Learning the lessons of COVID-19: homeland resilience in the United Kingdom - is it now time for both a dedicated civil defense organization and a paramilitary force?

ABSTRACT The United Kingdom’s homeland resilience capacity is poor. The COVID-19 pandemic proved this. Back in 2019, the UK had been labeled as the best prepared country in the world for a pandemic. And yet, by 2020, and once COVID-19 had struck, the UK became “unequivocally” the hardest hit country in Europe – particularly in terms of excess mortality. In this article it is argued that the UK’s continental neighbors coped better than the UK because they had better homeland resilience capacity. This was provided by their having civil defense organizations, paramilitary forces and militaries which are specifically designed to contribute to homeland emergencies. The UK, in contrast and almost uniquely in the world, lacks both civil defense and paramilitary bodies and, moreover, it has armed forces that are not actually structured to provide help in domestic emergencies. Given the problems highlighted during COVID-19, is it now time for the UK to set up its own bodies specifically tasked with alleviating domestic emergencies? This article explores this question by comparing the UK’s pandemic response with that of Spain – a country which, according to all available data, should have performed worse than the UK. But it did not. Why?


Introduction
The COVID-19 outbreak underlined for the United Kingdom, as it did for states across the world, the importance of maintaining homeland resilience capacity. And, in the UK's case, it showed just how poor its own such capacity was. The UK was, in fact, the worst effected country in Europe in the initial stages  May 2020) of the pandemic; specifically in terms of its "excess mortality" (i.e. deaths caused by . According to the UK's Office for National Statistics, "[b]y 26 June 2020, the UK had the highest cumulative excess mortality rate in Europe" (UK Office for National Statistics 2021). England, indeed, was recorded as having, "unequivocally," in the first few months of the pandemic, the highest death rate among 23 of its European neighbors (Raleigh 2020). And this was from a position, moreover, where the UK had been declared by the

The best prepared, yet the worst effected
In April 2020, and at a time when the first serious effects of the pandemic were beginning to bite in the UK (the country's first lockdown having been imposed on 23 March), the Deputy Chief Medical Officer came to be ridiculed for saying that the UK was, in fact, and when it came to dealing with pandemics, an "international exemplar in preparedness" (Sky News Online 2020). This was, however, and on one level, a true statement. The Global Health Index Report of 2019 had rated countries in terms of their readiness for any pandemic. The UK was rated second in the world in terms of its "overall pandemic readiness" and it was said to be actually first in terms of "Rapid response to and mitigation of the spread of a pandemic" (John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health 2020). Everything thus looked good for the UK in 2019 in terms of pandemic preparation. In 2020, therefore, the country should have dealt with the effects of COVID-19 better than any other country in the world.
It did not, of course. By July 2020, England's Chief Scientific Officer was forced to admit that, "it's clear the outcome has not been good in the UK" (Cameron-Chileshe and Hayes 2020). Indeed, the UK came, by mid-2020, to be the European country most badly effected by , not only in terms of excess mortality (Tallack 2020) but also in terms of economic retraction (Strauss 2020). The situation was aptly summed up by retired Italian Army General Pier Lunelli who, in August 2020, produced a report sponsored by his government into Italy's own response to the COVID-19 crisis. "I have to say," he noted and comparing countries across Europe, "that the UK was in the best situation, but performed the worst" (Giuffrida and Moseley 2020).
In this March-May 2020 period of the pandemic's initial major impact in Europe, the three other European countries then most badly effected -Spain, Italy and Russia -all managed to contain their death rates to below that of the UK (BBC News Online 2020). This was despite the fact that they were all supposedly far less "prepared" than the UK and even though they all on paper had a much less robust "rapid response" capability than the UK 1 (John Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health 2020).
In fact, these three countries, and despite their lower ranking, actually seem to have been better prepared for the pandemic than the UK. Their main advantage was that they had a means of putting whatever prior plans they did have into actual action. The UK lacked such means. For while the UK was being internationally lauded, including by the World Health Organization, for its pandemic preparation (World Health Organisation 2019), there emerged in the UK an obvious "gap between theory and action" (Giuffrida and Moseley 2020). That is, good plans existed, but there was no means of operationalizing them. Despite being ranked first in the world in terms of "rapid response" capability, the UK, in reality, had no such capability. In contrast, Spain, Italy, and Russia did have the capacity to operationalize their plans (however limited) because they had standing civil defense and paramilitary forces.
It is not suggested here in this article that having a civil defense and a paramilitary force made all the difference in term of a better mitigation capacity. However, the use they were put to and the results they produced in these other European countries cannot be ignored. What they achieved bears examination.

