Britain to Launch Home Defence Force to Protect Critical Infrastructure From ‘Enemy States and Terrorists’: Report

The United Kingdom, which is unusual in not having a Civil Defence establishment or Home Guard, will announce the creation of a new local force to protect infrastructure like power plants and airports from enemy action.

The British government will establish a new civilian homeland defence force to protect critical national infrastructure as part of its Strategic Defence Review (SDR), which it ordered after the Labour Party took power last year, it is claimed. Due to report this year, the SDR will say the United Kingdom is insufficiently protected from sabotage and attacks by “enemy states and terrorists”, according to a report by British newspaper of record The Times of London, which professes to have advance knowledge of its contents.

The report, which comes very nearly exactly 85 years ago to the day that the Local Defence Volunteers force was created, states this new “home guard” will be “modelled on the citizens’ militia created in 1940”. It would protect power plants, airports, and the landing areas of submarine power and telecoms cables, all of which have proven to be favourite targets during the Ukraine War, the conflict on which the eyes of military planners and thinkers predominantly remain.

THE HOME GUARD 1939-1945 (H 2005) Local Defence Volunteers: ‘Old Contemptibles’ in the Local Defence Volunteers lined up for inspection. None of the men pictured wear any official uniform except for the LDV armband. Copyright: © IWM. Original Source: http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205195181

It is claimed that Russia’s hybrid warfare attacks on European states in recent years will be cited as an identified weakness for the United Kingdom, although the actual foe in mind is characterised as the more nebulous “enemy states and terrorists.” Certainly, other European states that have considerably increased their territorial defence operations in recent years have been open about naming Russia as a perceived threat.

“Homeland defence is now a critical priority”, the report claimed, with the coming SDR allegedly identifying “clear vulnerabilities to critical national infrastructure from hostile states”.

The language of The Times report, which alludes to the Home Guard of the Second World War, has invited inevitable comparison to the fondly, if comically, remembered ‘Dad’s Army‘ that was immortalised in the eponymous television comedy of the 1960s and 70s. The show made light of the perceived demographic of a typical Home Guard unit, being either those too young or too old to fight in the regular forces against Germany, Italy, and Japan.

Consequently, much of the subsequent media response to the story has taken this tone, with several outlets describing the plan to bolster Britain’s home defence as essentially silly and doomed to be another ‘Dad’s Army’.

Less discussed is a more recent attempt to revamp the Home Guard concept in the United Kingdom, the 1982-vintage Home Service Force (HSF). Formed by the Margaret Thatcher government, the rationale for the group—which was manned by experienced ex-soldiers to reduce the burden of having to train new recruits from scratch—is remarkably similar to what is now being floated through leaks in The Times today.

The HSF was described in a 1982 journal article as being geared to respond to “the threat new posed to Britain by sabotage groups organised by the Soviet intelligence services”. This, it was said, was in response to the threat perceived from Soviet Special Duties Brigades based in East Germany. These forces were understood at the time to be competent English speakers, accomplished parachutists, and intended to perform “deep penetration missions” for intelligence, reconnaissance, and sabotage operations.

Sections of the retired British soldiers brought back into the HSF would use a combination of their military training and local knowledge to help defend key sites and alleviate pressure on the regular forces. The force lasted a decade and was wound up in the 1990s as a post-Cold War cost-saving measure.

While in many respects the late Cold War-era HSF may be a more rational model for a new defence force, in others, the more famous Home Guard of the Second World War may predict how things could go. In 1940, after the Dunkirk evacuation, the British Army was desperately short of equipment — having left 64,000 vehicles, 20,000 motorcycles, and 2,500 artillery pieces behind — and even basic items like battledress uniforms and rifles were in such need that there was no spare capacity for what became the Home Guard.

Famously, the early equipment issue for the Home Guard forerunner, the Local Defence Volunteers, was simply a printed armband. Arms came in the form of what the volunteers could bring from home, including farmer’s shotguns and hunting rifles, at at the beginning there was only one firearm for every ten volunteers.

While not forced by enemy action, the British Armed Forces are in a similar situation in 2025. A 2024 House of Lords report on the state of defence found that “accounting and budgeting rules” imposed by the government on the military incentivised them to dispose of surplus weapons and equipment rather than hold them as a “strategic reserve.”

Citing the experience of the Ukraine War, in which both sides used huge volumes of weapons and ammunition that would be considered by practically any other developed nation as hopelessly out of date or life-expired, the report cited the utility of older equipment as being immediately familiar to retired military personnel who might have to be called up in an emergency, minimising training time.

The report stated: “The Government should urgently reconsider its policy for disposing of old weapons stocks and consider ‘mothballing’ them instead, ensuring that the accounting and IT infrastructure is updated to support this move. While there may be costs attached to this, as well as to maintenance, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the ongoing effectiveness of retired capabilities.”

Indeed, as recently as 2023, a National Audit Office report was going after the defence inventory management system for not disposing of equipment quickly enough. In such an environment where strategic thinking is punished, and whatever surplus there was in the system has already been donated to Ukraine for use against Russia, and defence equipment costs have soared due to higher global demand, there will be additional costs in equipping any new volunteer force, presumably with brand new uniforms and equipment.

Several NATO allies have home guard-type units focussed on providing local area knowledge to defending the homeland and not on foreign deployment, like the regular armed forces. Some of these are very long standing and date back to the Second World War or early Cold War, like Denmark, Estonia, Norway, and Sweden. In other countries, old defence establishments have recently been reactivated, like Germany’s Heimatschutz (‘Homeland Protection) which was brought back in 2019, and France’s Garde Nationale, which was activated in 2016 in response to a series of Islamist terror attacks.