“Developing National Security Structures: Examples from the UK”
Aussagen und Ergebnisse einer Veranstaltung vom 09. September 2025
Die folgende Fassung des Papers enthält keine Fußnoten. Die vollständige Fassung können Sie über das PDF abrufen
Geschätzte Lesezeit: 20 Minuten
Prof. Dr. Christoph Meyer, King’s College London / Dr. Daniel B. Neumann, Universität Leiden
Unter der Schirmherrschaft der Britischen Botschaft, Berlin, und in Zusammenarbeit mit dem GKND veranstaltete King’s College, London, am 09. September 2025 eine Vortrags- und Diskussionsrunde mit hochrangigen Teilnehmern aus Großbritannien und geladenen Vertretern aus den zuständigen deutschen Ressorts und Behörden zum Thema nationaler Sicherheitsarchitekturen in Großbritannien. Im Zentrum standen die Fragen, welche Erfahrungen Großbritannien mit seinen seit 2010 schrittweise entwickelten nationalen außen- und sicherheitspolitischen Lage- und Entscheidungsstrukturen gesammelt hatte, und welche Anregungen sich hieraus gegebenenfalls für das Vorgehen auf deutscher Seite ableiten lassen könnten.
Die Veranstaltung war die erste in der von britischer Seite aufgelegten „Kensington Security Series“, eines Programms von Diskussionsveranstaltungen, die Aspekten der praktischen Umsetzung der Vereinbarungen des am 17.07.2025 unterzeichneten deutsch-britischen Freundschaftsvertrags gewidmet sind.
Alle Seiten waren übereingekommen, dass im Interesse eines allseits offenen Gedanken- und Erfahrungsaustauschs die Sitzungen unter „Chatham House Rules“ abgehalten werden sollten. Die Verantwortung für die Wiedergabe der Inhalte liegt mithin bei den Berichterstattern von King’s College London, Professor Dr. Christoph Meyer, und Dr. Daniel Neumann. Als Teilnehmer an den Vorträgen und Diskussionen kann jedoch auch der Unterzeichner den hier zusammengestellten Aussagen nur beipflichten, die ein weiteres Mal wertvolle Anregungen für die anstehende Ausgestaltung der entsprechenden deutschen Strukturen und Prozesse geben können.
Umso mehr sei den Autoren für die Gelegenheit gedankt, dieses Papier auch als Hintergrundinformation des GKND zirkulieren zu können.
Für den Vorstand
(Dr. Gerhard Conrad)
King’s College London
Faculty of Social Sciences and Public Policy
Department of European & International Studies
“Developing National Security Structures: Examples from the UK”
Key take-aways and lessons
Christoph Meyer and Daniel Neumann
The following is a summary of the presentations and discussions held at the British Embassy in Berlin on 9 September 2025 as part of the Kensington Security Series, co-organised with King’s College London and the Gesprächskreis Nachrichtendienste in Deutschland e.V.. The event was held under Chatham House rules and not recorded. The summary is the responsibility of the authors alone and should not be attributed to the Embassy or any individual speakers. The authors acknowledge support of the ESRC through the King’s Impact Accelerator Account (New Government Fund).
Selected strengths and weaknesses of the UK security structures:
The creation of the National Security Council and the post of National Security Advisor under the Cameron-Clegg coalition government in 2010 helped in various aspects:
Community building: These structures promoted better expert discussions across government departments and agencies, not just among intelligence services. As such it contributed to fostering a national security culture and a sense of joint missions and purpose.
Crisis response: The structures were seen as primarily benefiting crisis resilience and
response (Litvinenko poisoning, Fukushima, Skripal).
Strategy formulation: There were also some benefits with regard to formulating more holistic and thus effective strategies (e.g. broader Cyber Strategy, improving the National Security Strategy) even though there is still room for improvement.
Policy-intelligence connectivity: The NSC provided more opportunities for leaders of intelligence agencies to interact more frequently and directly with policymakers, that is, more opportunities for understanding, follow-up questions, better tailoring of more actionable intelligence products to decision-makers’ needs (not wants). This includes to bring policymakers and intelligence providers together in joint meetings, and to ensure that policy discussions are preceded by an intelligence briefing.
Quality of policy discussions: The NSC is felt to have improved the level and detail of policy discussions and offers a space for dissenting views to be raised and heard – conflict is natural but needs to remain constructive in spirit.
