For the first time in a generation, the United Kingdom’s (UK) political class agrees that the British Armed Forces need to grow. What it has not agreed upon is how to pay for that growth, or how to keep the public paying for it over a decade rather than a single spending review. The debate so far has been almost entirely about levers: borrowing, taxation, and spending cuts. It has barely been about consent.

That is a mistake. Every past British rearmament that survived, from the shadow factories of the 1930s to the Cold War buildup of the 1980s, paired money with a deliberate effort to keep the country onside. Where that effort was skipped, the funding proved fragile.

The scale now under discussion is not small. A credible warfighting posture is not what has been discussed by any of the major political parties – although it has by defence think tanks. Meeting the UK’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) commitment and basic self-defence needs would require an army of around 100,000-110,000 regulars, a Royal Navy of 24-26 escorts and nine or ten attack submarines, and a Royal Air Force (RAF) of 12-14 fast-jet squadrons.

This would take core defence spending to roughly 4.3%-4.4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the mid-2030s, or around £115-£130 billion per year in 2026 prices. That figure sits well above the 3.5% NATO core pledge that Britain has already signed up to for 2035; itself a lower target that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) costs at roughly £40 billion a year in additional spending.

John Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned as Secretary of State for Defence in June 2026 specifically because His Majesty’s (HM) Treasury would not fund even that smaller ambition. The dispute preceded a change of government; Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, has since adopted a fiscal framework requiring day-to-day spending to be matched by revenue within three years, with debt falling as a share of GDP by 2029-2030.

This is not a comfortable fiscal moment to make the case for more spending. Public sector net debt stood at 94.9% of GDP in mid-2026, close to levels last seen in the early 1960s, and the OBR’s ‘Fiscal Risks and Sustainability’ report from July 2026 found that in almost all of its modelled scenarios, debt moves onto an unsustainable path from the 2040s onward. Simply stabilising debt at its current level would require a permanent fiscal tightening equivalent to the entire education budget. Any credible funding plan for rearmament has to work within that constraint – not pretend that it does not exist.

The public will pay, but only one way

Polling suggests the difficulty is not the principle of spending more on defence, but the mechanism chosen to fund it. YouGov tested 12 ways of raising the money in mid-2026; only three commanded net public support. A rise in the additional rate of income tax scored 30 points of net support: the strongest of any option tested, at 56% in favour against 26% opposed. Raising the higher rate of income tax and trimming out-of-work benefits both scored narrow positive margins.

Everything else tested – cutting the National Health Service (NHS), the schools budget, the state pension, or disability spending – scored deeply negatively, and increased borrowing specifically for defence was opposed by 52% of respondents. The lesson here is blunt: the public will pay, but only if the burden visibly falls on the wealthiest, and only if the protected services stay protected.

No single lever closes a funding gap of this size, so a workable package has to draw on several streams at once. An additional and higher rate income tax rise could raise £8-£12 billion per year. A targeted wealth tax on households worth more than £100 million would affect only around 1,000 households, having been modelled at roughly £10 billion in 2026.

Disciplined growth caps on unprotected departmental budgets and one-off ‘defence bonds’ – i.e., war bonds – to front-load capital investment in shipyards and munitions plants could supply the rest of the required funding. Indeed, defence bonds are already under serious discussion in Whitehall, championed by Andy Haldane, an adviser to Burnham, and raised by the Liberal Democrats in Parliament 25 times in 2026 thus far. Individually, none of these levers are sufficient. Together, and sequenced across three phases running to the mid-2030s, they are.

The harder half of the problem

Getting the sums to add up on paper is the easy part. The harder part is making the package survive contact with an electorate that Focaldata finds is one of the most polarised on this issue of any it has tested, even before such a scale of ambition is on the table. A government that raises taxes for defence without first securing durable consent is setting up exactly the reversal risk that should worry it most.

This is where the debate needs to change: public consent should be treated as a costed line item, not left to the Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) press office. Four measures deserve a place on the balance sheet.

First is a funded recruitment-legitimacy programme. Muslims, for example, make up only around 0.5% of the UK’s regular forces against roughly 6.5% of the population, and government-linked reporting found only around 30 recruits from over 2,000 applications by British-born Muslims completed training between 2016 and 2018. Faster security vetting, guaranteed provision for religious observance, and recruitment campaigns fronted by serving minority personnel would help to ease a personnel shortage and demonstrate that armed forces expansion is a national project, not a sectional one.

The second measure is an honest public information campaign grounded in the OBR’s own findings rather than governmental spin, fronted by credible non-partisan messengers such as serving personnel and veterans rather than ministers. Richard Hughes, Chairman of the OBR, has already told a public briefing that ‘the UK cannot afford the array of promises that are displayed to the public if you leave those unchanged, based on a reasonable assumption about growth rates in the economy and in tax revenues’. That argument deserves a wider audience than a select committee hearing.

Third is a British equivalent of Sweden’s household preparedness brochure ‘In case of crisis or war’, sent most recently to 5.2 million homes in 2024. This would convert abstract anxiety into practical agency for a cost of low tens of millions of pounds.

The fourth measure, most durable of all, is a statutory cross-party funding lock, modelled on the aid-spending law. That would raise the political cost of any future government trying to unwind the settlement.

Conclusion

The UK has repeatedly announced ambitious defence spending increases without sustaining the follow-through needed to fund them beyond a single spending review. The Defence Investment Plan allocated £15 billion over four years largely through departmental reprioritisation – a proof of concept for one funding lever at moderate scale, not a template that scales on its own. Scaling that mechanism, alongside the tax measures above and a properly funded consent effort, is achievable.

What is not achievable is a rearmament programme funded by stealth, sustained by hope, and abandoned at the next election. The persuasion budget is a rounding error against the military programme it protects. It may also be the difference between a rearmament that lasts and one that does not.

Nicolas Groffman is a lawyer and defence consultant. He studied Chinese at the University of Cambridge; founded Harligan Ltd., a cross-border advisory firm; and is General Counsel of Fitzroy Exports.

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Viktorija Starych-Samuolienė is joined by:

• Dr Rob Johnson, Director of the Oxford Strategy, Statecraft, and Technology Centre, and former Director, Secretary of State’s Office for Net Assessment and Challenge (SONAC);

• Simon Bergman, CEO of M&C Saatchi World Services and former British Army officer.

The conversation tackles the escalating geostrategic pressures across the digital domain and how adversaries like Russia, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and Iran conduct influence operations below the threshold of conventional armed conflict. We explore the spending disparities between allies and hostile states, the critical role commercial and creative industries play in modern national security, and how rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are reshaping cyber resilience and data warfare. Finally, we examine how democratic societies can build cognitive resilience through better data hygiene, proactive communication strategies, and whole-of-government agility.

The wider European defence development and production landscape faces widely acknowledged challenges related to scale and fragmentation. The most effective means of overcoming these challenges is multilateral collaboration, but this is hard to push through with so many decision-making centres involved.

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) two largest European defence spenders, and building on their long history of close collaboration, the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany can not only deepen their own relationship but also act as continental leaders, bringing in other countries and overcoming over-duplication. The follow-through on the Trinity House Agreement represents a timely opportunity for London and Berlin to overcome existing barriers and requirement differences to identify how and where they can catalyse shared defence industrial objectives.

A shared threat assessment

Unlike some European NATO countries further from the alliance’s borders, Britain and Germany currently have a largely similar understanding of the threats faced on the eastern flank. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has since been accompanied by a continent-wide campaign of sub-threshold warfare, which shows no signs of slowing. The two countries also face the rising threat of the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and increased Russian and Chinese coordination, creating the possibility of a multifront conflict. Given the impact this is having on the global military posture of the United States (US), the need for a multifront mindset continues to grow.

Historically, both Berlin and London have had deep ties to Washington: the UK with its ‘special relationship’ and Germany as the host of the majority of US forces in Europe. Both are also deeply intertwined with the American defence industrial base which, should a multifront crisis erupt, Washington will mobilise towards meeting the demands of war in the Western Pacific.

This is already being seen with changes that the US has forced in the prioritisation of weapons order deliveries, delaying European countries’ orders as a result of the conflict against Iran. The UK and Germany have the potential to fill this gap in order for European NATO to ensure it has the necessary productive capacity to show the Kremlin that it could sustain a continental peer conflict. To do this, however, requires both countries to overcome outstanding barriers and, where they exist, compromise on existing requirement divergences.

Differing senses of urgency

It is clear that Berlin has now developed a greater sense of urgency than London. If Britain does not follow suit, it risks being left behind. Projected German defence spending is now set to consume one third of the federal budget by 2027. Germany is even changing its debt rules it has stood by so steadfastly for years to allow for more investment in defence. In comparison, under the 2026 Defence Investment Plan (DIP), the UK plans to spend £79.1 billion in 2029-2030, while Germany plans to spend around €184 billion (£157 billion) in 2030.

Additionally the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) provides a timeline to 2035. Many of the capability investments outlined in the two documents will come well into the 2030s. However, numerous estimates – apparently including NATO’s own – assume that the Kremlin will be able to mount a serious challenge by 2029-2030. A similar sluggish attitude has been taken in the UK towards increased defence spending: the DIP was delayed by almost a year, having initially been planned for release in the autumn of 2025. The plan is also not comprehensive: it leaves a £5 billion shortfall.

These urgency differences are not insurmountable, nor a reason against closer cooperation, but they are a hindrance. Unless Britain is willing to deliver more of a frontloaded increase in defence investment, it will miss out on near-term collaboration opportunities with European NATO’s largest defence spender. This divergent sense of urgency will also undermine both countries’ ability to bring together allies behind them. If this can be overcome, and it is ‘simply’ a matter of political choice and public diplomacy in Westminster, there are abundant opportunities for deeper collaboration.

Accelerating procurement

It is not enough to build an efficient multilateral rearmament effort; rearmament efforts need to deliver capability faster. ‘Peacetime’ timelines of multiple years from development to operational status and prolonged construction times for equipment needs to be reduced. This will necessitate a move towards investing more in lower-cost programmes and ‘80% solutions’ that can be delivered more quickly. Both the UK and Germany have experience in developing such capabilities – for example, the Raven air defence system for Ukraine.

Focusing on the bigger picture is also key to cutting through technical deliberations, preventing partners from getting lost in smaller – although important – technical and political debates over workshare and capability requirements, as seen in the delays and eventual cancellation of the French-German-Spanish next-generation fighter component of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS).

