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Europe is increasingly targeted by grey zone tactics that exploit systemic vulnerabilities without crossing the threshold of war. The UK and Germany are facing cyberattacks, supply‑chain coercion, and growing GPS and space interference; both approach resilience differently but complementarily. This article argues that their combined strengths position them to lead Europe’s response. It examines hybrid pressure on critical infrastructure, the rising contest in space, and the need for deeper UK–Germany cooperation to strengthen societal, organisational, and cross‑domain resilience in an era where disruption, not open conflict, defines security.
Europe in the Grey Zone
Modern warfare has and is no longer kinetic first; it is systemic disruption. Grey zone interference is deliberately designed to remain below the threshold for a conventional military response. Space, as the first layer in the grey zone, is characterised by threats that are overwhelmingly reversible and deniable; RF jamming, spoofing, dazzling, cyber intrusion of ground segments, and close-proximity rendezvous operations. Kinetic ASAT remains rare precisely because debris is indiscriminate. Other hybrid tactics are economic warfare, such as the Iranian actions blocking the Strait of Hormuz, causing the biggest economic impact after WWII, to UAS leading the modern battlefield, like in Ukraine. The conflict is no longer clearly defined, and Europe requires a whole-of-society, cross-sector and cross-cultural response sooner rather than later, given the increased activities below the threshold of war. The most logical solution that comes to mind is that Germany and the UK, as Europe's biggest economies, must lead our security interdependent and united.
Grey Zone Warfare and Hybrid Threats
“Grey zone’ refers to hostile activity below the threshold of direct, state-on-state conflict, designed to coerce governments or simply erode their ability to function.” (UK Parliament, 2025). The scope of these hybrid threats, also called proxies, is used to blur the line between peace and war (NATO, 2024). While grey zone warfare describes the strategic space between peace and war, hybrid threats refer to the methods used within that space. Actions are limitless, deniable and hard to trace, and are multi-domain operations that can range from sabotage, espionage, propaganda & narrative warfare, infrastructure probing and supply chain attacks, cyberattacks, UAS, economic warfare, and space interference targeting civilian systems with a long-term impact rather than immediate consequences. NATO (2024) defines resilience as the capacity to prepare for, resist, respond to and recover from shocks and disruptions, rooted in Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty.
Evidence in Europe: UK and Germany Under Pressure
Europe’s leaders have warned that Russia is waging a grey zone campaign against us and pointed out a recent string of incursions into European airspace and into Germany (von der Leyen, 2025). Grey zone activity ranges in both countries from cyber attacks to GPS jamming. However, due to the grey zone nature and the difficulty of tracing the attacker, we must rethink our approach to these threats nationally and in a European context.
Germany is working on a draft budget for 2027, borrowing a total of 196.5 billion Euros to accommodate the improvements of defence and infrastructure. A strong focus is on defence, which is set to be increased to 105.8 billion Euros next year from 82.7 billion in the 2026 core budget (Reuters, 2026).
In comparison, the United Kingdom has announced that defence spending will rise to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, marking a significant shift from previous statements that tied the increase to economic conditions (Reuters, 2025). While this commitment signals a stronger strategic posture, critics argue that the pledge still lacks the urgency required to address immediate capability gaps, particularly as several NATO allies have already surpassed the 2% threshold and accelerated rearmament. With recent UK defence spending standing at £55.6 billion for 2024/25, the gap between present resources and the government’s stated ambition remains substantial. Analysts warn that without rapid implementation, the UK risks continuing a pattern of delayed investment at a time when the security environment demands faster action.
Supply Chains and Critical Infrastructure as a Hybrid Battleground
Supply chains and critical infrastructure are increasingly targeted through hybrid grey zone tactics designed to create economic coercion and long‑term dependency. A recent UK example illustrating this vulnerability is the 2025 cyber attack on Jaguar Land Rover, one of the most damaging incidents in British history. The disruption is estimated to have cost the UK economy up to £1.9 billion (BBC, 2025). The identity of the perpetrator remains unconfirmed, highlighting a defining feature of grey zone activity: attribution is difficult, deniable, and deliberately obscured.
