Hello, everyone and welcome to this E-Snap online conversation.

My name is Fredek Erics, and I'm very pleased to welcome today Elizabeth Brawl, a security

expert who is also in the world of think tanks, now as senior

fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. I first met Elizabeth about 25 years ago

when we were both young and pretty new in the world of journalism and policy analysis. And since then,

Elizabeth has had a great career in both fields. She has worked for major newspapers

and magazines, and with some of the big security policy think tanks in the world, including

positions at the Atlantic Council and the Royal United Services Institute for Defense and

Security Studies, Rusi. Elizabeth is also also commissioner on the UK National Preparedness Commission

and on the advisory board of the Center for Information Resilience in the same country.

And she is also out with a new book called The Defender's Dilemma,

Identifying and Deterring Grace Zone Aggression,

and this is also the subject of today's conversation.

Hello Elizabeth. I'm very glad to have you with me today. Thank you for having me and thank you for

inviting me and hello to everybody who is joining the Kong, the quote, to discussing these issues

with everybody later. Yes, indeed. So may I just start

asking out of own curiosity? So what is the National Preparedness Commission? It's a commission

that was set up by Lord Toby Harris, a member of the House of Lords, and a long-time

experts and proponent of greater resilience in the UK.

And he assembled essentially when the UK national,

well, the integrated review, which is a national security strategy,

leading up to that he assembled what he considered to be the leading experts on national resilience

...