A deeper British-German relationship is critical to prevent recurring technical and political debates. More effective bilateral processes have already been established, but much remains to be done regarding unnecessarily complex regulatory systems that reduce speed through duplication, a lack of testing, and increased bureaucracy. Both countries need to work together to mitigate these issues and prioritise speed. Ultimately, overcoming potential technical and workshare disagreements will require top-down compromise from politicians in both countries.

Deep precision strike

British-German defence capability collaboration has already made headway into concrete capabilities such as Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), armoured mobility such as the Boxer, and increasingly on deep precision strike. Conversations between British and German teams have built the human and communications infrastructure to work towards milestones such as developing a 2,000+ kilometre range for deep precision strike. Looking forward, the UK will lead on producing a new long-range missile based on mature technologies, entering service around 2030, and invest in Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) technology, which Germany is taking the lead on.

Despite these strong foundations and positive steps, there are still potential barriers to the delivery of these systems, as they cannot necessarily be delivered at speed (noting the 2030 delivery estimate), nor are they immediately interoperable – requiring integration with launch platforms for example. These complex systems require survivability, manoeuvre at speed, and stealth – all of which have long lead times, pushing back delivery beyond 2030.

Deep precision strike is an expensive business; one European countries have long been reluctant to fund and over-reliant upon the US for. One of the keys to reinforcing the work underway will be to unlock more funding, either in-country or through joint funding mechanisms. When Security Action For Europe (SAFE) negotiations reopen again, reasonable access terms for Britain would go a long way in unlocking further funding for shared deep precision strike programmes.

Additional capability areas

Nuclear capabilities and the space domain represent further areas for potential British-German collaboration, specifically where dependency on the US is currently excessive. Consider space capabilities as a case in point: with both the PRC and Russia taking steps to challenge the space domain, the UK and Germany should adapt, integrating space into their strategic thinking as previously done with drones and cyber warfare.

Likewise, as Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) increasingly becomes the backbone of all military domains, closing space-based ISR gaps is critical to European NATO’s ability to operate at scale in the event that US forces and enablers are focused elsewhere. Discussions are happening with Germany on joining ODIN’S EYE, a missile early warning system funded through the European Union’s (EU) European Defence Fund.

Like deep precision strike, one of the biggest barriers to space-based capabilities is cost. Duplicating the suite of American capabilities that European NATO relies on would be prohibitively expensive, but building in a targeted selection of multilateral space-based capabilities would bolster overall alliance space posture and act as a hedge against American distraction. Germany has committed €35 billion (£30 billion) over several years but Britain is lagging behind: the DIP only committed £3.2 billion over the next four years.

Conclusion

There is a great deal of alignment between London and Berlin on national security conversations, both domestically and bilaterally. Yet, despite these similar threat assessments and the shared acknowledgement of the worsening Euro-Atlantic security environment, a divergence has emerged.

Germany clearly now has a far greater sense of urgency, as demonstrated by its fiscal and political actions. The Trinity House Agreement outlines where both countries intend to work closer together and plenty of good work has already been started, but much remains to be done. Current and future efforts would be aided greatly if the UK were to develop the same sense of urgency. Through both wider and deeper cooperation on capabilities, Britain and Germany can lead European NATO in preparing deterrence before the point of potential crisis comes.

Ellie Drake is Operations Officer at the Council on Geostrategy.

William Freer is Research Fellow (National Security) at the Council on Geostrategy.

This article is the result of a half-day conference held on 15th July 2026 in partnership with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) UK and Ireland. This was the third in a series of events in 2026 that the Council on Geostrategy is organising with KAS to encourage closer defence cooperation between Britain and Germany.

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The contemporary geostrategic environment has never been more volatile and uncertain. The international system is under sustained pressure from the self-interested actions of the states possessing the world’s three largest nuclear arsenals, and the maritime domain – the indispensable global commons – is more important than ever.

Against this backdrop, and the increased risk of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) conflict with Russia, how can the Royal Navy exercise sea control in the North Atlantic at the moment where its size reaches a historical nadir? By any metric, it requires a huge increase in the number of platforms capable of delivering military effect at, under, and above the sea. However, the prospect of any significant increase in the sum (or share) of British taxpayers’ money allocated to conventional maritime forces seems slim.

The cost of building large, complex warships in Europe is now in the region of £2-£2.5 billion per hull, and the cost of maritime strike aircraft and specialised naval helicopters are now approaching £100 million per airframe (e.g., the F-35B Lighting II Joint Combat Aircraft and next-generation Merlin AW101). The imperative to break the vicious cycle of ever fewer numbers of ever more expensive platforms has never been clearer.

In June 2025, the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) revealed the Royal Navy’s answer to this question: a ‘New Hybrid Navy’ in which highly capable crewed submarines, warships, and aircraft are augmented with far larger numbers of remotely operated and autonomous uncrewed systems in every warfighting domain. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) in June 2026 fleshed out the ambition: a fleet of ‘state-of-the-art crewed ships networked with uncrewed surface and undersea craft’, all connected and orchestrated by a secure, high-speed ‘Maritime Fighting Web’. One eye-catching announcement was the unveiling of the plan for ‘at least six’ flexible, lower-cost Common Combat Vessels (CCVs), replacing previous proposals for a small number of highly specialised, very expensive Type 83 destroyers.

In the air domain, programmes were announced for fixed wing (Project VANQUISH) and rotary wing (Project PANTHEON) Autonomous Collaborative Platforms (ACPs), to work alongside existing Fleet Air Arm crewed aircraft as a ‘Hybrid Air Wing’. Overall, at least £1.5 billion has been profiled over the next four years to unlock this vision, as part of the £5 billion allocated for advanced uncrewed systems across defence in the DIP.

Evolution or revolution?

Executing such a major shift in maritime doctrine while simultaneously introducing untested and fast-moving technology is far from straightforward. The principle ‘crewed where necessary, uncrewed wherever possible, and integrated always’ is laudable, but much harder in its execution than it is in its design.

At its heart, this new way of warfare represents both continuity and rupture. Continuity lies in the problem set: North Atlantic sea control, protection of the United Kingdom’s (UK) nuclear deterrent, seabed infrastructure security, integrated air and missile defence, and protection of NATO’s northern flank. Rupture is the message sent by the cessation on any further work on the Type 83 destroyer – although in reality, Type 83 was never a programme to be cancelled, but merely a proposal that might have delivered the Future Air Dominance System (FADS) requirements.

This move away from ‘a small number of large, expensive ships’ is not just because of cost per hull, but also because of the necessity of increasing single points of presence vastly; to use the language of a ‘system of systems’ approach, functions once stacked on one complex platform – sense, decide, effect – are now to be spread across far more interconnected assets.

Risks and opportunities

History, however, teaches temperance of technological enthusiasm. Battleships ceded primacy to aircraft carriers only after navies (and air forces) developed doctrine and tactics, built aircrew pipelines, perfected aircraft launch and recovery procedures, and built a viable industrial base. Nuclear submarines transformed underwater endurance and reach, but required new safety cultures, shore infrastructure, and specialist crews that took four decades to build. What lessons can be drawn from these transitions?

In each case, the platform was the visible element of a deeper change in command, logistics, infrastructure, and training. Those experimenting and innovating with these transformational technologies were bold, knew the sea and the perils of operating in the middle of a huge ocean, and were not afraid to fail in order to succeed on the next try. That is the culture that will succeed in the 21st century.

However, the siren call of armchair admirals, populist podcasters, and energetic politicians with limited maritime knowledge, extrapolating lessons directly from the Black Sea to the North Atlantic, is already being seen. This is a major category error. Cheap, massed, and precise systems matter, but Britain must protect oceanic trade routes, nuclear-power ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) bastions, and NATO strike groups operating far from friendly ports. Ukraine’s success has been sea denial in an enclosed sea with small expendable craft, not the sea control that the UK requires for a massive ocean. The Hybrid Navy must remain centred on high-end crewed platforms, with uncrewed assets expanding sensing, effect, and presence.

To see true success, defence must change its delivery culture. One recent article laid down nine decision points which, in the delivery of the Hybrid Navy, necessitate ‘conscious trade-offs…each balancing the four forces that pull against each other in every choice: cost, crew, capability, and cadence’. It is difficult to argue with the logic here, as the choices described – of quality versus quantity to at-sea versus alongside maintenance – are at the heart of ensuring success.

This risk can only be mitigated by conducting the Hybrid Navy acquisition process using subject matter experts, not rusticated to delivery teams in a remote location. Now is not the time for generic programme delivery professionals, but the moment for maverick, free-thinking mariners who know the domain and will make the right calls.

Conditions for successful delivery

If the aforementioned risks are appropriately sentenced, and the ‘Defence Lines of Development’ (Training, Equipment, People, Infrastructure, Doctrine and concepts, Organisation, Information, and Logistics; alongside Safety and Security) – as unglamorous but decisive as they are – are considered accordingly, there are therefore two main areas where the conditions for successful delivery need to be set: regulatory permissions, and the culture of feedback.

Today, the safety, regulatory and policy permissions needed to operate Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USVs) larger than 24 metres routinely in British waters do not yet exist. No uncrewed vessel of this size has received either civilian (MCA) or defence (DMR) operating clearance; neither civilian classification societies nor the Naval Authority and Technical Group have yet approved a USV design. Stories abound of Kafkaesque restrictions and illogical conditions being applied to USVs, which prevents even the most benign of activities at sea, with the siren call of ‘more safety’ missing the very reason as to why these vessels exist.

This culture cannot be solved through tweaking paperwork nor attempting to convince (well-meaning and hard-working) maritime regulators to take more risk. The first condition that must therefore be set is to maximise the freedom that defence already has in legislation to allow the Hybrid Navy to learn by doing, with operators given the freedom to fail safely without worrying about interminable paperwork and shoreside meddling from people incentivised to say ‘no’.

Secondly, a lesson from Ukraine that is relevant to the Hybrid Navy is the power of the feedback loop. Against Russia’s full-scale invasion, defence technology companies equipping the Armed Forces of Ukraine aim for the ‘rule of six’: six hours to get operator feedback to the manufacturer, six days to get any required software update applied in the field, six weeks to get hardware changes deployed back to the front line, and six months to replace any given system completely. By comparison, feedback cycles on most British defence programmes are often measured in months or years. Software and hardware upgrades can take years, if they happen at all.

The Hybrid Navy must adopt the former model, embedding an evergreen feedback loop into the system from the outset, using closed messaging groups, informal channels of communications, and incentivised manufacturers.

