For the first time in a generation, Britain's senior military leadership is asking a society shaped by eighty years of peace to reckon with the possibility of conflict — not the cinematic kind, but the quiet, infrastructural kind that severs cables and darkens cities. The gap between the threat as experts understand it and the threat as ordinary citizens feel it has rarely been wider. History suggests that this gap, left unaddressed, carries its own dangers — not because war is inevitable, but because unpreparedness invites miscalculation on all sides.