The UK government is drawing up a new 'War Book' to guide how the country would respond in a major conflict, as a defence expert warns Britain may have no clear 'last days of peace' before modern war breaks out, according to the University of Exeter.
The UK's previous 'War Book', a detailed, classified manual setting out who does what when war is looming, was scrapped in 2004. It had underpinned Whitehall planning from 1939 onwards, laying out how departments would mobilise the economy, control information and protect critical infrastructure.
Its absence, the new report argues, has left officials and the public with little shared understanding of what might actually happen if Britain stood on the brink of a large-scale conflict.
The warning comes from Paul Mason, an honorary senior fellow at the University of Exeter, who has urged ministers to rebuild that framework and place it under explicit democratic control. In his briefing, he says the government's revived War Book must be subject to parliamentary scrutiny so that any emergency powers it contains are 'just and reversible,' rather than a blank cheque for the state.
His intervention dovetails with comments from the Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir Richard Knighton, who has already confirmed that Whitehall is writing a new 'War Book' 'in a modern context, with modern society and modern infrastructure.'
The news came after a period in which the government had been quietly reorganising its crisis machinery. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, under pressure on several fronts at home and abroad, has formed a Middle East Response Committee in response to the ongoing confrontation between the United States and Iran.
While that body is focused on a specific regional flashpoint, Mason's briefing widens the lens; it asks whether Britain is structurally ready for any serious clash with a peer adversary.
The removal of the old 'War Book' twenty years ago, he argues, has created a 'vacuum of public assumptions about what the state might do if the UK found itself on the brink of kinetic war.'
That phrase matters. In Mason's view, the notion that there will be a clearly signposted run-up to conflict, the sort of tense but visible countdown remembered from 1939, no longer holds.
'The modus operandi of the enemy, to engage in hybrid and cognitive warfare in advance of kinetic, means we may never enjoy a 'last days of peace' phase such as those activating the 1939 War Book did,' he writes. 'All 21st-century conflicts are cognitive.'
Source: International Business Times UK