Will it work?

The benefits of successfully delivering a Hybrid Navy are numerous and easy to elucidate: distributed UK sensors and persistent uncrewed presence can offset crewed hull availability shortfalls, and increased mass without proportional crew growth eases the frontline people recruitment and retention problems.

In testing the hypothesis, hybrid war games are claimed to have delivered a substantial uplift in combat mass and roughly threefold missile capacity for a North Atlantic contest. There seems little other route by which Britain can sharpen its conventional deterrence and introduce a genuine wartime level of physical presence at sea, but history’s lesson is blunt. Naval revolutions (many of which were the UK’s to trigger) reward those who are bold and confident in their planning, but it is imperative to learn from their failures.

R. Adm. (rtd.) James Parkin CB CBE served in the Royal Navy for 28 years, primarily at sea as a frontline warfare officer. From 2021 to 2025, he worked in Navy Command HQ as Director Develop.

This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Strategic Defence Unit.

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The United Kingdom’s (UK) defence capability is approaching breaking point. Successive cuts to defence spending since the end of the Cold War mean that Britain’s strategic ambitions are outpacing capabilities. The Royal Air Force (RAF) has fewer jets than it did a decade ago, the Royal Navy is struggling to keep the nuclear Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD) operable, and the British Army is at its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars.

Gen. Sir Richard Barrons, co-author of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), warned as far back as 2023 that the UK only has enough munitions stockpiled to sustain a high-intensity conflict for about a week. What is more, Prof. John Bew, former Foreign Policy Adviser to 10 Downing Street, has recently warned that Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, could face a major international military crisis within a matter of weeks.

The case for rearmament has never been stronger. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) is a step in the right direction, and news that the Burnham administration intends to meet the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) spending target of 3.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2035 is certainly welcome. Much of this new investment will (quite rightly) be focused on rebuilding Britain’s depleted weapons stockpiles, purchasing new equipment, and investing in future technologies that will be crucial to winning the next conflict. However, while the political rhetoric is positive, it is not aligning with reality.

Innovation nation?

The UK has a long history of being at the forefront of defence innovation. As seen during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, successfully leveraging new technologies such as drones and Artificial Intelligence (AI) often translates into success on the battlefield.

Despite the examples of Ukraine and its historical pedigree, Britain is not sufficiently investing in future defence technology at the scale and pace needed. A report from data analysis firm Beauhurst suggests that while overall investment into British defence companies has increased since the commencement of the Kremlin’s invasion, funding into innovative ‘defence tech’ companies has actually fallen, from 55 deals worth £313 million in 2022 to 41 worth £91 million in 2025 – a drop of 71%.

This is not just a case of investors getting cold feet. Non-dilutive public sector grant funding for defence tech firms has also fallen. While the value of grant funding into defence tech firms doubled in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from £49.2 million in 2022 to £101 million in 2024, funding dried up in 2025, with Beauhurst reporting a 74% drop in year-on-year funding into the sector valued at only £25.9 million. This marked the lowest level of grant funding into British defence tech firms since 2016’s £11.7 million.

Why does this matter? For defence tech businesses, developing a promising product is only the beginning. The real challenge is surviving long enough to turn that technology into a dependable contract. Major defence platform contracts take an average of six years to award, while even modular technology upgrades typically require around three years. For smaller companies with limited reserves and little recurring revenue, this creates a prolonged gap between building a working prototype and generating meaningful commercial income.

Nor does winning a place on a defence programme guarantee timely delivery. A National Audit Office (NAO) review found cumulative delays on Ministry of Defence (MOD) projects were equivalent to more than 21 years in 2021 alone. More recently, only two of the MOD’s 49 major projects were assessed as both on time and within budget. This is a longstanding problem: a review of defence procurement in 2009 found 40% of projects overran cost expectations and 80% were delivered late.

These delays are inconvenient for major contractors, but potentially existential for emerging defence tech firms. Most Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) do not sell directly to the MOD, instead entering the market through supply chains controlled by large prime contractors. This weakens their visibility over future contracts, delays revenue and increases the amount of working capital needed before a product reaches deployment.

This helps to explain why falling equity and grant funding matter so much. Defence tech firms are being asked to finance years of research, testing, regulatory compliance, and procurement uncertainty at the same time that the capital available to span that period is retreating. Without patient funding, otherwise viable companies may abandon military applications, concentrate on civilian customers, or move overseas in search of clearer demand.

Growing dependence on foreign capital

The retreat of capital from British defence tech companies is not without consequences. Beyond the immediate impact on the economic and innovative opportunity cost of businesses not receiving much needed scaling capital, it has also left the UK uniquely reliant on foreign capital to finance the technology which could serve as the guarantor of sovereignty in the years ahead.

Beauhurst data shows that investment into innovative British defence technology companies is becoming increasingly internationalised. In 2015, around two thirds of investment came from UK-based investors. By 2025, that figure had fallen to around one third, with growing participation from Commonwealth and NATO-aligned investors, particularly those based in the United States (US).

This is particularly apparent for some of Britain’s most promising and strategically important defence tech firms. In June 2026, London-based maritime drone manufacturer Kraken Technology Group (KTG) secured £130 million through a major equity deal. This deal transformed KTG into the UK’s latest tech unicorn, but it would not have been possible without foreign investment: of the ten investors in KTG, only two were British funds.

Part of the problem lies in the structural barriers facing defence investors: slow and uncertain procurement cycles; Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) funding restrictions; and a shortage of late-stage capital across Europe. These weaknesses have left the UK increasingly dependent on overseas investors to finance technologies, with direct implications for its future security.

This dependence is most pronounced in relation to the US. American investors are not always the most frequent backers of British defence tech companies, but when they do invest, they tend to write much larger cheques. The average deal involving a US-based funder is significantly larger than one backed by European Union (EU)-based investors, and almost four times the size of a domestically funded round.

American capital has undoubtedly helped British companies to develop and scale technologies that might otherwise have struggled to secure funding. However, relying on it so heavily carries strategic risks. Investment can influence where companies expand, where intellectual property is held, and ultimately which country captures the economic and military value created by British innovation. The answer is not necessarily to turn away from US investors, but to rebuild the UK’s own capacity to finance strategically important companies.

Conclusion

Britain cannot rebuild its military strength through headline spending commitments alone. The technologies shaping modern warfare need patient capital, predictable grant funding, and a procurement system capable of moving promising products from prototype to deployment before their developers run out of money. Overseas investment, particularly from trusted allies, will remain valuable, but it should complement rather than substitute British capacity for financing important companies.

The DIP offers an opportunity for the UK to close this gap, but only if funding reaches beyond established primes and into the emerging businesses driving innovation. Otherwise, Britain risks entering the next crisis with the ideas to compete but neither the capital nor commercial pathways needed to get them into the field.

Callum Newton is an Associate Director at Beauhurst Insights, where he leads the team’s work with public sector organisations and institutional investors. He specialises in analysing the financial, fundraising, and innovation activity of private companies, with a particular focus on the UK’s defence tech landscape.

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Since February 2022, the strategic centre of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has moved decisively eastward. The Madrid and Vilnius summit declarations, the accessions of Finland and Sweden, the Permanent Structured Cooperation arrangements, and the forward-deployed brigades in the Baltic states represent the alliance’s most significant reorganisation since the end of the Cold War. Each step has been necessary, and proportionate to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

The corollary has been less visible. NATO’s attention to its southern flank has quietly diminished. No coherent doctrine for the eastern Mediterranean has emerged from recent summits, with the most recent one in Ankara settling this point. The strategic terrain in the region is shifting in ways that the alliance is barely tracking, and the United Kingdom (UK), whose most enduring forward presence sits in that theatre via the Royal Air Force (RAF) air stations on Cyprus, has not articulated a contribution to closing the gap, despite the Sovereign Base Areas giving it a permanent operational stake in the region that no other alliance member matches.

Post-Brexit, Britain has bilateral flexibility in the region that European Union (EU) member states do not, being able to develop relationships without European-level coordination. The UK-Greece Strategic Bilateral Framework and bilateral engagement with Egypt indicate that this flexibility is being used. What has not yet been built is the strategic framework that would unify these relationships into a coherent regional posture.

The Turkish factor

Türkiye’s autonomous strategic posture means that NATO planning cannot assume Ankara’s alignment on regional issues. For years, tension was expressed in the air, with airspace violations over the Aegean and periodic simulated dogfights between Greek and Turkish aircraft. However, the 2023 Athens Declaration on Friendly Relations and Good-Neighbourliness established a bilateral framework for managing disputes, and the reduction in incidents since has been marked. The improvement is real, but also bilateral, resting on the political will of two administrations and unaccompanied by any alliance-level mechanism. The underlying disagreements over the continental shelf, Cyprus, and hydrocarbon rights remain unresolved, and NATO has developed no means of addressing them should the present détente falter.

This autonomy should not be mistaken for distance from Washington. Turkish bilateral standing with the United States (US) is presently rising rather than falling. That is a reasonable return for a state which has carried significant alliance burdens in Syria and acted as mediator in Gaza and Iran, but it carries a structural consequence: a Türkiye whose interests are well served bilaterally has correspondingly less incentive to invest in multilateral southern flank frameworks. The task is therefore to make such frameworks worth Türkiye’s participation, rather than to lament their absence.

Britain’s tripartite contribution

A British contribution to the southern strategy missing from NATO doctrine would have three pillars. The first is a UK-led trilateral with Egypt and Greece on Suez-Red Sea maritime security. Egypt holds the Suez Canal; Greece holds the EU’s southeastern maritime frontier and the partnership with Cyprus; and Britain holds the Sovereign Base Areas and operational naval capacity demonstrated through recent Red Sea deployments. A formal annual trilateral summit, permanent working group on maritime security, and joint exercises drawing on each nation’s naval and air assets would bind these three states into a regional security architecture that none of them can build alone.

Such a framework must also reckon with the Turkish Straits. Türkiye controls the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and exercises that control under the 1936 Montreux Convention, affording Ankara a legally recognised custodial role over Black Sea access. It exercised that authority in 2022, determining that Article 19 of the Convention was engaged by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and restricting the transit of belligerent warships accordingly.

A trilateral treating Turkish cooperation as incidental would be attempting basin-wide maritime security while disregarding one of its two principal gateways. Sequencing matters more than initial membership: a working UK-Egypt-Greece format that demonstrates value, and to which Turkish participation on Straits and wider maritime security is subsequently extended, is more achievable than a four-way negotiation begun cold. Britain is uniquely well-placed to manage that sequence.

