Wargame Day: Is the UK ready for a real Russian attack?

0:00How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. Coming up, the day Russian missiles came to London. We revisit our sister podcast, The War Game, which imagined a conflict between the UK and Vladimir Putin. October the 6th was the day he struck Oxford Circus.

0:43So, in real life, just how close to war are we? How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow. In the war game, it's now four in the morning on Monday, the 6th of October, 2025. Our cabinet ministers and officials have just been scrambled from their beds and into waiting cars.

1:31Taken to an emergency meeting in Whitehall, they hear this on the radio. Explosions have been reported across the UK. Details are only just coming into us, but the emergency services say they're responding to incidents in multiple locations, including London, the south-east of England. Hi everyone, welcome back to the Sky News Daily, where we're revisiting another of our podcast series, The War Game. Now, it's a rather different beast to the daily. Here, we try in 15 to 20 minutes to tell you all you need to know about one of the bigger stories in the news. As for The War Game, well, it imagined a conflict between the UK and Russia.

2:09Over the course of five hour long episodes, it brought together senior politicians, military top brass, Russia experts and more to take on the roles of a British war cabinet and those in the Kremlin who started the conflict. This is clearly an enormous show of force. It is definitely out of the ordinary. The Russians are signalling that there may be, let's call it what it is, Prime Minister, there may be an attack. I think we just have to be cautious of the word attack. What do we do next? You want to just take a breath before you decide exactly what the next move is. Every action, there will be a reaction.

2:45Without giving too much away for those who haven't yet listened, October the 6th was the day in the war game 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 learnt from the exercise, and how close to reality war with Russia actually is. So, to confirm, Admiral, we are not expecting that the United Kingdom is able to defend realistically against our missiles. Is that correct? Now, that was Keir Giles, a leading expert on Russia and the Russian military, playing the role of the Russian Premier.

3:21Good to have you with us, Keir. 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. 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.

4:07And 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. So it's sort of a bit like a role-playing game, except that the people that you brought in, you know, Ben Wallace, Jim Murphy, Amber Rudd, Jack Straw, I mean, they've all been in government. Yes, they have to 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.

4:55So 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. 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. 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.

5:40It'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. So, Deborah, along comes October the 6th and we have strikes on GCHQ, military installations, Oxford Street. As Keir said, this was a situation which was certainly believable.

6:18But 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? We played the game back in April. So October was far in the future. And it is quite chilling how, even in the build-up to us playing the game, there were, 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. Again, these are all kind of acts, aggressive acts by Russia that's testing NATO.

7:11All these kind of people sort of say sub-threshold grey 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 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?

7:53What about being part of the NATO alliance, Article 5? 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. Keir, 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.

8:33Well, 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 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 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 sort of neutralised NATO as well.

9:09So 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. 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? 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.

9:56We actually recorded the war game before the defence review came out. But before the release of the war game, you had the government's defense 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.

10:46And 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 say that this is a bunch of hypotheticals that exist at the extreme end of a range of possibilities, how would you reply to that?

11:35There'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.

12:16So, 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 underinvested in our military. That was one of the key purposes 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. So are we then, Keir, in your mind, edging towards, perhaps even slipping towards, an inevitable conflict with Russia?

12:59We'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 cyberattacks 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.

13:34We see this playing out at the moment with the complete failure, it seems, to put in place defenses 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? OK, 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 is the purpose of an exercise like this?

14:10I think the thing to say about, you know, 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 wargaming, the stuff that we do for government, 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 wargame was we didn't have what they call a war book. This is the document that we had 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.

14:52I 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 Kiev-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 the emergency. And I think what people have said to me who work in government felt that it was realistic. It was plausible, if unlikely. And I know it's the initiative 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.

15:30And apparently, I'm told, the action's been taken. Just in terms, though, of the content of the war game on this occasion, how much of what happened on the fictitious this October the 6th is of relevance to where we find ourselves geopolitically, defensively, as of this moment? 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 grey zone.

16:10That'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 or a Tom Glancy novel. This is the real thing. I think there are some things that people say, well, what about nuclear weapons? I mean, 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 noblised for war. UK isn't. It's now seasoned to have plenty of experience, which we really only have from the last 30 years of counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.

16:53But 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. 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 Keir's analysis so what on earth are they doing about it? There's definitely an exceptional understanding of the problem however, and there's lots of very brilliant minds who absolutely understand no one needs to be done but unfortunately the Ministry of Defence has 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 it's 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.

18:05And 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 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.

18:55It's not something long off in the distant future. And when we've got a strategic defence review with a timeline of a decade, which is what the UK has, then it's clear that those dates don't match. My thanks to Debra, 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.

19:39The Daily is back again tomorrow

19:50How does a banana trigger a CIA-backed coup? Do AirPods herald the arrival of a new global order? What do LED lights say about the future of humanity? I'm Ed Conway, and in each episode of my new podcast, Stuff Matters, I take an object, crack it open, and reveal the world-shaping forces hidden inside. This is economics told through the things we think we understand. Search Stuff Matters on your podcast app to listen and follow.