Critical natsec decisions may be taken in boardrooms, MI5 chief warns on 25th anniversary of 9/11
Decisions critical to the UK's security could be taken in corporate boardrooms rather than Whitehall during the next major crisis, the head of MI5 has warned.
Sir Ken McCallum said the country cannot wait for an attack to discover who controls a vulnerability, who has the authority to respond or "who was supposed to pick up the phone".
Writing in The Independent on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the MI5 Director-General said much of the infrastructure now at risk is in private hands.
"In 2026, unlike 2001, many of the assets, systems and services under threat sit in private sector hands," he wrote
"This means many of the most critical decisions will be taken not in COBR but in boardrooms."
Sir Ken called for a new "team of teams" bringing together government, industry and academia to identify vulnerabilities and coordinate action when a crisis occurs.
He said national security could no longer be treated as the specialist responsibility of intelligence agencies,
"This is my call to arms after 25 years: government, business, academia, and the public must treat national security not as the specialist concern of a handful of agencies, but as a shared national endeavour. "
The warning comes as MI5 confronts a markedly different security environment from the one it faced after the attacks of 11 September 2001.
Jihadist terrorism remains a danger, he said, but now sits alongside threats from hostile states, including sabotage carried out through criminals, covert interference in democracy and destructive cyber attacks against power stations.
New laws are needed to counter state-backed aggression, according to the MI5 Director-General.
Technology and artificial intelligence are also transforming the environment in which the security services operate.
Sir Ken said AI "arguably shapes today's national security frontier more profoundly than does geopolitics".
He was working in an MI5 counter-terrorism team when hijacked aircraft struck the World Trade Center, killing 2,977 people, including 67 British citizens.
Sir Ken recalled a colleague watching the second aircraft hit the towers and saying: "Osama Bin Laden… I guess none of us leaves MI5 for at least a decade."
Brown University's Costs of War project estimates that post-9/11 "War on Terror" killed between 4.5 million and 4.7 million people, including up to 940,000 direct deaths and up to 3.8 million from other indirect effects of war such as disease and malnutrition.
The attacks transformed MI5's operations and led to much closer cooperation with police, other intelligence agencies and international partners.
Sir Ken said cooperation with MI6, GCHQ, the US and other partners helped detect and disrupt multiple plots before the 7 July 2005 bombings.
A year later, he said, an aviation plot threatening a death toll and global shock "on a par with 9/11 itself" was averted.
He also defended the intervention in Afghanistan, saying the "hard reality was that some form of Afghanistan intervention was necessary" because Al Qaeda was preparing further attacks.
Acknowledging that mistakes were made, including within MI5, he paid tribute to the 457 British service personnel killed during the campaign.
Their efforts, alongside those of intelligence officers and human sources, had made another attack on the scale of 9/11 progressively less likely, he said.
However, Sir Ken warned against using the response to one threat as the template for confronting the next.
"We must of course always learn from the last attack – but must beware of preparing brilliantly to fight yesterday’s enemy, using yesterday’s methods, against yesterday’s target."
"Our adversaries do not offer us that luxury," Sir Ken said.
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