A major concern is that in many countries, supply chains are treated merely as enablers of critical infrastructure rather than integral components of it and therefore do not receive equivalent protection. This applies acutely to space, as the UK space supply chain has critical single-source dependencies on radiation-hardened components, star trackers, reaction wheels, optical payloads, and increasingly the silicon for onboard computing, where a single foreign vendor can gate an entire national capability. CDP and the National Space Strategy acknowledge this, but funding for tier-2 and tier-3 mapping is still thin.
Another challenge is the complexity and opacity of modern supply chains. Key questions arise: Where are the essential components procured? Where are they manufactured? Which suppliers and subcontractors feed into the systems that underpin national critical infrastructure?
If the answer is predominantly China, states risk creating strategic vulnerabilities and potential leverage points for coercion. Specific for space: the choke points are rare-earth magnets (NdFeB for reaction wheels and momentum devices), gallium and germanium for RF and optical payloads, and increasingly the assembly of CubeSat-class buses. China controls >85% of refined rare earths and has used export licensing as coercion twice in the last 18 months. For sovereign space, this is the supply chain risk that should keep ministers awake.
A further, often overlooked vulnerability in semiconductor supply chains is the dependence on helium, a critical process gas used in cryogenic cooling and advanced manufacturing environments, including semiconductor fabrication and lithography. Qatar is estimated to account for approximately 20–25% of global helium supply capacity, making it one of the key global exporters of this strategically important gas. Disruptions in its production capacity have previously contributed to global supply shortages, highlighting how upstream industrial gases can rapidly cascade into semiconductor manufacturing constraints. This reinforces the fragility of critical high-tech supply chains, where resilience depends not only on fabrication geography but also on geographically concentrated process inputs (Reuters, 2026b).
Even when sourcing from Europe, the picture is not necessarily safer: where do European subcontractors obtain their materials? Which jurisdictions, such as certain Baltic states, face higher corruption risks or weaker regulatory oversight? What are the relations to Russia? Are these vulnerabilities systematically assessed?
To safeguard national security, countries must conduct comprehensive supply chain vulnerability assessments, map dependencies at every tier, and prioritise local or allied sourcing, supported by robust security standards. Without this, nations risk inadvertently constructing the very crises they seek to avoid. These supply chain vulnerabilities directly manifest in the space domain, where material dependencies translate into operational exposure.
Space as a Critical Domain of Hybrid and Grey Zone Activity
Space has already become a critical domain for hybrid threats and grey zone warfare, with its centrality to Earth’s critical infrastructure making it uniquely vulnerable. As satellites underpin so many essential services, the space domain is particularly exposed to electronic warfare and jamming, cyber intrusions, ground‑segment attacks, and service disruption, all of which can be executed below the threshold of open conflict. The Secure World Foundation and CSIS taxonomies both include a fifth category that is growing fastest: rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) co-orbital shadowing, inspection, and grappling. Russia's Luch/Olymp and China's SJ-21 (which physically relocated a defunct Beidou satellite to a graveyard orbit in 2022) are the clearest examples.
Satellites enable global communications (television, telephone, internet), banking and financial transactions (secure data transfer), electric power grid management (site origination and infrastructure monitoring), transportation systems (navigation and GPS essential for military and civilian deployment), and a wide range of real‑time services including Earth observation, weather forecasting, space‑object tracking, and intelligence collection (Defense Intelligence Agency, 2022). Disabling these systems would have catastrophic consequences for civil, commercial, and military operations.
This dependency explains why governments are investing heavily in counterspace capabilities to address emerging threats and safeguard national security (CSIS, 2025; Secure World Foundation, 2025). 'Counterspace', as in the doctrinal sense (US Space Force, French Commandement de l'Espace) means capabilities to deny, degrade, or destroy an adversary's space systems, offensive and defensive. What the UK and most European partners are investing in is largely *defensive* counterspace and space domain awareness.
A clear example of grey zone activity is the growing use of GPS jamming, which increasingly affects both military and civilian platforms. In 2024, an RAF aircraft carrying UK Defence Secretary Grant Shapps experienced signal disruption during a flight between the UK and Poland. Although the aircraft remained safe, the incident highlighted how interference can compromise navigation and communications systems (BBC, 2024). This disruption was attributed to Kaliningrad-based Russian electronic warfare assets, the same systems discussed later in the report.
