Overview
This is the first version of what has become a “UK Total Defence” deck, completed 12/07/2026.
As far as the authors of this site know, Total Defence, or the version we draw our inspiration from, is most directly attributable to Swedish military and societal thinkers.
The video on this page explains how we might tweak this concept and strategic philosophy for existing UK security doctrines. It explains why and how from matters currently in the news in the UK itself. It then gives a brief overview of an app designed to deliver on the needs of the above idea of Total Defence, sympathetically adapted to UK policing and national-security sensibilities.
The ultimate goal of such a “UK Total Defence” would be to gather forces from all parts of British society in a world where, increasingly, traditional military, law-enforcement and national-security resources are being spread far too thinly.
Meanwhile, the last third of the above video continues to clarify and lay out a clear and simple iteration, fruit of an Innovation Retreat just completed with Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, of what we want our digital and online citizen scanning app to look like, as well as do. (This last third has also drawn on the learnings acquired from a Stockholm-based accelerator which the founder of Secrecy One Ltd attended from April 2026 until June 2026. We wish to continue to strive to bring together the institutions involved in the same with the opportunities our new limited company Secrecy One Ltd offers.)
Delivery
More on UK Total Defence
The aforementioned app could conceivably stand on its own two feet, with no government support or consent. But it would remain no more than an app, and perhaps eventually just one more interesting — but nevertheless less than entirely consequential — app amongst a million more to be found on app stores globally.
The authors and founders of Secrecy One Ltd aim for much more than this, however. When we talk of secrecy, we mean a secrecy of sovereign and nation-state delivery, where citizens are clear that data collected by their democratically elected states is used by these states only to enhance the democracies in question, not to be communicated to other parties with whom the citizens being observed have no institutional relationships of any formal kind.
More on the proposed UK Total Defence-related app we call Verify Home
The concepts and tech of this first version of the app itself are already defined and costed. Everything the deck asserts we intend to do, we already firmly know how to achieve; how much it will cost; what we can do ourselves; and who we need to bring in to help us out, where we assess we can’t do this entirely alone.
Financial Ask
The Financial Ask is €100,000 for the MVP as described in this deck, fully functioning and tested, with five-month go-to-market.
An additional €500,000 is needed, including personnel costs, for the CISO, corporate-focused desktop program outlined here.
Both these proposals are firm and duly costed.
Details of the Value-Add and Ask
The details of our Value-Add and Ask are as follows:
- Value-Add | We make it possible for governments which judge they need to access everyone’s data more vigorously to carry the wider range of public opinion with them by framing this request in the context of what other countries call Total Defence practice, where such governments prepare the military, police forces and espionage agencies to fight battles and the collective communities the rest of us form part of to better fight all kinds of ongoing and currently mainly invisible wars.
- Ask | For governments to begin to firmly advocate the virtues of concepts such as Total Defence as practised by Nordic countries and similar, a) to fund technologies and institutions which make them possible to actively implement; and b) to deliver training and upskilling that makes it possible for ordinary people to become much more aware of both the dangers out there and the ways we can all contribute to protecting each other.