Comparing with Spain
For reasons of space, this article only compares the UK's COVID-19 response with that of Spain; the next worst effected country in the world in this initial March-May 2020 time frame. 2 Despite the higher proportion of older people in the Spanish population compared to the UK (World Data Info n.d.); despite having population densities in its cities far greater than those in the UK, 3 and despite the fact that COVID-19 struck earlier in Spain than it did in the UK -giving the UK more warning time to prepare -Spain still managed to bring its excess mortality figures, the highest in the world in late March 2020, down very quickly to below those of the UK. And it kept them there (Eurostat 2020;Tallack 2020;Aron and Muellbauer 2020).) It is this particular metric of excess mortality that is probably the most definitive in terms of producing a workable comparison of Spain's pandemic mitigation capacity with that of the UK. Graphs which show how European states brought down their excess mortality figures in the March-May 2020 period show that Spain actually brought its figure down the quickest -a drop down from 155% to below zero in a six-week period (3 April to 15 May). The UK, in contrast, which had the highest European excess mortality figure by mid-April 2020, only brought this figure down in a "slow descent" from 118% to 20% in the following six weeks of 17 April to 29 May. Thus, the UK had reduced its excess mortality figures at a far slower rate than Spain had done previously and had certainly not reached zero (Tallack 2020). In the pandemic's first few months, Spain had patently shown an ability, and despite the disadvantages mentioned, to "respond and recover" far better than the UK. Spain appeared to have exhibited a mitigation capacity the UK could not match. The argument is made here that this capacity came, in large part, from the ability of the Spanish government to utilize not only its civil defense and its paramilitary police forces, but also a military that is specifically structured to be an adjunct to the country's civil defense body.
Before examining how Spain operationalized its homeland resilience capacity, it is apposite first to establish the benchmark of how the UK made use of what mitigation tools it did have. The chief one being the armed forces.

COVID-19 and the reliance on the military in the United Kingdom for mitigation
In late March 2020, when it was becoming obvious that the country was being put under severe strain by the effects of the pandemic (Pegg 2020), the UK government turned to the standing Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS). This, with its roughly 70 personnel, could, in terms of mitigation effect, do little but provide direction (Civil Contingencies Secretariat 2016). But to whom? Beyond the limited (and with next to no surge (Moosa 2020)) capacity of the National Health Service (NHS), there was no other standing civilian body available to provide mitigation at both the pace and scale required. It was certainly not Public Heath England (PHE). As the then Health Secretary, Matt Hancock, later lamented to a parliamentary committee, "we need a public health agency that isn't only brilliant at science, but is also ready to mass scale very, very quickly." But PHE "was not set up," as Hancock went on, "to be an organisation ready to go to mass national scale" (House of Commons Science, Research and Technology Committee 2020). Other countries, however, did have their civil defense organizations that were established specifically, in national health emergencies, not only to be "ready to provide mass scale very, very quickly" but also mass with the necessary skill sets (see below).
In the absence in the UK of a civil defense body, the CCS could only turn to either private contractors (British Medical Association (BMA) 2020a) or the military for the necessary mitigation. For their part, however, private contractors require significant leadtimes to prepare for any tasks they might be given. They also have to agree contracts and then look around for the requisite personnel numbers, skill sets and equipment, which may not be immediately available (BMA 2020b). Private contractors simply do not have the standing capacity that can deal with the exigencies brought about by the likes of homeland emergencies -it is uneconomic for them to do so. They cannot, therefore, act at the pace and scale necessary. As for the UK's armed forces, their traditional focus since the end of the Cold War (and thus since the end of a specific peer-state kinetic threatprimarily nuclear -to the country) has been on "discretionary" expeditionary operations (Iraq, Afghanistan, etc) beyond the shores of the UK, and not on those of "national survival" (Davis 2017). As such, they have come across, in recent years, as being reluctant to engage in mitigating domestic emergency situations. In 2009, for instance, the military was stating that the "Armed Forces provid[e] the 'last resort' for emergencies within the UK." The military was looking to private contractors to take the lead in such emergencies (UK Parliament 2009).
Within the armed forces, though, it seems that the problem with relying on contractors later came to be recognized. By 2014, the military was beginning to come about and to put itself forward as the mitigator almost of "first resort." As the Vice Chief of Defense Staff confirmed in 2014, "Defence is no longer considered a last resort option . . . [but it] . . . should be ready and configured to play an early role in providing civil resilience" (JDP02: UK Operations 2014, iii). But this claim of being "ready and configured" seemed, however, to be largely rhetorical. In terms of its Military Aid to the Civil Authorities (MACA) responsibilities, it was being explicitly stated in 2016 that, "The MOD [Ministry of Defence] does not generate and maintain forces specifically for this task." Any MACA assistance the military provided would be "subject to the availability of resources, without affecting core MOD objectives." Thus, contributing to homeland resilience tasks was not, for the Defense establishment prior to COVID-19, a "core objective" (HM Government Policy Paper 2016). Military help would only come if spare capacity was available.
Moreover, the currently extant and relevant MOD documentation, such as JDP02: UK Operations: the Defense Contribution to Resilience and Security of 2014, also does not appear to marry up any aspiration to assist with a sense of practical commitment. As one military analyst put it in 2021, JDP02, "acknowledges . . . that Defence is 'increasingly' seen as being a supporting component . . . [for homeland resilience but] . . . the 'system' has not pulled through this conclusion and little has changed with regards to readiness for MACA operations." This author further observed that, "JDP 02 establishes that MACA tasks should only be authorised if the civil sector has discounted all options, including private contractors" (Maguire 2021). Thus, overall, while senior officers were coming to state that the armed forces were no longer the "last resort," there still certainly seemed to be no overt enthusiasm for MACA taskings.
A ready example of this lack of readiness to act as a first-resort mitigator may be seen in the military's attitude to decontamination activities. Currently, there is no ability within the armed forces to deal with any major chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) event in the UK. If there is, for instance, a substantial leak of chemicals or an accident at a nuclear power plant, or even in the case of dealing with fallout after any possible nuclear attack on the UK, the armed forces have no capacity to deal with it (Thornton and Miron 2020), and nor are they supposed to (See UK Government Decontamination Service 2017).
When it came, therefore, to dealing with the pandemic's early effects in the UK, and without any alternative agencies to turn to, the government was having to rely, in large part, on a military that was neither enthusiastic about nor structurally configured to be the mitigator of first resort in any national emergency. This overall reluctance of the UK's armed forces stood in stark contrast to the approach of the armed forces in certain other European countries, notably Spain (see below). Reluctant or not, at the start of the pandemic's effects in the UK, it did, though, fall to the armed forces to provide significant "rapid response" mitigation effect (Brooke-Holland 2020).

