative Party.

Deborah Haynes (19:35)

And don't forget the woke sandwiches. We're here for every made up culture war. What is your woke sandwich filling of choice by the way?

Host (Sky News Daily) (19:42)

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Deborah Haynes (19:43)

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