Security and resiliance are fundamental for economic prosperity. But natural disasters and emergencies come in many forms and are indiscriminate in their impact. Additionally, within the new security environment, man-made security threats are varied, innovative and often designed to cause maximum disruption by breaching social norms in terms of both choice of target and method of attack.
The outgoing Prime Minister, Tony Blair, recently said,“ The [security] threat we face is not conventional. It is a challenge of a different nature from anything the world has faced before.” He was echoed by his then Home Secretary John Reid who, speaking at the Royal United Services Institute, stated that the country’s key energy installations and infrastructure are among the likely targets. Terrorists could, he continued, cause devastation through an “electronic attack” on the UK’s infrastructure and that al-Qaeda’s aim was to “bleed us to bankruptcy”.
This means that every aspect of our economy needs to be secure and resilient – not just from physical attacks and hazards but also from electronic – and that security and resilience solutions need to be sufficiently versatile to be able to respond to a plethora of threats.
The difficulty is compounded by the uncertainty of who we’re dealing with. In November 2006, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, Director General of the Security Services, said,“ My officers and the police are working to contend with some 200 groupings or networks, totalling over 1,600 identified individuals (and there will be many we don’t know) who are actively engaged in plotting, or facilitating, terrorist acts here and overseas.”
The UK Security Service continues to describe the threat to the UK as severe – or, in other words, that “an attack is highly likely”.
Faced with such serious, long-term and ubiquitous threats and hazards, a coherent national security and resilience strategy is needed. However, those who make decisions about how to make things secure and resilient do not exist entirely in one place. They are spread across the public and private sectors, and are driven by varying agendas and have unique vulnerabilities.
Some aspects of security fall into what David Schmidtz, an author and scholar on history and foreign policy, describes as “collective” or “public goods”. These are goods and services that all individuals want but that cannot be produced adequately in a market system. It is hard, for example, for the entire population to simultaneously individually rationalise to voluntarily do their part to secure comprehensive national emergency services such as police, fire and ambulance.
In such cases the state intervenes, taxes individuals and then provides such services. But, many aspects of security and resilience, such as the provision of secure financial services, and secure and resilient communications systems, operate under market conditions.
The result is a UK security and resilience landscape that is as fragmented as the economic asset landscape. Strategy is highly devolved with those charged with the day-to-day operation of a particular asset, who understand the vulnerabilities best, also charged with devising their own security strategy. Yet to achieve a coherent national security, each strategy element needs to be compatible, both horizontally and vertically, with all the others.
But before calling for centralised control and tighter regulation, it is worth exploring the nature of the security and resilience system that has been created.
Privatisation of many of the economic assets has meant the replacement of rigid hierarchical public sector monopolies with a flexible network of suppliers. When it comes to coping with disruption, networks are inherently resilient. The more complex the system the better: the wider variety of actions offered results in an increased ability to accommodate a larger variety of perturbations. Therefore market forces are creating the redundancy and duplication of many of our economic assets necessary to enable the nation to cope with disruption. Likewise competition is encouraging companies to invest in security and business resilience solutions.