Military mitigation brought to bear
Under Operation RESCRIPT, some 20,000 regular service personnel were made available to fulfil some of the mitigation tasks that emerged ("Military stands up COVID support force" 2020). In the end, some 13,000 personnel, or nine per cent of the entire armed forces came to be tied down on COVID-19-related duties in the March-May 2020 period (Brown and Fisher 2020). The military provided skill sets (up to a point), personnel numbers (up to a point) and vital equipment (to a limited degree) that did prove invaluable. Armed forces personnel, for instance, designed, built and were prepared to partially staff a series of temporary "Nightingale" hospitals around the country (which were not, in the end, used in this initial March-May period). The military also designed and set up a large number of mobile test facilities "that could test hundreds of thousands of people a day" ('Minister for the Armed Forces' 2020). By May 2020, 92 out of 96 of the country's mobile test centers were being run by the military (Makin-Isherwood 2020a).
Military personnel also stepped in to deal with the initial shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) experienced in the UK. This was caused by a combination of the NHS, after 2017, taking a decision not to maintain large stocks of PPE (Davies and Garside 2020) and because much of what was kept in store had been allowed to run out of date, thereby making it unusable (Channel Four News 2020).
This PPE shortage was ameliorated almost purely by military action. This was not just a matter of military officers using contacts abroad to source PPE but also of having military personnel managing the whole of the NHS's PPE resupply system, with a naval admiral in overall charge (Worrall and Sarah 2020).
While there are these examples of the armed forces coming to provide invaluable assistance, there was also a specific limit when it came to the rather thorny issue of using the military to enforce COVID-19 restrictions imposed by the government.

