Britain | Straps around the barrel

Strategic Command wants to bind Britain’s armed forces

The way armies, air forces and navies collaborate has never been more important

TOPSHOT - Ukrainian recruits take rest during a five-week combat training course with the UK armed forces near Durrington in southern England on October 11, 2022. - Ukrainian soldiers charge across a plain, brandishing rifles as smoke drifts from an explosion. But the recent recruits are not on the front line back home. They are in Britain, where the army is helping them to learn vital battlefield skills. (Photo by Daniel LEAL / AFP) (Photo by DANIEL LEAL/AFP via Getty Images)

Nov 13th 2022|Northwood

General sir Jim Hockenhull could not have anticipated a public profile when he entered the Intelligence Corps, one of the darker corners of the British armed forces, at the tail end of the cold war in 1986, nor when he was appointed chief of defence intelligence in 2018. But Russia’s war on Ukraine thrust him into the limelight. On February 16th, as Russian tanks massed on Ukraine’s border, he made a rare public statement warning that Russia was not pulling back as it claimed. The next day Defence Intelligence (di) took the unprecedented step of publishing a map depicting Russia’s possible axes of invasion. Eight days later it was vindicated. Its updates on the war are now tweeted daily.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Straps around the barrel”