The director of the Department of Homeland Security, General Loreto Gutiérrez Hurtado, has positioned this Thursday the "threat" derived from hybrid strategies as "one of the most characteristic challenges of the moment" and has emphasized that her department has already started work to design a new National Security Strategy in light of the "transformation" of the international context.
In her speech at the "Dialogues for Security," organized by the newspaper "El País" at the CESEDEN headquarters in Madrid, the general recalled that, when drafting the National Security Strategy of 2021, still in force, the goal was set to "develop the capacity for prevention, detection, and response" against hybrid strategies, a "threat that constitutes one of the most characteristic challenges of the moment."
The National Security Law of 2015 establishes that the Strategy, which acts as a reference for the state's security policy, must be reviewed every five years "or when the changing circumstances of the strategic environment" make it necessary. Since the first Strategy, approved in 2013, reviews have been carried out in 2017 and 2021.
Impact of Ukraine and the Middle East on the new Strategy
In compliance with this legal framework, the National Security Council approved the procedure to draft and prepare a new document in April 2025, a decision motivated "above all" by the wars in Ukraine and the "regression" of the situation in the Middle East, as detailed by General Gutiérrez Hurtado. In her view, the update "proves that it is a living document, which evolves as the world transforms."
The head of National Security also briefly referred to the situation in Ceuta to recall that that crisis represented the first occasion in which the Executive activated the situation of interest for national security.
"A National Security system that is currently activated extraordinarily since the declaration of interest for National Security in the city of Ceuta, a situation declared by royal decree following a report from the National Security Council on August 25," she pointed out. "This is the first time that the situation of interest for security has been declared in Spain since our National Security law was enacted in 2015," she emphasized.