A military enforcer?
A vital element of homeland resilience is the ability, in any domestic emergency situation, to enforce any new government regulations that have to be introduced. Often, these will involve restricting the movement of people. A case in point being that pandemics have to be prevented from spreading and thus population movement has to be limited (as pointed out in a UK parliamentary report in 2021 (UK Parliament. Coronavirus: The lessons learned to date 2021)). Unequivocally, the countries that did best in initially controlling their pandemics were those that tightly controlled movement -the likes of China, the South-East Asian nations and Australia and New Zealand (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2021). To ensure such outcomes, it is a state's police force that will be asked to engage in the majority of these controlling activities. But these are not normally within any police force's remit and, with such extra responsibilities, any police force can become overstretched.
In the UK, therefore, during the early stages of the pandemic, armed forces personnel were also ready (although not used) to "backfill" for the police. That is, troops were on standby to take over certain of the police's low-profile duties. This would have released more police officers for front-line duties (Forcesnet 2020). Thus, in the UK, there was never any intention that the army would actually be put on the streets to ensure that people were conforming to lockdown restrictions. As the Armed Forces Minister, James Heappey, put it as early as March 2020, "Military patrols on UK streets are not likely" (Minister for the Armed Forces 2020). Both the police and the military themselves were also averse to this contingency. As one senior police officer expressed it, having troops "on the streets helping the police to enforce Covid regulations . . . is not what policing has asked for and not what it needs" (Dodd 2020b). The military concurred. The UK armed forces did not want to follow, say, the model of its close ally, Australia, where the military is specifically "double-hatted" and designed to act as a support to the police. In Australia, during the early stages of the pandemic, army personnel (unarmed) conducted joint lockdown patrols alongside police officers in certain cities (The Telegraph 2020). In terms of this Australian-style double-hatting, Heappey said at that time that he did "not think this is the answer here" (Minister for the Armed Forces 2020). Indeed, Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, later came to note that the military would not be deployed to "push people around" or engage in any "enforcement" of lockdown rules (Times Radio 2020). This was echoed by the then head of the armed forces, General Sir Nick Carter, who said that such enforcement was "absolutely not the role of the Armed Forces" (Chief of Defence Staff, General Sir Nick Carter 2021).
This military reluctance to have a presence on the streets basically meant that even if the UK government had been minded to introduce a strict lockdown (à la Australia or New Zealand) in the March-May 2020 period it could never have been totally enforced. Without military help, the police force in the UK did not have the numbers to do so. Policing in the UK has always been low-profile and "by consent" and, as such, there has never been the need for a large police force in the country (Home Office 2012). England, indeed, has one of the lowest ratios of police-to-population in Europe (McCarthy 2019).
Thus, there were simply not the police numbers to engage, for instance, in the mass monitoring of the movement of people; in controlling border crossings; in enforcing the wearing of face masks or any of the myriad of other tasks that the police may have been called on to perform during the pandemic. In the UK, therefore, and with the military unwilling to assist, it had to be a case of enforcement-lite when it came to pandemic regulations. Heavy-handed enforcement did not seem to be an option (Dodd 2020a). Indeed, even the limited number of extra tasks that the police were being asked to do at this time still caused major problems. As one Chief Constable put it, "These are the toughest times in the history of policing" (Thompson 2020).
It is important in this context to note what the UK lacks. Unlike most of its continental neighbors (France, Spain and Italy, for instance), the UK government has no paramilitary police force it can call upon to support local forces -not only when specialist skills are called for (e.g. bomb disposal, decontamination capabilities, etc) -but also when a surge capacity is required. During the early stages of the pandemic, these continental countries, because they had paramilitary police bodies to turn to, could create, as will be shown in the case of Spain, an enhanced means of not just enforcing lockdowns but also of providing more general mitigation capacity against the effects of the pandemic.

The problem of relying on the military
The UK government, in terms of putting its counter-pandemic plans into action in this March-May 2020 period, came to depend heavily on its armed forces. The military in the UK was not just the at-pace and at-scale mitigator of "first resort" in emergency situations, it was also the only such resort. But this was, however, a military that was wary of taking on this role.
There is an obvious problem here for the UK government. Having only a reluctant military as the only agency that can provide some measure of rapid response capability in domestic emergency situations does seem to leave the country exposed. It makes homeland resilience capacity in the UK look fragile, weak. But why, though, does the UK government (and, by extension, the British people), have to be so reliant on its military? Would it not be better to have standing, dedicated bodies that are specifically designed to provide the necessary mitigation at pace and at scale? Spain did have such bodies available.

The situation in Spain
Madrid had declared a State of Emergency as early as 14 March 2020. The country suffered grievously at this time and its health service was almost overwhelmed (The Lancet 2020). But, as noted, Spain brought its excess mortality figure down at a rate the UK could not match. In substantial part, the argument can be made that Spain was able to drop its excess mortality so fast because it could "respond and recover" better than the UK. The Spanish government had the ability to turn not only to its civil defense and paramilitary forces but also, indeed, to a military that was in no way reluctant to conduct homeland resilience tasks. Indeed, it was specifically designed to take on these tasks as a "core" function.