The second contribution is deeper naval cooperation with the Greek and Cypriot navies. This would encompass joint exercises building on the existing UK-Greece Strategic Bilateral Framework, intelligence sharing on Russian and Chinese naval movements in the basin, and formalised basing access. Bilateral defence relationships already exist. What is missing is the operational tempo that turns bilateral cooperation into regional deterrence.

The third British contribution is treating the eastern Mediterranean energy axis as a strategic concern, not a commercial one. The natural gas politics of the eastern basin involve EU member states, an alliance member excluded from the consortium and contesting its maritime legal basis (Türkiye), and Israeli onshore infrastructure that is increasingly subject to threat. A British role in convening East Mediterranean Gas Forum security discussions, and in deploying Royal Navy capability to protect undersea infrastructure, would extend NATO’s southern flank doctrine into a domain where the alliance has had no operational role. The precedent already exists in the BALTIC SENTRY mission, established in January 2025 after a sequence of cable-cutting incidents in the Baltic Sea. The Mediterranean equivalent has not yet been built.

The southern flank after Ankara

The Ankara summit’s outcomes bear directly on the argument presented in this article. The six-paragraph Ankara Summit Declaration reaffirms Article 5 and the 360-degree approach to deterrence. It records 2025’s defence investment commitment from The Hague, announces more than US$50 billion (£37.5 billion) in new procurement, and pledges €70 billion (£59.8 billion) in military support to Ukraine for 2026. It states that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon, and calls for freedom of navigation to be respected in the Strait of Hormuz. It does not mention the eastern Mediterranean.

The omission is all the more striking considering where the summit was held. Ankara is the capital of NATO’s principal Mediterranean power, and the Declaration’s only maritime security commitment concerns the Strait of Hormuz rather than the basin in which two alliance members contest each other’s continental shelf. NATO has found language for freedom of navigation in the Gulf, but none for the waters in which its own members dispute maritime boundaries.

That said, the southern flank was not absent from Ankara, being present in a different form. The most consequential southern flank business conducted at the summit was bilateral: Donald Trump, President of the US, signalled serious consideration of an F-35 Lightning II Joint Combat Aircraft sale to Türkiye, although the transfer remains blocked by a legislative requirement that America certifies Türkiye no longer possesses the Russian S-400 missile system. Additionally, both Greece and Israel have voiced objections, and can be expected to press them in the US Congress.

This mechanism deserves attention. A question bearing directly on the Aegean military balance was raised between Washington and Ankara, and the NATO states most immediately affected by it have no forum in which to be heard other than Congress. An alliance member lobbying American legislators against a weapons transfer to another NATO country is not evidence of a functioning southern flank architecture. It is evidence that no such architecture exists, and that in its absence the smaller Mediterranean allies are reduced to working through Washington rather than through NATO itself.

This is not to say that the southern flank is unimportant to NATO. Rather, it is handled bilaterally and transactionally, and remains unarticulated at the level of collective commitment. The 360-degree formula has been alliance language since 2016, and still carries very little operational content south of the Bosphorus.

Here is where the British position is genuinely distinctive. EU engagement with Ankara is constrained by the vetoes available to Greece and Cyprus as member states, and American engagement is bilateral and transactional by habit. The UK is bound by neither. It is a guarantor power under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, maintains functional relationships with Athens and Ankara simultaneously, and sits outside the institutional machinery that makes Turkish participation so difficult to arrange.

Convening across the Greek-Turkish divide is not a British aspiration as much as a British comparative advantage. No other ally holds the same combination, although when a drone struck RAF Akrotiri on 1st March 2026, France responded by deploying anti-drone systems to Cyprus and Greece – publicly committing to their defence. On 8th June 2026, France and Cyprus formalised this cooperation by signing a Status of Forces Agreement, establishing the legal framework for a French military presence on the island. France has built this framework from a standing start. The UK, which has held the Sovereign Base Areas and its presence in Akrotiri for decades, has yet to do equivalent strategic work with Cyprus, Greece, or Egypt, and from a far stronger institutional base.

The eastern Mediterranean is where NATO’s next decade will be tested. Ankara has confirmed that the test will not be met by declaration. Britain has the standing to shape it, and now has rather clearer evidence that no one else intends to do so.

Ethan Gallant is an open-source intelligence analyst working on sanctions networks, corporate ownership, and strategic infrastructure. He publishes methodology-led investigative casework at ethangallantosint.substack.com and is a member of Chatham House and RUSI.

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The past decade has witnessed a growing number of incidents in space that would once have seemed extraordinary. Russian satellites have conducted increasingly sophisticated rendezvous and proximity operations, most recently against an ICEYE Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Earth observation satellite allegedly used by Ukraine. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has also demonstrated comparable capabilities while notably expanding its counterspace portfolio. Electronic interference with satellite navigation and communications has not only become more frequent, but it has also become endemic in some parts of the world, such as in the Baltic region and the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, cyber operations against commercial and government space systems have become a routine feature of international competition.

Collectively, these activities are commonly described as examples of ‘grey zone’ warfare; hostile actions deliberately calibrated to remain below the threshold of conventional armed conflict. The phrase has become part of the contemporary strategic lexicon, particularly in discussions of space, where outright military confrontation carries enormous risks of escalation.

Yet, the growing popularity of the term raises an uncomfortable question. What if grey zone warfare is not the problem at all? What if it is simply the latest expression of something far older?

The United Kingdom’s (UK) challenge is not that Russia and the PRC have discovered a revolutionary new way of competing. Nor is it that Britain lacks capable armed forces, intelligence agencies, or commercial space companies. Rather, the greater danger is political. After more than three decades in which many assumed that major power rivalry had become increasingly constrained by globalisation, international institutions, and economic interdependence, the UK risks misinterpreting the normal condition of international politics. Space merely exposes that misunderstanding perhaps more clearly than other domains.

The idea that strategic competition exists somewhere between peace and war is itself somewhat misleading. History offers remarkably few examples of prolonged periods in which great powers simply coexisted without persistent rivalry. Throughout the 19th century, the Cold War, and indeed much of recorded history, states continuously sought to advance their interests through diplomacy, intelligence, economic pressure, technological competition, proxy conflicts, and military signalling. Open warfare was only one manifestation of a broader strategic contest.

If anything, the historical anomaly was the three decades following the end of the Cold War. The overwhelming predominance of the United States (US), combined with expanding global markets and international institutions, encouraged the erroneous belief that geopolitical competition had become progressively less central to international affairs. The expectation emerged – sometimes explicitly, often implicitly – that strategy itself had become less important than economic integration and crisis management.

As the late Colin S. Gray often reminded us about strategic affairs, bad times have an unfortunate habit of returning. Space illustrates this return with unusual clarity because it has become indispensable to modern civilisation. Military operations, financial markets, global communications, navigation, weather forecasting, and Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) all depend upon space-based services. At the same time, these systems remain deeply interconnected. The destruction of satellites risks generating debris that threatens all space users, while attacks on strategic space assets carry profound implications for conventional military operations and potentially nuclear deterrence.

Britain’s adversaries therefore increasingly seek political advantage without provoking outright war. Cyber operations, electronic warfare, co-orbital satellite manoeuvres, growing commercial dependency, legal ambiguities, and intelligence collection offer opportunities to influence an adversary’s behaviour while managing escalation risks. This is not evidence that the character of strategy has fundamentally changed. Rather, it reflects the enduring logic of competition adapting to a domain in which the costs of direct military confrontation are exceptionally high.

Most analyses of these developments focus upon satellites, launch vehicles, or counterspace capabilities. Important though these are, they are not the true object of strategic competition. The real target is political judgement.

Persistent competition in space rarely seeks immediate military victory. Instead, it seeks to influence how political leaders interpret risk, assess escalation, and exercise strategic choice. A co-orbital satellite manoeuvre may reveal technical capability, but it also tests political resolve. Electronic interference with navigation systems imposes practical costs, but it also normalises behaviour that might previously have been considered unacceptable. Ambiguous actions create uncertainty not simply within a military headquarters, but within governments themselves.

Viewed individually, such incidents often appear too limited to justify a significant response. Viewed collectively, they reveal something rather different: a sustained strategic campaign designed to shape political decision-making over time.

This distinction matters because the UK does not principally suffer from a deficit of military capability. British military and intelligence organisations possess an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the challenges posed by adversarial space operations. Moreover, commercial space innovation is accelerating and, in turn, increases the attack surfaces by which adversaries might compete. Indeed, the UK has recognised space as a critical operational domain within the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) and is planning to invest accordingly.

The more difficult question lies at the political level, where there appears to be a persistent tendency to interpret strategically coherent campaigns as isolated tactical incidents. The instinctive response has often been one of restraint: to avoid unnecessary escalation, to preserve diplomatic space, to take what might be described as the strategic high road.

Restraint is not in itself a weakness. Indeed, it is often a hallmark of responsible statecraft. The difficulty arises, however, when it is not accompanied by an equally coherent strategy for shaping an adversary’s behaviour. Adversaries probe, responses remain cautious, political thresholds become clearer, and further probing follows. Over time, the cumulative effect is not dramatic defeat but something considerably more subtle: the gradual erosion of strategic freedom of manoeuvre.

This process extends well beyond space. It is visible in cyberspace, maritime coercion, economic statecraft, information operations, and technological competition. Space simply provides perhaps the clearest illustration because the political consequences of apparently minor technical actions are often immediate and globally palpable.

The objective of persistent strategic competition is therefore not necessarily to compel surrender or achieve decisive military victory. It is the progressive narrowing of an opponent’s range of politically acceptable choices while preserving one’s own. Success is measured not by territory captured or forces destroyed, but by the gradual reduction of strategic freedom.

This should concern Britain because strategic freedom should be one of its greatest national assets. The UK’s influence has historically rested not only upon military capability but upon the ability to combine diplomacy, intelligence, commerce, alliances, and technological innovation into coherent statecraft. The challenge posed by contemporary strategic competition is not that these instruments have disappeared, but that they risk being employed reactively rather than proactively.

The language of grey zone warfare is therefore useful only up to a point. It describes certain activities, but it risks obscuring the larger strategic reality. The challenge facing Britain is not to prepare for an occasional category of conflict that sits somewhere between peace and war. Rather, it is to recognise that persistent strategic competition has always been the historical norm, and that space is simply the latest arena in which this enduring logic is being expressed.