While the Shapps incident is notable from a public and political perspective, the more strategically significant trend is the scale of activity, with an estimated ~2,000 GPS interference incidents per year reported across the region. This indicates that jamming is no longer confined to isolated or targeted events but has become a persistent ambient operating condition across the Baltic and Black Sea approaches. Such disruptions have wider implications, with GPS jamming also affecting civilian aviation, commercial shipping, and emergency services (SHIELD SPACE, 2026).
In response, countries are pursuing space autonomy to reduce reliance on external capabilities that could be disrupted, degraded, or denied, an emerging strategic priority (Secure World Foundation, 2025). UK space initiatives reflect a growing recognition that resilience must be built not only nationally but also through regional collaboration between government, academia, and industry.
At the same time, the increasing contestation of space has exposed a major vulnerability: the dependence on ground‑based control systems (NATO, 2019). This is the most under-appreciated vulnerability in the entire UK space architecture. Most UK-operated satellites depend on a small number of ground stations whose physical security, network connectivity, and TT&C uplink encryption vary wildly. A determined adversary does not need to touch the satellite; taking out or spoofing the ground segment achieves the same effect at a fraction of the cost and with full deniability. This is where supply-chain risk and counter-space risk converge.
In a contested environment, even brief delays in ground-to-space communication can result in the loss of critical assets. This has accelerated a shift toward greater satellite autonomy, with new developments exploring the use of AI to enable satellites to detect threats, assess intent, and manoeuvre in real time without waiting for ground station commands (SHIELD SPACE, 2026). While this enhances responsiveness, it does not remove ground dependency; tasking, key management, and software updates still remain dependent on ground infrastructure. Autonomous manoeuvring also raises important considerations under emerging international norms, including US and UK positions on responsible behaviours in space (UN General Assembly Resolution 76/231), which will need to be reconciled with the development of autonomous defensive capabilities (SHIELD SPACE, 2026). This evolution reflects a broader move toward resilient, self-protecting space architectures, where autonomy enhances survivability against jamming, interference, and other grey zone interference.
UK vs Germany: Societal Responses to Hybrid Threats
Whole‑of‑society resilience in the UK and Comprehensive Defence in Germany represent two distinct but complementary approaches to countering hybrid threats. The United Kingdom increasingly frames hybrid threats as a challenge requiring a whole‑of‑society response, recognising that government alone cannot protect the nation from grey zone activity. Critical infrastructure operators, private industry, academia, civil society, and local authorities all play a role in detecting, reporting, and mitigating hostile activity. The UK’s Integrated Review and subsequent updates emphasise resilience as a national responsibility, with particular focus on strengthening public awareness, improving cyber hygiene, and enhancing cooperation between government and industry. However, critics argue that the UK’s approach remains fragmented, with preparedness varying significantly across sectors and public understanding of hybrid threats remaining low. The government’s reliance on the Gov.uk preparedness website as its main public‑facing tool underscores the limited depth of current societal resilience efforts.
Germany, by contrast, has revived elements of its Comprehensive Defence concept, drawing on Cold War‑era civil preparedness models (Bundesministerium des Inneren, 2016). This approach integrates military, civil, economic, and societal resilience under a unified framework. The German government has expanded civil defence planning, strengthened federal–state coordination, and increased investment in infrastructure hardening, emergency communications, and public preparedness. Germany’s strategy explicitly recognises that hybrid threats target societal cohesion, making public resilience and trust in institutions essential components of national security.
Despite their differences, both countries face similar vulnerabilities: ageing infrastructure, complex supply chains, and adversaries willing to exploit societal divisions. A combined UK–German approach, leveraging the UK’s innovation ecosystem and Germany’s structured civil preparedness, would create a more robust European model for societal resilience.
Certainly, the same applies to the space domain. Germany, positioned at the centre of Europe and surrounded by nine neighbouring states, will inevitably play a leading role in shaping Europe’s orbital security posture. The UK, meanwhile, is beginning to explore approaches to greater autonomy in space operations, particularly as governments recognise the risks of relying solely on vulnerable ground‑based control systems. Emerging European companies are contributing to this discussion by demonstrating how AI‑enabled onboard decision‑making could enhance resilience and reduce dependency on external links. One such start‑up provides an example of the type of technological development underway in Europe, offering a reference point for how autonomous capabilities may evolve in future space security architectures, without implying any specific procurement direction (SHIELD SPACE, 2026). This aligns with broader international assessments, such as the CSIS (2021) Defense Against the Dark Arts in Space report, which argues that autonomous defensive manoeuvre and onboard threat detection will be essential to surviving future counterspace attacks.
