Modern war tactics leave Britain exposed, says defence chief

♦ Britain’s enemies are increasingly ignoring the rules of war, the nation’s military intelligence chief has warned.

Air Marshal Phil Osborn yesterday said that the UK’S adversaries view today’s battlespace as “layered – across physical and virtual, legal and illegal”.

The country has “miscalculated” the pace at which threats are changing, he admitted, leaving it vulnerable to attack. The speech by the Chief of Defence Intelligence at the Royal United Services Institute in London was a thinly veiled attack on Russia.

He pointed to the unprecedented levels of industrial espionage and use of chemical weapons, and said the “attempted assassination” in Salisbury of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia was “highly likely a state-sponsored chemical weapons attack”.

Propaganda campaigns were perverting political processes, he said.

Highlighting the risk to national infrastructure and attempts to frustrate the rule of law, Air Marshal Osborn said Britain needed to adopt an approach “founded on understanding first, deciding first, and then acting first”.