Philip Ingram sees Russia, China and Iran stepping up ‘gray zone’ activities across UK and Europe

François Picard is pleased to welcome Philip Ingram, journalist and former British military intelligence officer. The events surrounding RAF Fairford are not an isolated incident, explains Ingram. It's part of a much wider security issue in which conventional military operations, intelligence activity and gray-zone tactics increasingly overlap.

The withdrawal of the U.S. B-1 bombers can plausibly be understood as a routine operational rotation: Fairford is a forward operating base, the aircraft have been deployed for several months, and both crews and equipment require respite and deeper maintenance. At the same time, however, the timing of that withdrawal, the ongoing counterterrorism investigation and the broader debate over British defence spending make it impossible to consider the episode purely in operational terms.

From his perspective, the most important point is that much of the relevant information necessarily remains outside the public domain. The arrests and subsequent releases on bail may reflect tactical decisions within a much larger intelligence and counterintelligence operation. He also sees the possibility that the activity around RAF Fairford forms part of a broader threat shared by British and American intelligence services.

More broadly, he would place this episode within the growing pattern of gray-zone activity across Britain and Europe. Russia, China, Iran and their proxies are increasingly operating below the threshold of conventional conflict, using activities that can test security arrangements, probe intelligence networks or create uncertainty without necessarily producing an immediately visible attack.