Britain's Next War Won't Be an Away Game: A Former Spy Chief on Cyber Campaigning- 327

August 5, 2026

General Sir Jim Hockenhull spent a career built on keeping secrets, and he is now best known for the moment he chose to share one. As Chief of Defence Intelligence from December 2018 to May 2022, he pushed London to declassify and publish what British intelligence knew of Russia's plans to invade Ukraine — down to a map of the invasion routes Moscow's forces would take — specifically to strip the Kremlin of its ability to manufacture a pretext after the fact. The decision is now widely judged a success. At the time, Hockenhull says, almost nobody else in government thought it was a good idea at all, with one crucial exception: then-Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, whose own background as security minister gave him enough familiarity with intelligence work to back a proposal that ran directly against the culture of an institution built to keep information contained rather than release it.

Hockenhull's case, laid out at length in a new interview, is that the declassification wasn't a one-off act of transparency so much as the opening move in a sustained information campaign — and that this distinction between a single disclosure and an ongoing campaign is exactly what Western governments, Britain included, still struggle to sustain. Intelligence releases began on February 17, 2022, mapping Putin's invasion axes, but a single release meant nothing without a standing team built specifically to keep translating classified material into safely shareable public information as the crisis evolved. That same infrastructure supported something the public didn't learn about until much later: sustained intelligence-sharing with Ukraine itself, a fact that only became widely known when the United States briefly announced it was suspending its own intelligence-sharing with Kyiv. The audiences for the original disclosures, Hockenhull says, were never singular — the British public needed to understand a European war was coming and that Russian disinformation would try to manufacture a pretext for it, drawing on a familiar playbook already seen in Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Syria in 2016; but the releases were also aimed squarely at Moscow, a deliberate signal that Britain's understanding of Russian intentions ran deep enough to expose them before they happened, closing off the space in which a fabricated justification might have taken hold. As Hockenhull frames it, once a lie establishes itself in public understanding, it becomes nearly impossible to kill — which made preempting the lie with the truth, however unlikely peaceful reversal actually was, worth the institutional risk of breaking with decades of secrecy culture.

Hockenhull is candid about where the intelligence assessment fell short, and his account of that failure is more interesting than a simple victory narrative would be. British intelligence correctly assessed Russia's plan for Kyiv to fall within five to seven days and for the broader operation to conclude in roughly thirty-five, and correctly catalogued the structural weaknesses that would undermine that timeline — an operation at a scale unattempted since the Second World War, undersupported logistics, a plan dependent on rapid success with no real contingency for delay, poor coordination between land and air forces, uncertain morale, and inadequately trained conscripts operating relatively modern equipment. He draws a direct parallel to Germany's 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union: an overestimation of one's own force paired with a diminished view of the adversary, often rooted in the same underlying assumptions. What British intelligence didn't anticipate was that Russia would suffer from every one of those weaknesses simultaneously rather than absorbing them individually — and it also lacked meaningful insight into Ukraine's own war plan, since Ukrainian forces were reluctant to share their intentions with anyone, at times even internally, making it genuinely difficult to judge the actual correlation of forces going into the invasion. Hockenhull's broader point about intelligence assessment cuts against the retrospective "you said this and it didn't happen" style of criticism: sharing an assessment changes the situation the assessment described, since the people acting on that intelligence then behave differently than they would have otherwise — meaning Western support decisions informed by the West's own accurate reading of Russian weaknesses were themselves part of why those weaknesses compounded into failure.

The strategic argument Hockenhull presses hardest concerns cyber capability specifically, and it turns on a single structural fact: unlike a conventional weapon, which remains functionally the same object until used, a cyber capability can be closed off by something as mundane as a routine software update, whether or not anyone even knows an operation depended on the underlying vulnerability. Cyber tools, in his framing, resemble Lego bricks more than munitions in a warehouse — skilled operators can combine them differently depending on target, technology, and moment, but any given combination's usefulness is often temporary and cannot simply be stockpiled for a decisive future moment. That reality, he argues, makes 1950s-style nuclear deterrence theory a poor fit for cyberspace; the more useful modern question isn't what you can threaten to do to an adversary, but what it does to that adversary's calculations to know that you can already see them. He credits Britain's National Cyber Force, established in 2020 and funded on a decade-long commitment from 2021, with being built specifically as a joint construct led by the Ministry of Defence and GCHQ, with the Secret Intelligence Service as a key partner — a single entity spanning cybercrime, online child exploitation, terrorism, hostile-state activity, and, ultimately, wartime targets, rather than the traditionally separate military and civilian capabilities most comparable states maintain. Offensive cyber typically grows out of the intelligence community, which makes covert operation the default posture, but Hockenhull argues there are real occasions where an adversary knowing what you're capable of — sometimes through quiet diplomatic channels rather than public announcement — serves a deterrent purpose a purely secret capability cannot, citing the barely-disguised nature of the Sony hack that followed a film mocking North Korea's leadership as a case where an attacker chose visibility over concealment. The trade-off cuts both ways: demonstrating a capability publicly all but guarantees the adversary patches the underlying vulnerability, and Hockenhull is skeptical of the instinct to answer every cyberattack with a cyber response in kind, arguing cyber tools work best combined with other levers of state power rather than treated as a self-contained tit-for-tat.

What frustrates Hockenhull most, in the time since leaving uniform in June, is Britain's failure to sustain anything resembling a continuous campaigning posture — a criticism he extends to the government's own churn as much as to any external adversary. Days after this interview took place, Britain appointed its fifth prime minister and fifth defence secretary since the invasion of Ukraine four years earlier, and Hockenhull argues this constant reorganization is precisely why Britain struggles to match adversaries who treat every instrument of state power as part of one uninterrupted, long-running effort — not admiration for their methods or the ethical lines they cross, but genuine respect for the integration itself. He points to the Digital Targeting Web within the UK's new Defence Investment Plan — the ambition of connecting "anybody's sensor to anybody's shooter" across allied forces — as the modern descendant of the Dowding System that coordinated Britain's air defense during the Battle of Britain, scaled to a volume and speed of missile, drone, and information traffic the mid-twentieth century never had to process, and dependent on hard, largely unresolved questions about trusting allied intelligence enough to act on it without independent verification when there may be no time for a second check. He has also pushed to reform how Britain recruits cyber talent specifically, building a direct-entry pathway that takes recruits through brief basic training straight into specialist cyber instruction rather than the traditional four-to-seven-year route through conventional military career progression — the first cohort of roughly forty recruits saw only a single dropout, a retention rate far outperforming standard military training and evidence, in his view, that talented people who would never join through the conventional path are reachable through a different one.

Hockenhull's parting argument returns to the public trust problem that runs through the entire interview: because so much of what British intelligence knows about the threats the country actually faces remains classified, the public is being asked to fund an expanding defense and cyber posture — spending that competes directly with money that would otherwise go toward schools or hospitals — largely on faith, without ever seeing the evidence that would justify the trade-off. He wants to help build a sustained public case for why that spending matters, treating it as a long-term campaign rather than a single argument to be won once, and he's explicit that the risk isn't confined to some hypothetical future war — sabotage, espionage, and attacks on undersea fiber-optic cables are already live possibilities, arriving well before anything resembling a conventional shooting war, arriving inside Britain itself rather than in some conflict fought at a comfortable distance. As he puts it, the next war Britain faces won't be an away game.