The UK does not need to rediscover strategic thinking because space has become contested. It needs to rediscover strategic thinking because bad times – history – have returned.

The greatest danger is not that Britain’s competitors have developed a revolutionary new form of warfare. It is that they have remained students of strategy while the UK has, at times, behaved as though sustained geopolitical competition were an interruption to normal, benign international politics rather than its enduring competitive condition. The most immediate task is therefore not to develop a new vocabulary for competition, but to recover an older strategic understanding: that rivalry among major powers is continuous, that political judgement remains the decisive instrument of statecraft, and that the ultimate purpose of strategy is to preserve a state’s freedom to choose its own course in an increasingly contested world.

Dr John B. Sheldon is a Founding Partner of AstroAnalytica Ltd., a boutique space strategy consultancy headquartered in London.

This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Strategic Defence Unit.

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On 28th July, the Pentagon launched a six-month review of the United States’ (US) military footprint in Europe. This is likely to be the most consequential reassessment of American force posture on the continent for a generation. Although the Trump administration has stated that Europe remains ‘strategically and culturally vital to the United States’, this does not mean that the current force posture will endure. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, Commander US European Command (EUCOM), has already warned allies to expect force reductions.

Washington is trying to resolve a key strategic dilemma: how to maintain credible deterrence against Russia while reallocating military resources to prevent Chinese military dominance in the Indo-Pacific, but without undermining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) political cohesion – its centre of gravity.

The US has described its preferred end-state as ‘NATO 3.0’, under which European allies assume primary responsibility for their conventional defence while America concentrates on strategic enablers and deterrence, and frees up its forces for employment elsewhere.1 This reflects Washington’s assessment that European allies already possess a substantial conventional military advantage over Russia. Additionally, the US would continue to provide extended nuclear deterrence.

A thorough review may well lead to a more acceptable division of transatlantic labour. However, although Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War, told the Ankara summit that the review results were not predetermined, he also linked the review to what he characterised as European resistance to unrestricted American access to air stations during operations against Iran. Furthermore, if pledged European military investment fails to keep pace with probable US force reductions, any precipitous American posture change risks weaker deterrence, increased scope for Russian coercion, and a decline of US influence in Europe.

This is not the Trump administration’s first attempt to reduce the US military presence in Europe. In 2020, during his first term, Donald Trump, President of the US, ordered plans to withdraw approximately 12,000 personnel from Germany, although the decision was subsequently reversed by Joe Biden during his presidency. Trump’s current initiative represents less a radical departure from the past than the revival of a longstanding objective, albeit in a markedly different strategic environment. Waiting for Trump’s current term to end in the hope for a change in American direction is unwise; Washington’s shift in focus towards the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is generational and bipartisan.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted the largest reinforcement of US forces in Europe since the end of the Cold War. EUCOM today comprises more than 80,000 military and civilian personnel, divided between around 65,000 permanently based in Europe (mainly in Germany) and the remainder rotated in and out for operations and training. This has decreased from a peak of around 100,000 in the immediate wake of the Kremlin’s commencement of its invasion.

Grynkewich told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he has three priority missions: to secure the strategic approaches to the continental US, in particular the Atlantic and Arctic; to project combat power in and beyond Europe; and to position NATO to defend and deter against external aggression. Each mission is undertaken in conjunction with America’s European allies. His overlapping responsibilities show why the review must extend beyond simplistic arguments about troop numbers. It must determine which of these priority missions, in whole or in part, European allies can assume, and which will continue to require unique US capabilities.

Recent operations against the Russian ‘shadow fleet’, Iranian nuclear facilities, and Daesh affiliates in Africa all relied on American bases in Europe and close cooperation with European allies. The review must consider not only how many troops and facilities are to remain in the European theatre, but also which capabilities must remain there if the US is to continue to project combat power into neighbouring theatres.

Before the review was launched, Washington began adjusting its force posture. A rotational US Army Brigade Combat Team (BCT) returned to the US at the end of 2025 without replacement. The Pentagon cancelled the planned deployment of another BCT to Poland, although Trump reversed that decision. The administration also announced the withdrawal of 5,000 personnel from Germany, a move widely interpreted as a response to Berlin’s criticism of Washington’s operations against Iran. Even more strategically significant was its decision to cancel its previous commitment to deploy long-range missiles to Germany periodically, including ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles.

These reductions illustrate a wider problem: European allies are being encouraged to assume greater responsibility for their own defence, but their planning is complicated if US deployments can be announced, cancelled, or reversed with little or no consultation.

Before his re-election, Trump’s officials briefed that as part of a planned radical reorientation of NATO, the US would maintain its existing airpower and bases in the UK, Germany, and Turkey, as well as its naval forces. Any reductions would be focused on land warfare capabilities such as infantry, armour, logistics, and artillery.

The most likely outcome of the review is a leaner American presence based on nuclear deterrence, strategic enablers, intelligence, Command and Control (C2), strategic mobility, rotational deployments, and naval, air, and special forces. This posture would allow the US to contribute to deterrence and surge forces in a crisis while projecting power further afield. The review is therefore likely to reduce those conventional capabilities that European allies can plausibly replace over the next decade while preserving those capabilities that remain uniquely American.

If this logic is followed through, an adapted US force posture would re-balance its capabilities as follows:

However, the axe may go deeper. Before Ankara, Trump mused about cutting troops in Europe by a third before settling on a review. This would reduce force levels to those before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, as urged by some American think tanks.

There are several strategic risks. Members of Congress have expressed concern about any reduction of a ‘robust’ US troop presence in Europe while the conflict in Ukraine continues and also about the risk of nuclear proliferation by allies due to a perceived weakening of the American commitment to European security. Congress has prohibited use of Department of War funds for reducing troop levels below 76,000, selling or handing back EUCOM sites, or relinquishing the role of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). Similar provisions are in the draft 2027 National Defence Authorisation Act, currently stalled in the Senate.

Signalling retrenchment of conventional US support in Europe to incentivise America’s allies to spend more is one thing. However, as David Blagden, Associate Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Exeter, has argued, the US has ‘turned actively predatory’. It has issued threats over Greenland, imposed tariffs, insulted allied contributions to US-led operations, and harmed European economic security while simultaneously demanding that its European allies must be subordinate to Washington and continue to buy American equipment. If the US remains predatory and European governments cease to believe American commitments to continental security are credible, they will begin to hedge away from the US – ‘the reaction to belittlement is likely to simply [sic] be more defiance’.

In sum, the central question for the review is not how many American troops remain in Europe, but which military functions the US should continue to perform itself and which Europeans must provide for themselves in the future. If the review produces a coherent division of labour, underpinned by sustained European investment and credible American strategic commitment, NATO can emerge stronger despite a smaller US footprint. If reductions become strategically incoherent or are used to coerce allies politically, however, Washington risks encouraging the strategic hedging away from America that it seeks to avoid.

John Foreman CBE is an independent consultant specialising in Russia, Ukraine, and Euro-Atlantic security. He served as UK Defence Attaché to Kyiv (2008-2011) and Moscow (2019-2022).

This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Strategic Defence Unit.

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The publication of the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) last month – and perhaps more strikingly the resignations of John Healey and Al Carns as Secretary of State for Defence and Minister for the Armed Forces, respectively – has brought discussions of defence into the limelight in the United Kingdom (UK). Among Ministry of Defence (MOD) and British Armed Forces personnel – both serving and retired – there is a consensus that a national conversation on defence is a necessity.

Despite this recognition, however, there has been little progress made in communicating the cruciality of defence to the British population. Although there is increasing public knowledge of and support for defence, a gulf separates defence experts and the political class from the UK’s population at large when discussing the topic. As such, for this week’s Big Ask, we asked four experts: What does a national conversation on defence look like?

Richard Ballett

Council on Geostrategy

In short, a national conversation on defence looks hell of a lot more than some brief guidance note on gov.uk, which no one reads! It should leverage every information instrument His Majesty’s (HM) Government has, and build on what has worked before.

During the Cold War, HM Government distributed bright orange leaflets across the nation listing essential items every household should stock up on for when conflict erupted. This campaign was backed up by regular radio broadcasts, TV commercials, and public advertisements advising the population on what to do in case of war. A similar campaign could be delivered today to ensure the public is fully aware of the growing risk of conflict, the imperative of defence, and what every individual needs to do to prepare.

Focus groups have found that people are more persuaded by the case for international development spending when it comes from a senior military officer. The reverse is probably also true. HM Government needs other voices, beyond the military chiefs, to make the case publicly for increased defence spending and national resilience. It should co-opt leaders from, say, the International Red Cross, the Confederation of British Industry, or the Church of England to help communicate the rising risk of conflict and the role our military plays in keeping the nation safe.

At a time when people’s finances are being squeezed by sluggish growth and inflation, the case for the UK’s defence needs to explain how it protects people’s wallets too: very simply, a strong British military means less war, and less war means more peace and more prosperity.

Dr Anisa Heritage

Senior Lecturer, Department of Defence and International Affairs, Royal Military Academy Sandhurst

A national conversation starts by unpacking British society’s understanding of defence and how British society contributes to the nation’s defence.

Defence is fundamentally about protecting the state, including its people, against threats. As cyber attacks, online disinformation, and interference with undersea cables increasingly impact UK citizens’ daily lives, the understanding of ‘defence’ needs to evolve to include community resilience.

A starting point could be a conversation on what ‘keep calm and carry on’ means in 21st century Britain. How would British society adapt if a crisis or conflict were to begin tomorrow? Equally, how might it adapt to sub-threshold attacks on Critical National Infrastructure (CNI)? How long could British society function if critical systems failed, or if digital services went offline for an extended period? This requires building societal awareness and preparedness, and the ability to adjust to changing conditions.

The UK could learn from the approach taken by Nordic countries, where security and defence are viewed as symbiotic, and where security thinking focuses on societal resilience. Defence is a societal effort involving the armed forces, working alongside government, business, CNI, civil society, and citizens to ensure that society continues to function regardless of the challenge.

The 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) and National Security Strategy (NSS) identified the need for wider British society to support defence and play a greater role in protecting society. Despite this, only 26% of the UK’s public believes that building national resilience across all sectors, including civil society, is important.

Britain needs greater interaction between the military and society to build a better understanding of how one supports the other. Therefore, a national conversation on defence starts by engaging with and empowering British society to recognise its shared responsibilities in defending its way of life.

