Publication of the week: Professor Anthony Glees with James Ridley-Jones

14 August 2017

Anthony Glees with James Ridley-Jones, “Viewpoint: The current challenges to UK national security and how they might be addressed”, Journal of the Australian Institute of Professional Intelligence Officers 25.1 (2017), 40-54. ISSN 1039-1525.

This article offers a qualitative assessment of the current major security challenges facing the UK, as of the first half of 2017. It starts with an assessment of the grave impact of Brexit on Britain’s national security needs before moving on to consider the Islamist threat. It argues that to address the increased number of threats, the UK’s intelligence-led security community must continue to be actively involved in working together with the EU27 post-Brexit and that it must not only be expanded in terms of size but also of reach. It should seek to generate better actionable intelligence, chiefly, but not exclusively, from electronic sources, and exploit it more effectively. Intelligence should also be deployed to assist in preventing young British Muslims from being drawn into terrorism. Whilst recognising that good intelligence by itself cannot deliver total security, itself an unrealisable aim, and that many other measures are needed to keep any country as safe as possible, the article concludes that intelligence, and intelligence-led security activity, is the best single means of keeping democracies as safe as possible from terrorism, whether it is of the Islamist or any other variety.

Download the article (PDF file, 916 KB).

This article was written for one of the most prestigious of Australian intelligence journals by Anthony Glees and James Ridley-Jones, an MA student in the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies. James generated the section on “The New Frontier” (of the social media) and arranged and set the bibliography. BUCSIS students have a number of publications to their credit but this may be the first time a joint article has come out of the Centre.

Read more: