How Britain's biggest companies are preparing for a Third World War

Telegraph

2 days ago

The year is 2027 and a major global conflict has erupted. Perhaps China has launched an attempted invasion of Taiwan, or Russian forces have crossed into the territory of an eastern European Nato country.
Whatever the case, Justin Crump's job is to advise big companies on how to respond. And with tensions rising, a growing number of chief executives have got him on speed dial.
The former Army tank commander, who now runs intelligence and security consultancy Sibylline, says his clients range from a top British supermarket chain to Silicon Valley technology giants.
They are all drawing up plans to keep running during wartime, and Crump is surprisingly blunt about their reasoning: a global conflict may be just two years away.
'We're in a world which is more dangerous, more volatile than anything we've seen since the Second World War,' he explains. There are lots of crises that can happen, that are ready to go.
'Chief executives want to test against the war scenario, because they think it's credible. They want to make sure their business can get through that environment.'
The year of worst case scenarios
He rattles off a series of smouldering international issues – any one of which could ignite the global tinderbox – from Iran's nuclear ambitions, to China's threats to Taiwan, to Vladimir Putin's designs on a Russian sphere of influence in Ukraine and beyond, as well as Donald Trump's disdain for the post-1940s 'rules-based international order'. Against this backdrop, planning for war is not alarmist but sensible, Crump contends.
With all these issues building, 2027 is viewed as the moment of maximum danger.
'The worst case scenario is that all these crises all overlap in 2027,' he explains.
'You've got the US midterms, which will have taken place just at the start of that year, and whatever happens there will be lots of upset people. It's also the time when a lot of the economic disruption that's happening now will have really washed through the system, so we'll be feeling the effects of that. And it's also too early for the change in defence posture to have really meant anything in Europe.'
Putin and Xi Jinping, the president of China, are acutely aware of all this, he says, and may conclude that they should act before the US and Europe are more fully rearmed in 2030. 'In their minds now, the clock is ticking,' he adds.
He also points to major British and Nato military exercises scheduled to take place in 2027, with American forces working to a 2027 readiness target as well.
'There's a reason they're doing it that year – because they think we have to be ready by then,' Crump says. 'So why shouldn't businesses also work off the same thinking and plan for the same thing?'
He is not alone in arguing that society needs to start expecting the unexpected.
In 2020, the Government established the National Preparedness Commission to ensure the UK was 'significantly better prepared' for the likes of floods, power outages, cyber attacks or wars.
It has urged households to keep at least three days' worth of food and water stockpiled, along with other essential items such as a wind-up torch, portable power bank, a portable radio, spare batteries, hand sanitiser and a first aid kit.
'In recent years a series of high-impact events have demonstrated how easily our established way of life can be disrupted by major events,' the commission's website says – pointing to the coronavirus pandemic, recent African coups, Russia's invasion of Ukraine and turmoil in the Middle East.
Britain is also secretly preparing for a direct military attack by Russia amid fears that it is not ready for war. Officials have been asked to update 20-year-old contingency plans that would put the country on a war footing after threats of attack by the Kremlin.
All of this has led major businesses to conclude that perma crisis is the new normal, Crump says.
In the case of Ukraine, Western sanctions on Russia forced companies to choose between continuing to operate heavily-constrained operations in Russia, selling up, or walking away entirely.
Crump recalls speaking to several clients including a major energy company in the run-up to Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
He and his colleagues urged the business to evacuate their staff, at a point when it was still received wisdom that Putin wouldn't dare follow through with his threats.
'I had almighty arguments with some people in the run-up, because I was very firmly of the view, based on our data and insights, that the Russians were not only invading, but they were going for the whole country. But other people in our sector were saying, 'No, it's all a bluff'.
'Their team came to me afterwards and said: 'After that call, we were convinced, and we got our people out'. They got a lot of grief for that at the time, from people who were saying it was all nonsense.
'But then on the day of the invasion, they told me they got so many calls actually saying 'thank you for getting us out'.'
Yet even in Ukraine, much of which remains an active war zone, life must go on – along with business.