Dr Robert Johnson

Author of the podcast The Wargame; Director of the Changing Character of War Centre, Oxford University; and Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Who defends the nation? How much should the UK allocate of its national resources to defence and security? Who will scrutinise the decision-makers and those charged with implementation so that we can be sure there is maximum efficiency and minimal waste? How should Britain ensure that no state uses nuclear weapons against it?

A national conversation about defence depends on raising the consciousness of the issue in the everyday lives of citizens. Sallust, the Roman writer of the 1st century BC, was concerned that prosperity corrupts states more effectively than adversity. He was anxious that affluent societies, ones that indulged in their sporting events rather than their defence, were the ones that would face decline and defeat. By contrast, Livy, a contemporary of Sallust, believed that defence was dependent upon the resilience of the population. Their civic virtues, expressed as a willingness to sacrifice, and unity in a crisis, were the means to ensure security and success.

Tacitus, of the 1st century AD, carried a warning for 21st century Britain. He observed that the more corrupt the state, the more numerous its laws, and he noted that states collapse internally, not militarily. A century later, Marcus Aurelius commented that: ‘The impediment to action advances inaction. What stands in the way becomes the way.’ Vegetius of the 4th century AD reminded us in his Epitoma Rei Militaris that peacetime was the time for preparation if wars were to be avoided.

Ancient wisdom is not some distant academic irrelevance. It is a signal from the past, offering advice that was bought by defeat, humiliation, and blood. Too often, throughout history, governments have turned their backs on defence. Lord Hankey, writing in 1945 at the end of the two most costly wars, believed that too many lives had been lost through a lack of preparedness. He stated:

...it is the old, old story…Risks were run deliberately in pursuit of the aim of permanent peace...carried this time to the verge of risk and beyond. Not only were our forces too small for safety, not only were they inadequately supplied, but the armaments industry, on which they depended, the nucleus on which the war supply arrangements had to be founded, had been gravely impaired by lack of orders from home and abroad.

Peter Watkins CB CBE

Former Director General for Security Policy, Ministry of Defence (2014-2018); Visiting Professor, King’s College London; and Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

The SDR said that the national conversation on defence and security ‘…should be centred on a two-year series of public outreach events across the UK, explaining current threats and future trends…’ My view is that the conversation should be situated in the here and now. Britain is no longer facing just ‘threats’ – which, in the dictionary definition, are unpleasant things that ‘will’ or ‘might’ happen – but an active campaign of state-sponsored hostile activities short of war.

This includes disinformation, cyber attacks, arson, drone flights, etc., which are increasingly disruptive and costly for society and citizens. HM Government needs to be more open with the public on what it knows about such activities (and who is behind them), helping people to ‘join the dots’ and understand the need for greater economic and societal resilience. Effective defence in this new age of war will depend upon it.

The conversation could, as the SDR said, entail set-piece public outreach events. However, it could be more informal and online, with information provided via social media. Crucially, at its heart, it should consist of structured conversations with civic and business leaders, senior academics, etc., sharing the information that will help them to make their own entities more resilient and enabling them to ‘spread the word’ in their communities.

At a national level, this conversation could take the form of a variant of Finland’s acclaimed National Defence Course – curated by the College for National Security with support from the Defence Academy. Regional versions could be hosted by universities. The costs would be low, and the multiplier effect would be high.

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A combination of global instability and the belief of Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, in hard power-backed reindustrialisation presents the North East of England with a generational opportunity to expand its footprint for defence manufacturing. Defined in this article as Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, County Durham, and Teesside, the North East hosts around 2,000 direct industry jobs backed by Ministry of Defence (MOD) expenditure; roughly 1% of British defence industry Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) jobs. Set within the larger 23,200 total number of MOD-supported military and civilian roles, it is clear that the region’s defence industry holds a disproportionately small share.

Amid this local context, the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) has reiterated the centrality of the Hybrid Navy concept to the Royal Navy, comprising a mixed crewed/uncrewed fleet, modular payloads, autonomy, and scalable production. This article therefore recommends that the MOD develops a North East ‘Hybrid Hub’ to support uncrewed systems development, training, and deployment in the North Sea to support national priorities while focusing the region’s underutilised defence industrial potential.

Currently, the North East receives roughly £180 million in direct spend – a fraction of the £4.7 billion, £6.6 billion, and £7.9 billion in the North West, South West, and South East respectively. With a stated goal of reaching 3.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence spending by 2035, a Burnham administration should use this opportunity to address the stark regional imbalance in defence spending.

North Sea security threats

This approach to defence expenditure should be targeted, with spending to be made in terms of a region’s recognised strengths and industrial potential. Arguably, the North East’s biggest asset (and vulnerability) is its geography, with the rivers Blyth, Tyne, Wear, and Tees all feeding directly into the North Sea. As an increasingly contested environment playing host to Russian combatant and ‘shadow fleet’ transits, the North Sea has already been the suspected host to sub-threshold activity, albeit further south. It is not outside the realm of possibility, however, that North East MOD sites – including Royal Air Force (RAF) Boulmer and RAF Spadeadam, alongside North Yorkshire’s RAF Leeming and RAF Fylingdales – could face similar hostile action in future.

As demonstrated across Europe, Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) also faces rising pressure from Russian sub-threshold attacks. In the Baltic region, suspected Russian sabotage of undersea cables has elicited several coordinated allied responses, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) BALTIC SENTRY mission. Such threats may also apply to the North Sea, in which critical renewables and hydrocarbon sources provide a significant share of British energy. Should the Burnham administration choose to expand North Sea oil and gas extraction, the need to secure it will only intensify.

Potential vulnerabilities also face the North East’s land-based CNI, which ranges across ports, undersea cable landings, chemical plants, airports, and upcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) data centres. The Port of Tyne in particular has demonstrated its importance to overseas deployments, with the 7th Light Mechanised Brigade departing North Shields aboard a civilian Roll-On, Roll-Off (Ro-Ro) ferry to move 1,400 personnel to participate in Exercise RHINO STORM earlier this year.

A ‘Hybrid Hub’

As a frontline region facing these threats, the North East is ideally positioned to provide a portion of the Royal Navy’s presence through attritable and autonomous uncrewed vessels, which are foundational to the Hybrid Navy concept. The North East should therefore host a ‘Hybrid Hub’ on the River Tyne to enable the development, training, and deployment of Uncrewed Surface and Undersea Vehicles (USVs and UUVs) directly into the North Sea.

In doing so, the Royal Navy would not be starting from scratch. HMS Calliope, a stone frigate on the River Tyne’s south bank in Gateshead, currently hosts up to four P2000 Archer class patrol/training vessels. Although a reservist training facility, a recent – yet unconfirmed – report has suggested that it is set to be expanded into a ‘shadow fleet command centre.’ This points to a notable evolution in testing, training, and deployment opportunities available for the region.

P2000s have already proven their integration with both USVs and UUVs, acting as a ‘mothership’ for tactical command. By expanding this in the North Sea, with its notably rough conditions, maritime traffic, and offshore energy, the Royal Navy could better prepare systems and crews for challenging environments, including the High North. This ultimately presents the MOD with a scalable opportunity, enabling expansion geared towards deeper support for larger crewed and uncrewed vessels, as envisioned by the Royal Navy.

A Hybrid Hub would also mark a contribution to shared international priorities, particularly with the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), for which North Sea security is an evolving imperative. With a shared objective of boosting interoperability and interchangeability, the JEF could further use the North Sea as a joint proving ground to support further training, development, and presence-enabled deterrence.

Industry

A North East Hybrid Hub would also create significant opportunities for local industry and raise broader avenues for inward investment. This would build upon an established supply chain which includes autonomous maritime, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and space capabilities, all of which will need to be leveraged to meet strategic requirements. Despite this alignment, the North East’s defence sector is, in part, held back by the MOD’s investment of only 4% of the defence budget in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) nationally.

Of the £180 million spent by the MOD in the North East, 35% goes to local SMEs (the highest percentage nationally by a significant margin). The region therefore receives the largest slice of the smallest pie. Although there is increasing space-centric investment in the region from primes such as Lockheed Martin, Airbus, Raytheon, and Leonardo, the North East would undoubtedly benefit should the Burnham administration decide to accelerate plans to provide further support for SMEs.

A Hybrid Hub, in convening industrial and strategic focus, could leverage the region’s more than 27,000 defence-related jobs, including in the space, cyber, AI, and advanced manufacturing sectors. This would draw upon a network including local Members of Parliament; the region’s two combined authorities; the North East Regional Defence and Security Cluster (NERDSC); the North East Technology Park (NETPark); and the region’s five universities, of which three are founding members of the Defence Universities Alliance.

Acting upon this could enable greater engagement with national programmes such as the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) and AUKUS, in addition to deepening bilateral industrial ties with partners like Ukraine. For the Royal Navy specifically, it could enable a scalable expansion of Project BEEHIVE autonomy trials to complement (not replace) Portsmouth-based uncrewed system testing. With a recent trial already demonstrating the utility of the North Sea for the world’s first USV airdrop, there is a clear rationale for the region to host and support similar activity in future.

Conclusion

In contributing towards Burnham’s regional growth agenda, expanding the MOD’s presence to a North East Hybrid Hub is just one option for British-made hard power reindustrialisation. A convergence of political priorities and the growing need to secure the North Sea provides the North East with an opportunity for generational change, reminiscent of its proud heritage of shipbuilding. As the future of European security adapts to the decisions made at the Resolute Desk, (itself fashioned from the remains of a ship built on the River Tyne), His Majesty’s Government should empower the North East to ensure that no region is left behind in responding to the challenges ahead.

Benedict Baxendale-Smith is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and PhD Student in Defence Studies at King’s College London. His research focuses on British and Australian maritime strategies in the Indo-Pacific amid American-Chinese strategic competition.

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On Monday, Andy Burnham became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (UK) and announced his new Cabinet. Acknowledging the political shortcomings of His Majesty’s (HM) Government, he used his first speech to lay out his vision for reindustrialisation, welfare reform, and building ‘a new sense of national unity’.

While Britain looks ahead to a new administration, the challenges faced by Sir Keir Starmer, former Prime Minister, still exist. With these issues demanding the attention of the new Cabinet, this week’s Big Ask poses the following question to eight experts: What should the new Prime Minister prioritise for the rest of 2026?

