The defence readiness bill is delayed, UK resilience can't be

Images of Brits sheltering-in-place as airports, data centres, energy facilities, and hotels come under drone and missile attack in the Gulf region have brought uncomfortably close to home the reality of modern conflict. The Hezbollah-attributed drone strike on a hangar at the UK’s RAF Akrotiri base in Cyprus, and an attempt on Diego Garcia, has only added to the effect.

Beyond the Iran threat, the UK Government defines the risk of confrontation with Russia in the near future as ‘acute’. Blaise Metreweli, the MI6 Chief, warns that Moscow is already engaging tactics “just below the threshold of war.” 

The contours of the current conflict reveal the connected resilience fronts of any future European war: technology, energy, and defence. The Defence Readiness Bill, designed to ensure the resilience of critical industries and infrastructure, is due to focus on these critical sectors and their underlying infrastructure. Its delay until 2027 risks hobbling progress.

The UK now needs a single institutional project that matches the reality of the current risk environment: a triple transition that deliberately aligns low‑carbon energy systems, advanced digital infrastructure and technologies, and defence innovation. Making the UK safer depends on developing these entwined fronts together, quickly and at scale with joint planning, shared metrics, and integrated investment decisions. 

In more peaceful times, the government has treated these domains separately as “digital”, “net zero”, and “defence modernisation”. Even when “green” and “digital” agendas were brought together across Europe, they sometimes enjoyed more airtime than policy impact. 

Yet in practice, as this war shows, they form a single strategic system on which a country’s ability to absorb shocks, adapt and maintain core services—from powering bases and hospitals to keeping data centres online and protecting civilians and deployed personnel—depends. 

At war, novel low-carbon energy solutions will be critical for the UK. Distributed, modular infrastructure—edge data centres powered by local renewables or off‑grid sources, for example—could reduce the impact of any single strike. AI-based defence platforms and other advanced technologies like quantum demand vast, reliable compute power, which decentralised energy supplies could support. 

Departments and budget lines are not currently set up for such systems-level planning.  The British Energy Security Strategy is authored by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), for example, while a separate Defence Operational Energy Strategy is owned by the Ministry of Defence. They barely reference each other.  

The launch in April 2025 of the UK AI Energy Council (AIEC), jointly led by the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT) and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) could help align policy conversation around AI, data centre growth, and low-carbon energy needs. Yet renewable energy is still only infrequently treated as a national security or sovereignty backbone. The Strategic Defence Review notes the potential use of the Defence estate to “support clean energy generation, including renewables, where this enhances resilience and delivers value for money,” but fails to make a clear link between energy and defence innovations. Eight companies are reportedly invited to attend meetings of the UK AI Energy Council (AIEC), designed to support the power demands of AI; all are foreign-owned or controlled. 

Learnings from elsewhere may prove instructive. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,  fearing impending Russian aggression on their own soil, disconnected from the  Russian and Belarusian grids last year, synchronising instead with EU networks. Their approach—combining innovative grid management and cybersecurity—treats energy resilience as a national security imperative.

Managing the manoeuvre took clear coordination across strategic sectors and policy domains—ledy by governments that are, as Oliver Moody, author of Baltic, describes “flexible but at the same time coherent enough to get things done.” Estonia’s National Defence Act, which enjoys high public trust, legally establishes that the whole of society has a role to play in national defence, including government, businesses, infrastructure operators, and citizens. The UK Government Resilience Action Plan, by contrast, devotes less than a page to “readiness for whole-of-system crises and catastrophic risks.” 

British diplomacy must also serve the triple transition directly. That means shifting from broad MoUs to tightly scoped tech‑and‑infrastructure deals that hardwire supply‑chain resilience, shared standards and co‑investment in strategic energy, data and defence assets. British diplomats will require greater technology fluency and comfort working inside innovation ecosystems than has previously been needed. 

Beyond bilaterals, they must judiciously engage the proliferation of increasingly complex but potentially useful tech “minilaterals”—small groups of countries, chosen for complementarities or strategic goals: choosing forums that advance the same integrated agenda across energy, digital infrastructure and defence. Britain’s  Pax Silica membership is a step in the right direction.

Alongside boosting coordination capacity across policy domains and countries, the government must be highly proactive in its relationship with the technology sector, not just in cutting deals or setting regulation, but in early security planning as the infrastructure of the digital economy—data centers and server farms—becomes a physical target. This current problem for Middle East states and US-based global providers is also an augur of how adversaries may approach European infrastructure in any future escalation.  Data centres put AI, defence innovation, and energy diversification in symbiosis, each critical to one another—they must be planned and implemented as such.

The UK is experiencing a preview of what systemic shocks feel like when they touch familiar places and people. The question is whether ministers are willing to bolster the coordinating capacities of government, both at central and local levels, and invest in the reality that energy, digital, and defence are now inseparable and cannot become a competitive scrum for Treasury attention. Resilience has to be built where these systems intersect, before a crisis hits.