Civil defense in Spain
Spain's first line of defense in the COVID-19 crisis was the General Directorate for Civil Protection and Emergencies (Dirección General de Protección Civil y Emergencias (DGPCE)). It is more commonly known as Protección Civil or Civil Protection. 4 It is a body that is "a public service oriented to the study and prevention of collective high risk, extraordinary disaster and public calamity situations" (Directorate-General for Civil Protection and Emergencies). It is part of the Ministry of Interior and when any domestic emergency situation strikes the country this body coordinates the responses of not only its own Protección Civil assets but also those of the various local authorities across Spain. In total, it controls the activities of some 350,000 people (Spanish Ministry of the Interior 2020b). Many of these are trained volunteers who don their Protección Civil uniforms when asked. The most fundamental element of the Protección Civil system, and the one designed to provide the most immediate at-scale response, is, however, actually a military asset. This is the Military Unit for Emergencies (Unidad Militar de Emergencias or UME). The UME has six battalions (c. 3,300 personnel in total) distributed around the country (González 2020). The UME becomes subordinated to the Ministry of Interior in emergency situations when it leaves the control of the Ministry of Defense (see below) (Law 17/2015(Law 17/ 2015. Once the pandemic struck, the Protección Civil agency provided a corpus of personnel who were immediately available to engage in mitigation efforts that could be conducted at a pace and at a scale that the UK could not replicate. 5 Protección Civil engaged in a wide range of activities. Some of these were mirrored by the military in the UK -such as the distribution of PPE and the setting up of testing centers (Canal54 2020) -but many were not. Protección Civil could offer, in particular, degrees of care that were not matched in the UK in this March-May 2020 period. Whereas in the UK, for instance, it was left to private individuals, the charity sector and local councils to offer help (in an uncoordinated and often very tardy fashion (Woodcock 2021b) to vulnerable people threatened by the pandemic (Whitehead et al. 2021), in Spain Protección Civil personnel moved in quickly to perform a multitude of social welfare tasks. They would phone isolated elderly people to offer assistance; they would deliver food and medicines to people's homes and to care homes (Moran Fernández 2020). The care home sector was one that, controversially, received hardly any assistance in the UK from any source in the March-May period (Amnesty International 2020). Protección Civil would also decontaminate buildings using their own equipment (Moran Fernandez). Such decontamination in the UK was being left to largely inexperienced private contractors in the March-May 2020 period and whose response was very limited and, again, tardy (Bennett 2020). 6 Protección Civil volunteers (again, in uniform) would, moreover, patrol public spaces and enter the likes of shops, bars and restaurants to ensure that social distancing was maintained and that face coverings were worn (mandatory both in enclosed spaces and outdoors in Spain in the March-May period) (La Vanguardia 2020). If they faced any resistance, these volunteers could call in police officers from the local or national forces or, indeed, from the paramilitary Guardia Civil (ABC Andalucía 2020).
Moreover, contact-tracing in Spain was in place much quicker than in the UK, thanks to Protección Civil. In the UK, contact-tracing was conducted purely using phone applications and remote calling and only once a system had been set up some six months into the pandemic (Kent 2020) and at "unimaginable" expense (Woodcock 2021a). In Spain, in contrast, a robust system was in place far earlier, far more efficiently and at much less cost. Rather than wait for technologies to be developed, Protección Civil personnel (accompanied by police officers or by social workers) were immediately available to go to the homes of those suspected of having the virus to actually physically test them (Ileon 2020). Visits were also made to the homes of people who were supposed to be quarantining if they could not be contacted by phone (Piero 2020). Such physical checks could not be carried out in the UK in the March-May period simply because there was neither a system in place nor, again, the personnel available to put it into practice.
The existence of the Protección Civil agency allowed the Spanish authorities to apply wide-ranging and large-scale mitigation effects almost immediately. A body of permanent staff and quickly deployable trained volunteers was on hand as, indeed, was essential equipment. It was not necessary to wait for private contractors to be brought in, for apps to be developed or to rely on the military. Certainly, though, the Spanish military (and beyond just the UME) was also a major factor in terms of mitigation capacity.

