A Warning from the Shadows
General Sir Jim Hockenhull spent a career inside Britain’s military intelligence establishment. Yet he might be best remembered for giving secrets away.
As Chief of Defence Intelligence from December 2018 to May 2022, he made the call to declassify and publish London’s knowledge of Russia’s invasion plans—down to a map of the routes its forces would take. The goal was to expose the Kremlin’s intentions before Moscow could manufacture a pretext. The move is now widely seen as a success, though Hockenhull admits that when he first proposed it, almost no one in government thought it was a good idea.
Now out of uniform since June, he’s speaking with a new urgency. His message is blunt: Britain’s next war won’t be an away game. It will be fought at home, in cyberspace, and on the information front—long before any tanks roll.
The One Man Who Said Yes
In 2023, at Recorded Future’s Predict conference, Hockenhull revealed that only one person had backed his radical plan to publish intelligence. That person was Ben Wallace, the then-Defence Secretary.
“I was lucky it was him,” Hockenhull says now.
Bureaucracy, he explains, is designed to manage risk. “People tend not to say yes or no to anything. They’ll say, ‘that’s an interesting idea,’ and then ask lots of questions. If you’re not careful, you screen out the things that could be really good but are quite risky.”
Wallace was different. He understood intelligence from his time as security minister, and he was willing to take big decisions. “If you went to him with a reasoned argument, he’d back you. That’s why, with one person, we got it through.”
From Ultra to Open Source
The contrast with the Second World War is stark. Britain went to extraordinary lengths to conceal intelligence sources like Ultra. In 2022, Hockenhull made the opposite choice.
He sees it as a continuum. “It’s all the use of intelligence,” he says. The question is which direction you go, because once you commit, you’re committed. The first release on Feb. 17, 2022, showed the axes of Putin’s invasion plan. But it couldn’t be a one-off. A discrete team was set up to work out what could be shared publicly without compromising sources and methods.
The public releases were only part of a wider effort. For a long time, London didn’t make clear it was also sharing a great deal with the Ukrainians. “The conflict is broader than what happens on the ground. It’s in the information space, and it always has been.”
The arrival of the iPhone changed everything, he argues. “Suddenly everybody’s consuming information in a fundamentally different way. This was our first attempt to recognize that we’re in a modern digital era of communication.”
Deterrence Is Stuck in the 1950s
Who was the disclosure aimed at? All of them—the British public, allies, Ukraine, and Russia. The emphasis shifted over time.
“We wanted the British public to understand that a war was coming in Europe, that it was a long-planned Russian effort,” he says. The playbook was familiar—Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, Syria in 2016—but it had never been contested in advance.
That raises a wider question about deterrence. “We often revert to nuclear deterrence theory of the 1950s,” Hockenhull says. “But in the modern age, how do we use our insight, our knowledge dominance, to deter our adversaries?”
The key is that these aren’t psychological operations. “This is using the truth to let people know the real situation before Russian falsehoods take hold, because once a lie is established, it gains a life of its own and is almost impossible to kill.”
The Limits of Intelligence
Many assessments suggested Kyiv would fall quickly. It didn’t. Does that complicate the idea that 2022 was an intelligence success?
Hockenhull is candid. “The key insight we had was understanding the Russian plan for Kyiv to fall in five to seven days. What we understood less clearly was how Ukraine intended to fight.” The Ukrainians were loath to share their plans with anyone, sometimes even among themselves.
About a week before the invasion, his team wrote an assessment highlighting Russia’s weaknesses: an operation at a scale not attempted since WWII, logistics not well supported, a reliance on very quick success, challenging command and control, questionable morale, poorly trained conscripts. “What we didn’t imagine was that Russia would fall over all of them simultaneously.”
There’s a deeper point here. “When you use intelligence, you change the situation. By informing the people mounting the operations, they act on it, and that changes the context being assessed.” In other words, part of the reason it didn’t happen is the insight intelligence provided.
Cyber: Not Weapons, Lego Bricks
The new Defence Investment Plan focuses heavily on cyber defense rather than offense. Hockenhull isn’t surprised. The big investment in the National Cyber Force was made back in 2021 and guaranteed over a decade.
He rejects the idea of a cyber silver bullet. “A conventional weapon stays broadly the same object until it’s used. Cyber terrain changes continuously—someone updating their system could remove an opportunity, create a new one, or change the risk.”
His metaphor is telling: “Cyber tools are less like weapons in a warehouse and more like Lego bricks. Skilled people can combine them in different ways, but the usefulness of any combination depends on the target, the technology and the moment.”
This is where he sometimes admires Britain’s adversaries. “Not the methods, the risks, or the ethical bounds they storm through—but the way they use everything as tools of statecraft.” Britain, by contrast, is a responsive nation, dealing with everything below the threshold of war as separate incidents.
Successive governments have tried to build campaigns, but “government is very good at reorganizing itself, and that makes sustained campaigning over a long period difficult.” Spending-review budgets run only four years, and people at the top shift and move. “If we’re going to adopt a longer-term campaigning approach, we need consistency, in resourcing but also in intent and structure.”
The Digital Targeting Web
The Digital Targeting Web in the DIP reminds him of the Dowding System from the Battle of Britain: gather information, combine it, make a decision and act. The underlying logic isn’t new. What’s changed is the scale, speed and complexity.
“Modern forces can gather extraordinary amounts of information. The challenge is to make sense of it in space and time, then act at the speed of relevance.”
The real ambition is broader than “any sensor to any shooter.” It’s “anybody’s sensor to anybody’s shooter.” A Royal Navy system might detect a threat that’s then struck by a Netherlands Air Force aircraft. That raises hard questions of trust and law. “Am I going to take action that may kill someone, based on information from another country, trusting their process was sound? If the missile’s inbound, there may be no time for a second check.”
The First Battle: Talent
Hockenhull has said the battle for digital and cyber talent is the first battle of the next war. Britain is making progress, but it’s a work in progress.
For most of his career, people joined the Army, Navy or Air Force through traditional routes and only later moved into cyber. So they created a direct pathway. The first cohort did a short period of basic military training and then went straight into specialist cyber instruction. They joined in August and graduated in November.
The first group was small—about 40 people—but only one dropped out. “That’s far below the normal attrition in military training. We were reaching highly motivated people who might never have joined through the conventional system.”
The traditionalists don’t always welcome variation. “They’ve got a big sausage machine to run, and it’s easier to limit the variation. But for scarce digital skills, we have to be more flexible.”
Why the Public Must Know
Hockenhull’s final argument returns to where he began. Britain is attacked in cyberspace every day. It may face sabotage, espionage and attacks on its undersea cables long before anything resembling a shooting war. Yet almost everything the state knows about that threat stays classified.
That leaves people being asked to fund the response—with money that would otherwise go to schools and hospitals—largely on trust. “We assume the public understands the connection, but if our insight stays highly classified, we’re effectively asking people to trust us without seeing the evidence.”
Repeating that war is possible isn’t enough. “Particularly when more defense spending may mean less for a child’s education, or a longer wait for an NHS operation. That’s an asymmetric argument, and we’ve got to do much better.”
He wants a coalition, inside and outside government, willing to have a national conversation over time. “We jumped from the Strategic Defence Review straight to funding, and almost skipped the people who matter most—the ones who’ll pay for it and live with the consequences.”
His final warning is simple and stark: “Because war isn’t going to happen as an away game. If there is a conflict, it will be happening here.”