UK–Germany Cooperation in the Grey Zone
While the Trinity House Agreement is the most visible symbol of UK–Germany cooperation, it represents only one part of a much broader network of bilateral and multilateral mechanisms designed to address hybrid and grey zone threats. Both countries work closely through regular UK–Germany cyber dialogues, shared NATO resilience commitments, and cooperation within the Combined Space Operations framework, which links their respective space commands on situational awareness and threat monitoring. This wider architecture enables joint analysis, information sharing, and coordinated responses across domains, including cyber, space, and critical infrastructure (Defence Today, 2025).
In the space domain specifically, cooperation is deepening as both nations recognise the growing vulnerability of orbital systems to jamming, interference, and grey zone activity. In 2023 alone, over 2,000 GPS interference incidents were recorded across Europe’s airspace (EUROCONTROL, 2026). The UK is also examining options for greater autonomy in space operations, particularly as governments seek to reduce reliance on vulnerable ground‑based control systems. European industry and research organisations are contributing to this discussion by exploring how AI‑enabled onboard decision‑making could support resilience and reduce dependency on external links, without implying any specific endorsement or procurement direction.
As hybrid threats intensify, expanding this cooperative framework into more structured joint exercises, shared early‑warning mechanisms, and coordinated cross‑domain responses will be essential. A more integrated UK–Germany approach would not only strengthen national resilience but also reinforce Europe’s ability to compete effectively in the grey zone.
Organisational and Supply Chain Resilience
Responding to hybrid threats requires organisations to adopt a resilience‑based approach that goes beyond traditional risk management. Hybrid attacks are designed to exploit systemic weaknesses, meaning that resilience must be embedded across governance, operations, and supply chains.
At the organisational level, this includes business continuity planning, exercises and simulations, strengthening cyber security, improving incident response, and ensuring that leadership teams understand the strategic implications of grey zone activity. Regular red teaming, penetration testing, and cross‑sector exercises help organisations identify vulnerabilities before adversaries do.
Supply chain resilience is equally critical. Organisations must map their dependencies, identify single points of failure, and assess the geopolitical risks associated with suppliers and subcontractors. This includes evaluating exposure to jurisdictions with high corruption risks, weak regulatory oversight, or known links to hostile state actors. Companies should adopt multi‑sourcing strategies, increase transparency across tiers, and collaborate with the government to share threat intelligence.
This increasing focus on supply chain transparency is also reinforced by European cybersecurity and critical infrastructure regulations, particularly the EU’s NIS2 Directive, which is driving higher standards for risk management, incident reporting, and supplier visibility across critical sectors. While not uniformly implemented across all domains, it is already shaping industrial practice within the European space and defence supply chain, particularly in Germany.
A key lesson from recent conflicts, particularly in Ukraine, is that electronic warfare (EW) and GPS interference can have cascading effects across logistics, communications, and critical infrastructure. Open Source Intelligence shows that Russia has deployed a layered EW ecosystem combining wide‑area GPS jamming, sophisticated GNSS spoofing, and anti‑jamming upgrades to weapons systems (EW Solutions Ltd, 2026).
Since 2023, large parts of Ukraine and the Baltic region have experienced persistent GPS denial, with strategic Russian EW assets “carpet‑jamming” entire regions and disrupting Position, Navigation and Timing (PNT) services used by both civilian and military systems. Civil aviation data, maritime AIS tracks, and national reporting from Estonia and Finland all confirm recurring outages, diverted flights, and the characteristic “ship‑spirals‑on‑land” patterns that indicate active spoofing rather than simple signal loss.
By 2025, Russia had escalated to full constellation spoofing, synthesising GPS, GLONASS, and Galileo signals in phase, enabling receivers, including some military-grade systems, to lock onto a convincing “fake sky” without triggering alarms. At the same time, new controlled reception pattern antennas (CRPAs) fitted to glide bombs, cruise missiles, and drones have improved Russian munitions’ resistance to jamming, while degrading blue force PNT within roughly 500 km of Kaliningrad and Belarus. This 500 km figure is consistent with EUROCONTROL and Finnish and Estonian Civil Aviation Authority reporting. Worth noting, this envelope now covers the entirety of the Baltic states, most of Poland, and extends into northern Germany, meaning NATO’s eastern flank operates under near-permanent PNT degradation. This is no longer “grey zone interference” in the traditional sense; it is an established operating condition that civil aviation, shipping, and any GNSS-dependent infrastructure must now plan around.