Mitigation from the Spanish military
After the declaration of the State of Emergency, the armed forces were made available to the "competent authorities" (RESDAL 2020). This, in Spain's case, was the Ministry of Interior, which, as stated, coordinated all of the country's responses to COVID-19 (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020aa). In essence, the Spanish military came to act as an adjunct to Protección Civil.
The military were brought in under Operación Balmis. As part of this, some 57,000 members of the armed forces were mobilized in the March-May period (47% of the total -far more than the UK's nine per cent) (Infodefensa 2020a). And whereas in the UK the military showed its degree of unwillingness to prepare for and engage in MACA activities, this was not the case in Spain. For the Spanish military, MACA was a "core objective." For instance, and unlike in the UK, there are specific elements within the Spanish armed forces that are dedicated to assisting the civilian authorities in a domestic emergency. This help comes mostly in the shape of the aforementioned UME. This is a Joint force (i.e. from all three services) "whose mission is to intervene anywhere in the national territory to contribute to the security and well-being of citizens together with the institutions of the state." The UME actually acted as the "spearhead" of the country's response to the pandemic. Its units would normally be involved in dealing with the likes of floods, forest fires and chemical leaks and their personnel are trained and equipped accordingly (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020b).
Most of the UME's engagements under Operación Balmis were actually related to decontamination procedures. By the end of April 2020, for instance, UME personnel had decontaminated some 1,353 care homes, 500 hospitals, 64 airports and hundreds of public transport hubs (RESDAL 2020). Such tasks were carried out not just by the UME but also by the army's Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) regiment (350-strong). This also has the skills and equipment necessary to conduct the mass decontamination of terrain, structures, vehicles and people (Isasi Arce 2020).
No mass decontamination activities were, as noted, undertaken by the military in the UK and nor could they be. It has neither an equivalent to the UME nor to the Spanish army's NBC regiment. 7 All UK decontamination tasks had to be left to private contractors.
Elements of the UME are, moreover, quite sophisticated. The unit has within it a laboratory that could carry out COVID-19 tests (González 2020). It stood alongside Spanish universities in this regard (ConSalud.es 2020). The military in the UK had no such facility, certainly not in the early months of the pandemic. The UK military laboratory at Porton Down (now run largely as a civilian entity) could only conduct testing once the right equipment had been provided, and this only happened several months into the pandemic and on a very small scale (UK National Health Service).
Importantly, while taking much of the "spearhead" role as the pandemic progressed, UME instructors also trained other military personnel to conduct the types of tasks that they themselves had initially been involved in (González 2020). A surge capacity could then be generated building on the UME's skill sets.
Beyond just the MACA-orientated UME, the wider Spanish military also appears to have conducted a much broader range of undertakings than did its UK counterpart. Some of the former's tasks were, of course, similar to those conducted by the armed forces in the UK. Spanish military personnel, for instance, helped set up Europe's largest temporary field hospital (5,500 beds) in Madrid (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020) as well as 20 other smaller ones across the country (Infodefensa.com 2020c). Other activities, however, the UK military certainly could not mirror. The Spanish Military Pharmaceutical Center, for instance, engaged in the actual production of generic drugs and disinfectants. As it was designed to do, it could itself create an ability to surge drug production capacity in times of national emergency. The Spanish military hospital system also accepted civilian patients (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020b). The UK military no longer has a hospital system (it too was broken up at the end of the Cold War). Indeed, most military doctors in the UK actually work in the NHS already (they are reservists) (Bricknell and Cain 2020). This lack of a separate military medical system also undermines the ability of the UK's civilian health system to surge to accommodate a national emergency.
The Spanish military was also, and importantly, involved in social care activities. Included among its many logistics tasks was -like Protección Civil -the delivery of supplies to Spanish care homes. Of the 10,960 military "interventions" in the first four weeks of Operación Balmis, a third actually involved visits by troops to care homes (Infodefensa.com 2020b). The armed forces also set up shelters for the homeless and supplied the food for them (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020e). The UK military engaged in none of these social care tasks (UK Parliament 2021).
Finally, the Spanish military was used in enforcing COVID-19 restrictions (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020c). In contrast to the UK, in Spain, not only was there a military presence on public roads to enforce lockdowns and to maintain security (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020d) but troops were also used (as in Australia) to help enforce mask-wearing and social distancing, including on Madrid's suburban rail system (Spanish Ministry of Defence 2020b).