'I've been to plenty of war zones,' says Crump. 'And people are still getting on with their lives, there's still stuff in supermarkets, and things are being made in factories – but that certainly all gets a lot more difficult.'
In the case of a major British supermarket, how might executives plan for, say, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?
The first question is how involved the UK expects to be, says Crump. But if Britain, as might be expected, sides with the US at least in diplomatic terms, 'we're not buying anything from China'.
That immediately has implications for a company's supply chains – are there any parts of the supply chain that would be crippled without Chinese products?
But as the recent cyber attack on Marks & Spencer has demonstrated, attacks on critical digital infrastructure are also a major risk to supermarkets in the event of a war with China or Russia.
'If you look at a retailer, the vulnerability is not necessarily whether or not they can transport stuff to the shop, even in a war zone,' says Crump. 'The problem becomes when you can't operate your systems.
'If you can't take money at the point of sale, or if you have no idea where your stock is because your computer system has been taken down, you've got major problems and you can't operate your business.'
Workforce gaps
In a scenario where Britain becomes involved in a war itself, Crump says employers may also suddenly find themselves with gaps in their workforces.
He believes things would need to get 'very bad indeed' for the Government to impose conscription, which applied to men aged 18-41 during the Second World War.
But he points out that the calling up of British armed forces reservists would be very likely, along with the potential mobilisation of what is known as the 'strategic reserve' – those among the country's 1.8 million veterans who are still fit to serve.
There are around 32,000 volunteer reservists and an undisclosed number of regular reserves, former regular members of the armed forces who are still liable to be called up.
'There's a big pool of people we don't tap at the moment who are already trained,' explains Crump.
'But there would be consequences if the entire reserve was called forward, which would have to happen if we entered a reasonably sized conflict. It would certainly cause disruptions.
'The medical services are hugely integrated with the NHS, for example, and we saw the effects of them being called forward with Iraq and Afghanistan.'
Food supplies
The sort of supermarket chaos that erupted during the Covid-19 pandemic would also return with a vengeance if a significant conflict broke out.
During that crisis, grocers had to limit how many packs of loo rolls and cans of chopped tomatoes shoppers were allowed to take home, among other items, because of supply chain problems.
'If we're in a conflict, that sort of supply chain activity would increase,' notes Crump.
'So you don't necessarily have rationing imposed, but there might be issues with food production, delivery, payment and getting things to the right place.
'In a world where we don't have our own independent supply chains, we're reliant on a lot of very interconnected moving parts that have been enabled by this period of peace.
'We've never been in a conflict during a time where we've had 'just in time' systems.'
Spanish blackouts: A dry run
Crump brings up the recent blackouts in Spain and Portugal. British grocers initially thought their food supplies would be completely unaffected because truck loads of tomatoes had already made their way out of the country when the problem struck.
But the vehicles were electronically locked, to prevent illegal migrants attempting to clamber inside when they cross the English Channel and could only be unlocked from Spain – where the power cuts had taken down computer systems and telecoms.
'People in Spain couldn't get online, so we had locked trucks full of tomatoes sitting here that we couldn't open because of technology,' Crump says.
'No one had ever thought, 'But what happens if all of Spain goes off the grid?' And I'm sure the answer would have been, 'That'll never happen' anyway.'
This tendency towards 'normalcy bias' is what Crump tries to steer his clients away from.
While it isn't inevitable that war will break out, or that there will be another pandemic, humans tend to assume that things will revert to whatever the status quo has been in their lifetimes, he says. This can mean we fail to take the threat of unlikely scenarios seriously enough, or use outdated ways of thinking to solve new problems.
'We've had this long period of peace and prosperity. And, of course, business leaders have grown up in that. Military leaders have grown up in it. Politicians have grown up in it. And so it's very hard when that starts to change.
'People have grown up in a world of rules. And I think people are still trying to find ways in which the game is still being played by those old rules.'
Unsurprisingly, given his line of work, Crump believes businesses must get more comfortable contemplating the unthinkable.
'Go back a decade and most executives did not want to have a crisis because a crisis is bad for your career, so they didn't want to do a test exercise – because you might fail,' Crump adds.
'But the whole point is that you can fail in an exercise, because it's not real life.'