Prof. Basil Germond

Professor of International Security and Co-Director of Security Research Institute, Lancaster University, and Visiting Fellow, Royal Navy Strategic Studies Centre

The new Prime Minister and Wes Streeting, his Defence Secretary, have inherited a Royal Navy that, despite chronic underfunding, remains a vital enabler of the national interest. The crisis in the Strait of Hormuz has demonstrated that the UK’s security and prosperity continue to depend on the stability of the global maritime supply chain and freedom of navigation.

In an increasingly volatile strategic and operating environment, the swift and efficient delivery of the Hybrid Navy proposed by Gen. Sir Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord, and costed in the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) is essential. Combining crewed platforms and autonomous systems will strengthen the Royal Navy’s flexibility, versatility, resilience, and attritable mass. This will enhance its capacity to shape the global maritime order and exercise seapower in support of British interests, from protecting undersea infrastructure in home waters to conducting high-intensity operations in distant maritime theatres.

Alongside a sustained commitment to naval investment, two priorities stand out for 2026. Firstly, enduring investment in seapower requires greater ocean literacy across Whitehall, Westminster, and wider society. Burnham can play a central role by consistently emphasising the country’s dependence on the sea for both its security and prosperity, and by embracing the narrative of the UK as a maritime nation from the outset of his premiership.

Secondly, HM Government must be prepared to respond swiftly and decisively to increasingly overt and covert Russian provocations at sea, including within or near British waters. This requires an open-minded discussion about whether existing doctrines, rules of engagement, and decision-making processes are suited to sub-threshold activities in the maritime ‘grey zone’.

In the longer term, defending freedom of navigation, including in the Strait of Hormuz, will place service personnel at greater risk. Credible maritime leadership will therefore require not only investment, but political preparedness to make difficult decisions when deterrence fails.

Dr Timothy Less

Senior Adviser for Geopolitics, Centre for Risk Studies, University of Cambridge

HM Government’s starting point is years of national stagnation. To achieve its geopolitical goals, it must focus as much on means as on ends. There is no point in having a foreign policy if Britain lacks the power to realise it.

The task begins with greater spending on a military that has been badly degraded by years of underinvestment. Allies have noticed the gap between the UK’s international ambitions and its capacity to fulfil them. The new Prime Minister should therefore publish an accelerated, fully funded timetable for substantially higher defence expenditure. This depends on restoring economic growth, which in turn depends on removing the myriad obstacles erected by previous governments – from higher taxes and excessive regulation to industrial electricity prices that remain among the highest in the developed world.

Yet, material capability is not enough. Realising Britain’s national priorities depends on the confidence and willingness to pursue them. HM Government must be able to define the country’s interests, and not allow abstract values to substitute for strategy.

It must also foster a stronger sense of patriotism. HM Government may not be able to manufacture this by decree, but it can stop treating it with embarrassment. People will not make sacrifices for the national interest unless they feel committed to the nation.

Whether the new administration will do what is necessary remains to be seen. John Healey’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer may indicate greater seriousness about defence, but I remain unconvinced of HM Government’s ability to revive the economy, or of the willingness of Ed Miliband, Foreign Secretary, to prioritise the national interest over demonstrations of virtue.

The litmus test will be Chagos.

Paul Mason

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Short answer: narrative. Every action should tell a story – and while that story might have subplots, side quests, and soliloquies, it has to have a clear plot and desired ending.

That is what was missing in the Starmer era. The protagonist is the British people; the antagonist is their enemies. That of course can include Russia, Iran, and their proxies, but also rip-off landlords, scammers, and mobile phone thieves.

I say this as someone focused on national security, but without a compelling story of who we are, where we come from, and where we are headed, nothing else coheres. All the trade-offs become identity battles. Avoiding that through narrative clarity has to be the focus.

Jack Pardoe

Head of Policy, Octopus Energy, and Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Burnham should give a top down order on energy strategy to Whitehall: ‘maximum production; electrification’. Or, more colloquially: ‘do a Norway’.

Norway produces oil and gas but also has the highest per capita penetration of electric cars and heat pumps. It flogs fuels to the UK and the rest of Europe while reaping the rewards of electrification at home. There is no good reason – whether environmental, economic, jobs, or security – not to produce more oil and gas from the North Sea. Britain should go ahead with more home production.

Realistically, though, the UK is more dependent on oil and gas than is good for it, especially now that serious alternatives exist for consumer uses. That has inflicted severe economic damage and hinders rearmament. Electrifying transport and heating – the biggest sources of demand for oil and gas respectively – creates options for providing important energy services.

A nuclear power plant, a gas-fired plant, or renewables all fuel electric cars. Likewise with a heat pump. Petrol cars and gas boilers are limited to oil and gas and lock in dependency on those fuels – which are lacking – for what is now relatively inefficient use.

All things being equal, electrification would free up more fuel for the British industrial base, which desperately needs revitalising, or for improving our balance of payments. The priority should therefore change from the current ‘build offshore wind at any cost’ to ‘cut electricity prices’ to improve the economics of electrification.

This means not overcapitalising the electricity grid as now, removing more electricity taxes and levies, introducing nodal pricing to cut waste and unfair windfall rents in the electricity market, and reopening unaffordable grid upgrade plans to do them more cheaply.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

While throwing trinkets and baubles to the public to alleviate the cost-of-living crisis may prove tempting, the new Prime Minister should hold his nerve. Short-term, populist fixes deliver nothing of tangible value; rather, they merely expand national debt without long-term gain. Instead, Burnham needs to place supply-side economic reforms at the heart of his agenda for the nation.

After two decades of sustained population growth and underinvestment, the UK’s infrastructure is creaking. The country desperately lacks reservoirs and power stations, while its roads, railways, housing, schools, and hospitals are severely strained. Streamlining planning regulations, building new homes, and upgrading the transport network are essential to lowering costs for businesses and households alike. Defence should also be leveraged: new military facilities would help to level up peripheral regions, while Britain’s defence industrial base could provide numerous new jobs.

Crucially, physical renewal must extend to public spaces, where broken window theory applies. Widespread litter, fly tipping, and high levels of petty crime leave high streets, highways, and local parks looking dilapidated and run-down, reinforcing a pervasive feeling of national decay. A coordinated effort is needed to clear up the litter – especially along highways controlled by National Highways and Transport for London – resurface roads, and bedeck town centres with new street furniture and well-maintained flower gardens.

By ensuring that public spaces are tidied up, Burnham’s new administration can demonstrate that the state can make a positive difference. This could instil renewed confidence in the British public, driving higher productivity and economic growth – a truly virtuous circle of national regeneration.

Grace Theodoulou

International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

While not much is known about the new Prime Minister’s foreign policies, when it comes to Beijing, it is unlikely that he will veer away from Sir Keir’s trajectory of increased contact with the UK’s ‘most complex bilateral relationship’.

Starmer and his cabinet saw the complexities of adhering to Labour’s ‘three Cs’ policy on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) – ‘cooperate, challenge, compete’. A good place for Burnham to start may be to do a mini ‘China Audit’ of his own, to see what role – if any – Beijing should play in his principal aims of building more public housing, improving infrastructure, and reducing energy costs.

As with many of Burnham’s predecessors, Beijing will be waiting in the wings to provide cheaper materials to enable these policies. The PRC views the bilateral relationship with a pragmatic lens, but at what cost? And with what small print?

Among a series of unenviable tasks that the Prime Minister will inherit from Sir Keir’s departure is the British Steel saga. When British Steel’s expropriation from Jingye was completed, only last week, the Chinese former owner demanded compensation, citing Article 5 of the UK-China Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT) – a legally binding agreement signed 40 years ago last May. Article 5 permits nationalisation if it is for a ‘public purpose related to the internal needs’ of the other contracting party, accompanied by ‘reasonable compensation’.

Whether ties are currently strong or strained, it is clear that the PRC is not going anywhere. Alongside conducting his own mini China Audit, perhaps Burnham could order a review of the UK’s current investment treaties with the PRC, to consider closing any major gaps that might allow for further fallouts as Whitehall grapples with the circular question of how to achieve green and affordable growth without compromising national security.

Dr Mann Virdee

Head of Science and Technology, The Entrepreneurs Network, and Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

The new Prime Minister should prioritise clarity and stability.

Entrepreneurs are a pretty resilient bunch; they know how to weather a storm if they can plan for it. What they find difficult is not knowing where they stand with HM Government. When Sir Keir took office, some entrepreneurs were relieved – not necessarily because they agreed with all his policies, but simply because there was a feeling that, at last, there would be some continuity for at least five years. Two years in though, it is time for change again.

The science and technology ecosystem had come to like the Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT). It was not perfect (being itself the product of an overnight reshuffle) but, once settled, there was a clarity and logic to it. It was a single front door and a dedicated champion for the whole sector at the Cabinet table. Now it is being folded into a new business super-department, with no standalone science and technology secretary. Where the different parts of its portfolio will end up remains unconfirmed. The risk is that the community which cohered around DSIT will fragment too – to the detriment of Britain’s effort to secure advantage in areas such as quantum and biotech.

This is the latest in a series of machinery-of-government changes where sector leaders learnt about them from media reports instead of being consulted. That disconnect erodes trust. If they abolish the department without speaking to the people it is there to support, what else might they do? Burnham has refused to rule out an ‘exit tax’ which has unsettled founders. It is also less clear where and how the country’s research and development budget will now be spent.

The UK’s propensity for playing with the machinery of government is, as James Wilsdon observed this week, a displacement activity – or, as I have previously argued, a case of politician’s syllogism. It is hard to move forward if you are continually going around in circles.

Prof. James Woudhuysen

Visiting Professor, London South Bank University

The most urgent priority must be to rebuild Britain’s defence. At the moment, the country has very little at all, making it difficult to achieve any civilian priorities.

One part of defence must be a much more stringent attitude to illegal immigration; another must be to strengthen capabilities in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in nuclear fusion. Energy remains a key weakness of the UK’s economy and resilience. The grid needs serious attention, and the Net Zero obsession with intermittent sources of energy needs extinguishing.

To avoid social upheaval, Britain needs a programme of mass housebuilding. That will not happen until the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act is abolished, so that residential construction and new towns are possible in much wider areas of the country. A relaxed planning regime will make it possible for wholly or partly manufactured homes to have a guarantee of sales, making their success more likely.

A neglected area for action is to anticipate and ward off floods. Many homes and, even more damagingly, many small businesses are still regularly destroyed in the UK through resorting to sandbags rather than proper flood defences.

Under new management, the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway should be extended to Scotland. Speed limits on roads should be lifted, and output targets for Electric Vehicle (EV) manufacturers abandoned.