The police and Guardia Civil
Another layer of Spanish mitigation capacity came with the police forces and the paramilitary Guardia Civil (Civil Guard). The 78,000-strong Guardia Civil is one of the three police forces in Spain; the others being the Local and the National. Collectively, their presence means that Spain has two-and-a-half times the number of police per capita as in England and Wales (Wikipedia n.d.).
These forces were far more active than the UK police in terms of the initial imposing of COVID-19 restrictions in the March-May 2020 period. Unlike in the UK, arrests of people for not conforming to any lockdown regulations (such as not wearing masks outdoors) were common (Spanish Ministry of the Interior 2020a). If just one day -26 March 2020 -is taken as an example, the scale of Spanish measures can be seen. It was recorded that on this day the National Police made over 500 arrests of people for COVID-related offenses and turned back over 200 people trying to cross into Spain by car (Spanish Ministry of the Interior 2020a). The Guardia Civil, also on 26 March, stopped over 100,000 people on the streets and 2,500 vehicles at checkpoints to verify if they were conforming to lockdown protocols. Additionally, the Guardia Civil monitored the border and, on 26 March, conducted 11,000 checks at airports and stopped 1,900 vehicles at border crossings. Such dramatic figures for only this one day signify the scale of use of just two of the police bodies in Spain in attempts to control the pandemic during its initial stages (Spanish Ministry of the Interior 2020a).
In the UK, with light-touch policing necessarily operating, fines for any offenders were the norm, even for "egregious breaches of the law" (Casciani 2021). Arrests were very rare; and only seemingly linked to behavior at any mass demonstrations during the initial lockdown (Metropolitan Police n.d.). By way of some comparison, in England and Wales during the whole month from 29 March to 29 April 2020, and at the height of the pandemic, no arrests at all were made for any breaches of the COVID-19 regulations (ITV News 2020). The UK's borders were also not monitored by the police (or the Border Force) in the whole March-May 2020 period. As one Member of Parliament put it in the House of Commons, "Our country's doors have been left unlocked . . . In May 2020, the UK stood with only Iran, Luxembourg and the US Virgin Islands in having no border protection measures in place" (Thomas-Symonds 2021). It was obvious that UK COVIDrelated police activity in March-May 2020 was far less than in Spain and yet still, though, it was said to be "the toughest times in the history of [UK] policing." Of course, while it would a political decision to enforce strict pandemic protocols and to close borders, the UK government's hand would have been forced to a large degree by the fact that there were simply not the personnel available to properly carry out either task. Draconian measures were thus not really an option for the UK government; the resources to operationalize them were just not there.
But it should also be understood that the Guardia Civil is not merely a tool of control. It is ultimately a force designed to provide mitigation in emergency situations. It is thus a body that is flexible enough to take on a variety of homeland resilience tasks. During the pandemic, for instance, its personnel -and also on 26 March -visited 357 care homes to check on the health of residents (Spanish Ministry of the Interior 2020a). This was part of a general pattern of social care carried out by this paramilitary force (Munez 2020). Across the March-May period, Guardia Civil officers moved patients between hospitals, delivered medical supplies and also themselves helped build field hospitals (Munez 2020). Moreover, the Guardia Civil, like the military, had the capacity to carry out mass decontamination activities. The Guardia Civil has its own NBC unit called the Nuclear, Radiological, Biological and Chemical (NRBQ) unit. This has over 3,000 personnel (Montero 2020). Thus, when it came to conducting mass decontamination tasks, the Spanish government could turn not only to Protección Civil but also to units within both the armed forces and the Guardia Civil. The UK government, of course, in decontamination terms, had no standing body at all it could turn to.

Spain's options
As noted, Madrid was able to bring the country's excess mortality figures down markedly during the initial March-May 2020 period of the pandemic and at a much faster pace than could be managed in the UK. And this was despite the demographics and the population density being against Spain and despite its lowly position in the Global Health Index Report "preparedness" league table compared to the UK (John Hopkins University 2020). Of course, the difference in figures may have been due to the fact that Spain introduced tighter counter-COVID regulations than the UK. This was a political decision made by Madrid. But the point is that Madrid had options which would have influenced its decision-making. It had capacities -hundreds of thousands of people, skill sets and equipment -to call on when making its decisions which the UK government did not. Spain had Protección Civil; it had a military that was geared up to provide assistance, and it had the Guardia Civil. It is difficult not to draw the conclusion that it was the layers of specialized mitigation capacity provided by these bodies that allowed Spain to get its excess mortality down appreciably quicker than in the UK. In Spain, lives were saved that were not saved in the UK. Of course, and to reiterate, reducing excess mortality figures is but one metric, but it has to be the most important one. 8 It is one that can be used to show most clearly that Spain had an ability to "respond and recover" better than the UK.

