What is the government’s War Book — and is it really being updated?

What is being shared

A headline doing the rounds reads: “Russia ‘planning autumn attack’ as UK updates war book for first time in decades”. It bundles two claims together — that the government is rewriting something called the War Book, and that it is doing so because an attack is expected this autumn.

The first claim is true and on the record. The second is not something any official has said. Bundled into one sentence, the true half lends its authority to the other.

What the War Book was

The Government War Book was the state’s instruction manual for moving from peace to war. It dates back to before the First World War, and through the Cold War it set out, department by department, what each part of government would do at each stage of a worsening crisis — who is told, what powers are switched on, what is moved where.

It was never a public document, and it was never advice to households. It was a plan for civil servants. After the Cold War it fell out of use, and ministers later told Parliament that its role had been taken over by the emergency-planning arrangements under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

What is confirmed now

In a written statement to Parliament on 14 July 2026 — the annual statement on national resilience — the government said it had accelerated home defence planning, “including updating the government War Book”, and that the work would be tested in 2027 in what it described as the largest UK home defence exercise in several decades.

So yes: the War Book is being brought back and updated. It is happening in the open, it was announced in Parliament in the summer, and it sits alongside other published work — the 2025 Strategic Defence Review and the Resilience Action Plan — rather than being a sudden reaction to events this month.

What is not confirmed

We could not find any official — minister, military chief or intelligence agency — saying that Russia is planning an attack this autumn. The phrase appears in the headline, not in a statement.

What is real is the general warning. Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, said on 16 September that this is the most dangerous period of his career, a point we covered in what the government has actually said about stockpiling. Warnings of that kind are about the direction of travel over years. They are not a date.

An “autumn” timing seems to come from squeezing two things together: senior figures warning about Russia, and a planning document with an end-of-year deadline. Neither of those is a forecast of an attack.

Does any of this change what households should do?

No. The War Book is about how departments work together. Nothing in it is addressed to you, and nothing has been published asking households to do anything new.

The advice that is addressed to you is GOV.UK Prepare, and it has barely changed since it launched in 2024: keep a few days of water and food that keeps, a torch and a radio, your medicines, and the phone numbers you’d need written down on paper. Our emergency kit list follows it item by item.

What not to do

Don’t treat a planning document as a prediction. Governments plan for things precisely so that they are not improvising if they happen; the existence of a plan says nothing about likelihood. The UK also plans for pandemics, floods and power failures, and publishes the list in the National Risk Register.

And don’t share the “autumn attack” line as fact. It has no source, and it is the part of the headline doing the frightening.