National Security Advisor for coordination: A National Security Advisor has proven to be instrumental for arranging cross government work. He can do so best if he/she is perceived as “honest broker” by ministries rather than mouthpiece of the Prime Minister. He/she also facilitate cooperation with an international network of NSAs in many countries.
Joint assessment for “speaking truth to power”: The NSC depends for its performance on the Joint Intelligence Committee (created in 1936), chaired by an end of career senior civil servant and supported by assessment staff in the Cabinet Office of around 50. This is where the intelligence community aims for a professional consensus assessment based on shared tradecraft and standards without politicians in the room to avoid decisionmaker confusion and cherry-picking the most convenient view. These structures constrain inappropriate politicisation of intelligence analysis and facilitate “speaking truth to power”.
Professionalisation of analytical tradecraft: The creation of the “Professional Head of Intelligence Analysis (PHIA)” has helped to improve analytical standards, including developing a common language and terminology, especially through a variety of training and community-building events (Cosmic Bazaar forecasting tournament). It also fostered a sense of profession across agencies and departments, thereby improving resilience to politicisation but also enabling mobility between different agencies and departments.
Providing actionable intelligence: These structures have helped bring experts together that can formulate less abstract and more actionable intelligence enabling policymakers to understand situational implications and vectors for action and hence to take more nuanced decisions. This is aided be the approach to develop options for policymakers and assessing their implications.
Technical expertise: GCHQ (precursors going back to 1919) seen as a major asset for the situational understanding of all trends, risks and threats in the cyber domain given its technical expertise. It has expanded well beyond a narrow remit on signal intelligence and decryption by providing expertise on a range of technical issues. It also managed to become a highly attractive destination for talented people.
Review and adaptability: These structures saw constant improvement over time through mechanisms for institutional learning and a wider accountability culture. This entails lasting changes in structures and processes brought in after negative surprises led to inquiries and reports by senior practitioners (e.g. Nicoll, Frank, Butler), parliamentary committees, and scrutiny by specialised journalists and academics.
However, there were also weaknesses and shortcomings identified, that could be avoided in the creation of an inclusive national security architecture in Germany:
Outside expertise: There is a limited openness to outside expertise because of security clearance boundaries compared to other countries. This limits the ability to tap into relevant expertise outside of the intelligence community, particularly country and regional knowledge in academia and think-tanks.
Long-term strategy: These structures could deliver more on long-term threat mitigation, prevention and strategy but this may be a more structural issue for modern democracies in which politics often remain focused on the urgent day-to-day business.
Early warning: The confidence threshold for warning appears to be too high as a result of over-adapting to legacy of Iraq WMD issue and Butler report. For the same reason, over-policing of the intelligence-policy boundary limits the benefits to be obtained from rigorously future-proofing emerging policy options.
The impact of history: Path-dependency and the incremental development of structures make deeper changes more difficult, for instance, the lack of a single assessment agency and the separation of military intelligence from civilian intelligence.
Political buy-in: Despite benefits of these structures, they are (only) enabling. Performance depends on the appointment of the right people in key positions and on how senior politicians use (or not use) these structures.
Direction instead of coordination: The NSC has at times slipped more into directing rather than fostering cooperation across departments which is best avoided to preserve a sense of common purpose and shared ownership.
Suggested take-aways for ongoing German reforms and aspirations:
1) Build in regular reviews for adaptation.
The British system was (and is) not perfect. All security architectures need to adapt to new security threats and evolve as a result of learning of what works and what does not. A key take-away is not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good (enough) but to build-in mechanisms for regular review and learning after surprises, including through quick turn-around reviews separate from the slower and more politicised Enquete and parliamentary inquiries.
2) Formulate realistic goals that consider necessary trade-offs.
Security architectures need to be designed and build with priority objectives in mind. They cannot achieve everything at the same time equally well and balancing judgements are often required. For instance, between necessary confidentiality to allow for troublesome scenarios to be discussed without fears of leaks and sufficient openness to allow for accessing crucial subject and policy expertise. Or between a consensus-orientation in intelligence assessment to avoid political cherry picking against the risk of reducing robust challenge and creating lowest common denominator/compromise assessment. Or between a necessary orientation towards satisfying consumers/clients of intelligence but also telling them what they need to hear but do not want to. There are also trade-offs between oversight mechanisms to build trust in parliament and public and the need to build sufficient trust for cooperation with partner states and services. To reduce the risk that unrealistically high and diverse expectations of the German NSR create negative feedback loops, clarity within government is needed about the most important goals to be achieved in the short, medium and longer terms. To create and maintain a positive momentum it is recommended to set practical and achievable short-term goals. At the same time, clear public communication is needed to manage expectations accordingly to avoid early disappointments.