More broadly, the techniques underpinning these capabilities are increasingly accessible beyond state actors. The barrier to entry for credible GNSS spoofing has dropped to approximately £50,000 of software-defined radio (SDR) hardware and open-source software, significantly lowering the threshold for operational use. This creates a wider proliferation risk, where capabilities demonstrated in state-on-state conflict environments are likely to diffuse to non-state and proxy actors over time, expanding the threat landscape for both military and civilian users of satellite navigation systems.
The net effect is an offensive–defensive EW shield: Russian forces preserve their own PNT while degrading that of adversaries. For organisations and governments, this demonstrates how hybrid threats can disrupt not only military operations but also civil aviation, shipping, emergency services, and supply chains that depend on precise timing and navigation. It underscores the need for redundant navigation systems, authenticated signals, and robust continuity planning across all sectors (EW Solutions Ltd, 2026). In this context, resilience measures are also evolving at the signal and system level. Galileo’s Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OS-NMA) became operational in 2025, and GPS L1C with Chimera authentication is also being rolled out, both aimed at improving resistance to spoofing. However, these measures primarily address signal authenticity rather than denial-of-service effects such as jamming. As a result, the more complex resilience challenge lies in developing alternative and complementary Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) solutions, including eLoran, quantum inertial navigation, and signals-of-opportunity approaches. Research led by institutions such as the UK National Physical Laboratory (NPL) contributes to this broader effort and highlights the importance of diversified PNT architectures for long-term operational resilience.
Building resilience, therefore, requires a shift from reactive security to proactive, systemic protection. Organisations that invest in resilience today will be better positioned to withstand the hybrid threats of tomorrow.
Conclusion: Competing Below the Threshold
Grey zone warfare and hybrid threats are not future challenges; they are shaping Europe’s security environment today. The UK and Germany face increasing pressure from adversaries who exploit ambiguity, deniability, and systemic vulnerabilities to achieve strategic gains without triggering a conventional military response.
To compete effectively below the threshold of war, both nations must strengthen resilience across society, supply chains, and the space domain. This requires sustained investment, deeper bilateral cooperation, and a recognition that hybrid threats target not only infrastructure but also public trust, economic stability, and democratic cohesion.
By aligning their strategies, leveraging their respective strengths, and adopting a whole‑of‑society approach, the UK and Germany can build a model of resilience that enhances European security and deters adversaries operating in the grey zone. The challenge is urgent, but the leadership opportunity is clear.
Recommendations
Strengthening resilience against hybrid and grey zone threats requires action across government, industry, and society. Governments should expand civil–military exercises to test national readiness, introduce mandatory business continuity planning and regular preparedness exercises, and enhance cyber security obligations, similar in spirit to the UK’s proposed Martyn’s Law for counter‑terrorism protection. Public awareness and media campaigns are equally important to improve understanding of hybrid threats and reduce vulnerability to disinformation and coercion.
Yet resilience cannot depend on government action alone. Hybrid threats exploit the seams between public and private sectors, and the speed of disruption often outpaces policy cycles. We cannot afford to wait for new legislation or national strategies; organisations and individuals must begin strengthening their own resilience now.
Proactive steps such as improving cyber hygiene, conducting internal continuity exercises, mapping supply‑chain dependencies, and building awareness of grey zone tactics are essential to reducing risk today while broader national frameworks continue to evolve.
For the space sector specifically, this must extend beyond tier-1 suppliers to include component-level visibility of critical dependencies, including ITAR/EAR classification, the provenance of key components such as FPGAs and ASICs, and the origin of high-reliability materials such as optical glass and detector substrates. While the UK Space Agency’s Supply Chain Resilience programme represents an important step forward, it remains voluntary and limited in scale relative to the evolving threat environment. Strengthening this approach through more formalised and potentially mandatory disclosure requirements for critical national space infrastructure would significantly improve transparency and resilience across the supply chain.
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