The day the White House announced it was withdrawing the United States from the European Centre of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Threats, I happened to be in a meeting with a contact at the Federal Police in Vienna. He glanced at the news on my phone, made a dry remark in Viennese German that I will not bother to translate, and went back to whatever case we were on. That reaction is, I think, the entire problem in miniature.
The European conversation about the gray zone is happening at full volume. White papers, conferences in Brussels and Helsinki, ECFR reports, Council conclusions in March, a CSIS analysis that finally puts numbers on the sabotage. The actual operational people who would have to do something about it, at least in this country, are still treating it as somebody else’s file.
There is a doctrine emerging inside European intelligence services that finally, openly, names what has been happening for the past several years. Blaise Metreweli, the new chief of MI6, set it out in her first public speech on 15 December. “We are now operating in a space between peace and war,” she said. “This is not a temporary state or a gradual evolution.” Then she listed what that space contains: arson, sabotage, cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, drones over airports and military bases, aggressive undersea activity, and what she called the deliberate creation of fractures inside societies.
That speech was, by the careful reading of a few people I trust in London, a doctrinal moment. Metreweli spent very little time on China and almost none on terrorism, the two priorities that have dominated British intelligence work for two decades. She did not really mention the United States at all, which is itself a signal. The framing was entirely about Russia and about a Europe that has to start acting on the gray zone rather than just documenting it.
Joseph Fitsanakis sharpened the argument in a 5 May intelNews piece. His point, distilled, is that European intelligence services were built for a strategic environment in which they complemented American primacy. Their job was to support NATO, fill in regional gaps, provide national-level warning, and feed the larger US machine. That model is operationally insufficient now. Trump’s pivot, including the January withdrawal from the Helsinki-based Hybrid CoE, was the formal closure of the old arrangement. What Europe needs instead is autonomous intelligence structures capable of supporting an actual independent strategy. Most European services are not there yet, and the gap is widening.
The case for the doctrine, if you want it in numbers, is overwhelming. CSIS counted 219 suspected Russian hybrid warfare incidents in Europe between 2014 and 2025, with 46 percent of them occurring in 2024 alone. German media revealed in February that the Bundeskriminalamt counted 321 sabotage cases inside Germany during 2025. In September 2025, between 19 and 21 Russian-launched drones crossed into Polish airspace, forcing NATO Article 4 consultations and the closure of several airports. Drone sightings shut down operations at Munich Airport. Lithuania declared a state of emergency over repeated Belarusian balloon incursions. At the February Munich Security Conference, BND president Martin Jäger put the global Russian intelligence officer count at 60,000, not including informants. Whatever the precision on that figure, the scale is unmistakable.
This is the strategic backdrop. Now the part that actually matters from where I sit.
Austrian neutrality, as written into the Constitution in 1955, was designed for a different kind of conflict. The architects had in mind blocs, armies, formal alliances. The neutrality law commits Austria not to join military alliances, not to host foreign military bases, and not to participate in aggressive war. None of those conditions are triggered by the activity Metreweli described. A drone over Vienna’s airport does not require Austria to declare its alliance status. A cyberattack on the IAEA does not engage the army. A sabotage operation against a logistics hub in Lower Austria does not breach any of the formal conditions of neutrality. So Austria sits, technically neutral, while operations against its partners, its institutions, and increasingly its own infrastructure are run through its territory.
This is the part of the doctrine that nobody in Vienna wants to address out loud. Neutrality, as a legal category, is operationally meaningless in a gray-zone conflict. The conflict does not generate the moments that neutrality is built to manage. There is no declaration of war, no troop movement, no formal alliance request. There is only constant, low-grade, deniable pressure. And in a country that hosts the IAEA, UNOV, the OSCE, OPEC, the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights, several thousand accredited foreign personnel, and the seven-thousand-or-so hostile intelligence officers I have written about before, the absence of a formal war does not mean the absence of strategic stakes. It just means Austria is currently choosing not to act on them.
The §319a bill I covered last month is the dim reflection of this realization inside the Justice Ministry. The drafters know, even if they cannot put it in the explanatory memorandum, that the current legal framework is calibrated for a world that no longer exists. Closing the espionage loophole is the easy half. The harder half is asking whether a country can credibly call itself neutral when its capital is the operational backyard for at least one belligerent in an ongoing European conflict.
I do not see the DSN reaching that question on its current trajectory. Sylvia Mayer took over as director on 1 January. The service is still rebuilding from the BVT collapse, and the allied agencies I speak with regularly describe DSN as analytically respectable and operationally thin, which is the wrong shape for “between peace and war” work. The doctrine Metreweli outlined assumes a service capable of running disruption operations against hostile networks on its own initiative. That is not what DSN does, and it is not what DSN, given Austrian political reality, will be doing any time soon.
The political reality is the second-order problem. The FPÖ leads the polls. The party has spent the past decade building its base on a soft-Russia, hard-neutrality position, and there is no electoral incentive for them to revisit it. If they form the next government, or play kingmaker in the next coalition, the most likely outcome is that Austria stays inside the EU institutional framework on paper while drifting operationally outside the European gray-zone response architecture. Other European services will adjust by routing around Vienna. I have already heard variations of that sentence in a couple of allied capitals over the past year.
So what does Metreweli’s doctrine actually mean for this country.
It means the choice is becoming explicit. Either Austria modernizes its understanding of neutrality to allow active counter-hybrid work, including offensive cyber, disruption of hostile networks on its own territory, and meaningful operational sharing on hybrid campaigns against partners. Or it accepts that its strategic position will erode quietly, year by year, until the city is treated by allied services as a permissive environment to be worked around rather than worked with.
The Constitution does not actually prevent the first option. The Constitution prevents joining a military alliance. It does not prevent treating sabotage, cyberattacks, drone incursions and hybrid operations against European partners as serious matters that Austria acts on. That is a political choice presented as a legal constraint. Most Austrian politicians find the legal framing convenient because it spares them the conversation.
Metreweli’s speech, read carefully, was an invitation. She was telling other European services that the UK is moving from documenting to acting. She was telling Moscow that the cost calculus is about to change. She was telling Washington, very politely, that London no longer believes the transatlantic intelligence relationship is what it once was. And she was telling neutral countries that the gray zone does not respect their preferred categories.
Vienna has not yet had this conversation with itself. It will. The only question is whether it happens because Austrian politicians chose to have it, or because allied services stopped waiting.