3) Success depends on people and cultures more than structures.
The success of the NSR depends on success of the supporting structures and preparatory committees, starting with the “Stabsstelle” and three “Referate” which will have to build their work essentially on the intelligence, information and expertise provided by its supporting structures. These structures but also the key people heading them need to act and be seen to act by other parts of government as “honest brokers” and “facilitators” of cross government decisions and planning. Especially given the Ressortprinzip, they need to achieve the buy-in from relevant ministries and agencies and foster a common sense of purpose and culture of collaboration in assessment and policy-discussions. To achieve this goal, formal structures and legally codified procedures are less important than appointing the right people and fostering a conducive culture. This requires building a talented team with complementary expertise, sufficient diversity in cognitive styles, disciplinary and institutional backgrounds, and a mindset geared towards curiosity and common problemsolving – rather than representing “their” ministries. These should be positions that should attract the best people and where success in joint endeavours and tasks is beneficial for career progression.
4) National security structures require leadership.
As small coordinating structures in-between different government departments and agencies, strong leadership is required to make them succeed. This includes visible and persistent backing and buy-in from the political level, crucially by the head of government, but also by relevant ministers. Additionally, it also means that leaders of these structures should be well respected senior civil servants who can integrate different stakeholders as an honest broker, and who have the interpersonal skills to bring diverse staff from different backgrounds together. This does not mean that the leadership figure should be authoritative to direct and control the community, but someone with widely acknowledged competence and long term experience who diplomatically facilitates the coordination and cooperation between departments. In the UK, this was achieved by the National Security Advisor, who was seen as an important part of the NSC.
5) Improve assessments by strengthening the analytical profession.
To create an authoritative and credible “integriertes Lagebild” or “strategische Vorausschau” the respective units need sufficient assessment staff and resources. The currently envisioned staffing for the “Stabsstelle” clearly need to grow to meet the functional demand for an integrated assessment, even if agility remains important and over-institutionalisation/bureaucratisation needs to be resisted. Nevertheless, someone will have to draft the final papers for the cabinet. Staff need to operate on the basis of common high standards with regard to analysis but also with regard to collaborative mindset (see also point 3). Appointing a German equivalent to PHIA would be beneficial for the same reasons as in the British system (improving cross government standards through training) but would have an even more important function of community building. There should be also further efforts in reaching out/involving external experts in the structure in ways that are appropriate for different levels level of security clearance – pre-clearance or allowing for low classification collaborative opportunities.
6) Foster a genuine intelligence community.
A medium-term objective should be developing a distinct common intelligence community and the external environment and political culture that is supportive of this goal. The stronger the insights provided by intelligence services, the greater will be the chance that decisionmakers value the benefits of structures that draw on this knowledge and provide more direct and frequent opportunities of interacting with representatives of these bodies. More capable agencies will also create more incentives for cooperation and information sharing with foreign partners and agencies, including the UK.
7) Increase policy-intelligence interaction for more actionable intelligence.
The British National Security system including but also beyond the National Security Council enables policy-intelligence interactions while nonetheless ensuring that policymakers are kept out of assessments and that intelligence providers do not propose policy. This is achieved by ensuring that intelligence providers are in the room for policy discussions so as to provide assessments in the beginning and to answer questions throughout. Additionally, intelligence seeks not to be comprehensive and threat-oriented, but to identify risks and possible solutions by providing options that could be taken. Thereby, intelligence is meant to be less abstract and more actionable, giving policymakers clearer paths for how identified risks could be mitigated. In doing so, intelligence benefits from the proximity to policy and to other government departments for developing the understanding necessary for identifying risks and what levers could be options to mitigate them.
8) Strengthen security culture and discourses in society.
Finally, in line with the coalition treaty there should be systematic and determined efforts of better funding and strengthening strategic, security and intelligence studies in public universities and research institutes. Particular efforts should be made in the field of intelligence studies that are virtually non-existent in German academia. Existing think-tanks and institutes already offer extremely valuable expertise pertaining to general security policy matters in private and public fora but cannot replace the longer-term culture-shaping impact of basic research and higher education in these areas. This can help not just with recruitment challenges but help improve the quality of public debate on security matters, including the potential and limitations of intelligence and foresight.