The UK's future need for better homeland resilience
The evidence from the UK's experience of the COVID-19 pandemic is that immediate and at-scale mitigation capacity was lacking when compared to its European neighbors, notably Spain. This should not have been the case. The UK was, supposedly, the best prepared country in Europe for a pandemic and yet in the March-May 2020 period became "unequivocally" the worst effected. Good plans had been made in the UK prior to the pandemic but, once it struck, there was patently little ability to put those plans into action. The UK did not "respond and recover" well enough. Its homeland resilience capacity proved to be weak.
This problem needs to be addressed. And it needs to be addressed specifically because it seems clear that the homeland resilience of the UK will be put under increasing strain in the near-term future. There is, of course, the increasing danger of future pandemics (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform 2020; Madhav 2017) and there will, because of climate change, be more damaging, perhaps catastrophic, weather-related events (Talmazan 2021). There will also, though, and perhaps most seriously of all, be the growing threat from the activities of what the UK government refers to as "malign" state actors (Russia and China) (Global Britain 2021, 75, 29, 21).
It has been appreciated now for several years in both UK government/military and NATO circles that Russia, in particular, has been applying what the Russian military refers to as "active defence" measures against those NATO states it sees as its adversaries (Thornton and Miron 2021). The measures consist of what are collectively known as "sub-threshold warfare" activities (predominantly non-kinetic) that are focused on undermining, weakening, and ultimately destroying NATO state adversaries from within (Chekinov and Lt-Gen 2013). The Russian idea is to create what its military calls an "inner decay" (Falkov 2021). While currently the main "active defence" medium is mere information, these attacks may one day also include major cyber attacks aimed at crippling the critical national infrastructures and industrial control systems of core NATO states (NATO Strategic Command 2021). The ideal outcome from Moscow's point of view would be that any targeted state loses the ability to maintain domestic control to the point where, ultimately, a point is reached of internal "chaos": the state loses the ability to maintain control of its own society (Chekinov and Lt-Gen 2013). Such a state may then be said to be defeated -"neutralised" in Russian military parlancebecause it is more concerned with its own domestic security that on external threats (such as Russia). As a corollary, it is also far more open, as state entity, to manipulation by Moscow (Thornton and Miron 2021).
What these Russian "active defence" measures are specifically targeting, of course, is a state's homeland resilience. And the weaker this is the more likely these measures are to produce their desired effects.
NATO, for one, has understood the degree of threat. NATO's defense focus in recent years had been moving away from dealing with an external kinetic attack and more toward the sub-threshold threat scenario where the vector of attack is internal. There have been calls from the Alliance for its member states to increase their homeland resilience capacities (Roepke and Thankey 2019). As the organization reiterated in 2020, "[m]ilitary efforts to defend Alliance territory and populations need to be complemented by robust civil preparedness to reduce potential vulnerabilities" (NATO 2020). But this message came not to be mirrored in any UK official document, and certainly not in the Integrated Review or Defense in a Competitive Age.
What is more, the geopolitical situation has changed. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 the issue of nuclear strikes aimed at core NATO states is back on the homeland resilience agenda (Atlantic Council 2022; Nadeem; Badshah 2022). The possibility -and it is just a possibility -of any such strikes taking place would provide the ultimate test for any country's ability to "respond and recover," including that of the UK.
Given these near-term strategic threats -from pandemics, climate change and malign actors -it would seem especially incumbent on the UK government to now re-visit the subject of homeland resilience. It could start by truly learning the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic. Why have all the good plans but hardly any means of implementing them? The government could not call upon a civil defense body, a paramilitary force or even a military that looked upon MACA responsibilities as a "core objective."

Whither UK homeland resilience?
Setting up either a civil defense or a paramilitary force would be a major change of direction in the UK. And it may be a seen as a step too far given both the expense involved and, in the case of a paramilitary force, a reluctance born of the traditional consensual nature of policing in the UK. But the term "paramilitary" should not blind UK authorities to what such a force is capable of doing; including, as with the Guardia Civil, of performing social care roles.
And what of the UK's armed forces? Does this military now need to readdress what its core objectives actually are? Does it need now to be more accommodating of homeland resilience tasks? Does it need a formation such as the Spanish UME? Does it need to take the lead, for instance, in terms of providing significant decontamination capacity? And does it, if "control" measures are required, need to accept, like the Australian military, that it has a role to play on the streets of the UK? Of course, UK Defense would argue that its forces exist fundamentally to fight the nation's wars and not to provide major mitigation capacity in domestic emergencies. But this is the argument of yesteryear. Given the future near-term threats and given the absence of other suitable agencies, the UK's armed forces will have to do more.
But something does need to change. The UK can no longer risk, as the Italian general put it, being "in the best situation, but performing the worst."