Above all, the country must organise for more real engineers and fewer social ones. Lack of technical knowledge should be a bar to recruitment to the civil service – enough with Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE)!

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For decades, fighter aircraft have been the ultimate concentration of combat power, speed, and flexibility. A four-ship of Typhoons is complex and expensive, but for an urgent, difficult problem, fighter pilots knew they were probably the right answer. However, in recent conflicts, low-cost autonomous Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) – drones –have dominated numerically, and largely superseded crewed combat aviation at the battlefront. Now Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing warfighting, from planning to execution. As AI makes its way into autonomous systems, must fighter pilots – including the author – lament the end of their era?

Fighter pilots on the bench

Drones now cover all combat air roles. The defining system of this era – the Shahed – has been reproduced and modified by Iran’s allies and enemies alike. Autonomy and low cost have now been augmented with AI, starkly demonstrated by American and Israeli drones hunting individuals using facial recognition and behavioural tracking. With sufficient creativity, deep strike missions such as Ukraine’s Operation SPIDER’S WEB in June 2025 can also be executed with stunning value for money. With AI creeping up the targeting chain, even planning and prioritisation are being prised from fighter pilots’ grip.

Fighter pilots also have a new worry: nobody wants to be sat in a 9G supersonic fighter when their opponent is an AI-guided swarm of 25G hypersonic robots. The response to such a threat must be AI-guided, and the response will come sooner than we think. The fusion of AI, autonomy, mass manufacture, and precision is likely to drive the dominance of low-cost systems. Such systems are perfect proving ground for the technologies, not requiring the assurance that crewed platform adoption or integration requires. The bleeding edge of autonomy and AI sits at the cheap, expendable end of the spectrum.

This is where military forces will get most from coming investments. The relatively low cost of disposable systems, often in the low tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds or dollars, allows constant testing, driving up maturation, and driving down cost. In addition, the diversified design and manufacturing base for autonomy and AI is bringing fresh ideas, capturing some of the potential of the civilian sector (i.e., dual-use). Design, manufacture, and maintenance will improve, as will tactical performance.

Iceman’s children

The pendulum of combat advantage now swings towards smaller, disposable systems. However, as technology matures, it will inevitably swing back to the larger and more complex platforms. They will go faster, further, and deliver more weapons. Another new fighter pilot problem thus arises: if Iceman flew ‘ice cold, no mistakes’, the uncrewed systems – Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) – will be liquid nitrogen. They will be tactically excellent, with consistency and endurance beyond human reach.

In the United States (US), Anduril and General Atomics have perhaps the most advanced of these programmes. The first tranche of the Dark Merlin is expected in 2029, costing an estimated US$30 million (£22.4 million) each. Boeing in Australia also has a mature platform; the Ghost Bat, at a unit price of US$10-$15 million (£7.5-£11.2 million). Helsing in Germany has a similar platform in Europa. The People’s Republic of China has demonstrated its GJ-11 ‘Sharp Sword’, integrating with fourth- and fifth-generation combat aircraft. Neither Ukraine nor Russia has ignored CCAs. The Kremlin has operationally tested its S-70 Okhotnik, while Kyiv has committed to purchase 150 Saab Gripens from Sweden – already proven with AI-control, and effectively an optionally piloted fighter. These are all AI-enabled uncrewed combat aircraft, built to integrate with fifth-generation systems, and with extensive autonomous capabilities.

Don’t retire Maverick just yet

The rapid progress of autonomous and AI-driven programmes is not pricing combat pilots out of the market. Ethics will keep humans in the loop, and invaluable contributions can be made in imagination and original thought. To survive in their aircraft, however, pilots will need to command formations of autonomous teammates carrying sensors, jammers, decoys, and weapons.

Even the ‘legacy’ fourth-generation platforms have extremely well-engineered airframes and engines that can carry tonnes of fuel and weapons, and generate enough electrical power for significant compute. The way in which they deliver their roles must change fundamentally, but great value can be extracted from previous investment in existing fleets, albeit with some modernisation. This will bring extended utility from the equipment but, more importantly, also from the people operating and maintaining the systems.

Fighter pilots often say that today’s generation has less flying skill than their predecessors. This is, broadly speaking, true. Modern combat air is built on automation, making aircraft easier to fly as systems better fuse pilot inputs into more desirable outputs. However, if technology made poorer pilots, it made more capable warfighters. Freed of handling demands, combat pilots now control sensors, software, and weapons, and can manage much more tactical information, stretching to formations of dozens or hundreds of aircraft. This is not decline – it is evolution. Indeed, this same trend now stretches out of the crewed cockpit to formations of uncrewed systems.

Combat air will use uncrewed systems for reach, persistence, mass, and to take most of the physical risk. The human commander supplies intent, escalation control, the most difficult judgements, and – most importantly – imagination. Neither crewed platforms nor CCAs are cheap, but their thoughtful development and integration can extract significant value for many years to come. The scale at which they can operate can grow exponentially.

‘Top Gun’ class of 2027

Autonomy and AI are also adding new pressures to the existing model of command. At one level, it is an extension of mission command: intent from above, decentralised execution below, applied to software-controlled teams. However, with these technologies, commanders will not simply direct more units, but different kinds of units, with different tempos and varying levels of delegated authority and logic transparency.

AI will also offer novel tactics that commanders must be able to filter. It returns inevitably to the human, where military competences will need to evolve just as they have for fighter pilots, and add commanding both human and non-human subordinates, as well as controlling and responding to AI-driven systems.

The first generations of these systems seem likely to be able to operate through several layers or decision points of warfare, but not able to manage all its tactical and strategic dimensions. Humans will need to guide the machines and make many critical decisions. It would be unwise to surrender these functions. Low-cost systems will build tactical and technical competence. Large and complex systems will come, but humans should hone skills now on the accessible and affordable ones.

Autonomy and AI are rapidly proliferating through low-cost platforms and transforming all aspects of warfare, from design and manufacture, to how we train, plan, and fight. This phenomenon is highly visible in small and disposable systems, but it is premature to conclude that large, crewed fighter aircraft are no longer useful.

Iteration will mature the technology and the techniques, but these will be given new power and reach when integrated into larger and more sophisticated platforms. Fighter pilots will lament the twilight of the sweaty, cramped 9G cockpit, but this is the dawn of commanding distributed, intelligent systems across domains. The mental and physical challenges will be just as demanding, and the skills, initiative, and intellect to thrive will echo those possessed by history’s best fighter pilots.

Wg. Cdr. Ben Goodwin MBE is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy and a fighter pilot with experience in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, and Central Africa. He has been posted to the Ministry of Defence and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation in Brussels. Previously, he worked at the trading arm of a large bank, focused on foreign exchange and government bonds.

This article was written by the author in a personal capacity. The opinions expressed are his own, and do not reflect the views of His Majesty’s Government or the Ministry of Defence.

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The United Kingdom’s (UK) macroeconomic stability is directly tied to the security of vulnerable seabed cables and pipelines in the North Atlantic and North Sea. However, the Royal Navy hulls and surveillance platforms required to monitor these assets face severe operational overstretch, and Ministry of Defence (MOD) funding allocations have not kept pace with the evolving threat profile. As hostile states expand capabilities to map and probe this infrastructure below the threshold of open conflict, the subsea domain reveals a structural gap between His Majesty’s (HM) Government’s stated strategic ambitions and available frontline resources.

This fiscal friction culminated in June 2026 with the resignations of John Healey as Secretary of State for Defence and Al Carns as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, who formally cited HM Treasury’s unwillingness to resource the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) appropriately against escalating North Atlantic and European threats.

Britain’s reliance on a concentrated network of undersea data cables and energy pipelines presents a systemic vulnerability. Hostile actors can exploit this infrastructure through deniable seabed activity designed to avoid triggering the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) Article 5. The UK’s current capabilities for underwater surveillance, rapid attribution, and physical intervention remain unscaled to the value of the assets at risk. Furthermore, current force generation trajectories provide insufficient organic capacity to sustain seabed monitoring as a core, enduring mission. Absent a ringfenced uplift in maritime security funding within upcoming expenditure reviews, the capability gap will widen.

Recent allied initiatives – including new NATO coordination cells and Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) task groups – improve regional situational awareness, but do not yet constitute a credible maritime deterrence posture. Britain is currently on track to become a net consumer of allied security in the North Atlantic, rather than the leading framework contributor.

Addressing undersea vulnerabilities requires explicit fiscal trade-offs. HM Government should either lift the defence spending ceiling or curtail out-of-theatre commitments to fund domestic maritime surveillance, Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles (UUVs), and commercial sector resilience integration.

Financial data flows, international cloud services, government communications, and a significant portion of the domestic energy mix rely on seabed routes. Yet, policy oversight of these assets remains fragmented across the Cabinet Office, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), the Office of Communications (Ofcom), the MOD, and private commercial operators. This decentralisation prevents the generation of a unified operational picture.

The geography of the UK’s continental shelf compounds the security challenge. Critical data and energy corridors transit shallow, highly trafficked waters in the North Sea, making them accessible both to advanced military assets and dual-use civilian hulls. As these networks converge on a limited number of high-density landing corridors and coastal chokepoints, minimal operational effort can yield systemic economic disruption. While the data network possesses some inherent rerouting redundancy, the repair timelines for major gas pipelines or deep-sea fibre trunks do not match the speed at which a coordinated outage would generate severe political leverage during a crisis.

The primary threat to British undersea infrastructure is persistent, ambiguous interference in the ‘grey zone’ – the space below the threshold of armed conflict where attribution is difficult and the risk of escalation complicates decision-making. Foreign state actors – principally Russia – routinely deploy specialised hydrographic survey vessels, notably the Yantar. As noted by Healey in a personal statement to Parliament, the persistent loitering of the Yantar within the UK’s Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) and vital maritime corridors over the past two years underscores a deliberate, state-directed mapping campaign.

This physical probing is compounded by sophisticated cyber-physical targeting. Recent intelligence disclosures from Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) highlight that adversarial cyber actors are seeking exploitation vectors within the industrial control systems managing undersea landing stations, pairing physical reconnaissance with digital vulnerability mapping.

Hostile operations do not require the physical severance of a cable to achieve strategic effect. A pattern of unexplained telemetry dropouts, micro-damage to pipeline casings, or localised outages on secondary routes forces both HM Government and private operators to deplete finite operational and analytical capacity in simply diagnosing the incidents. Furthermore, operations conducted in international waters or under the guise of marine scientific research within EEZs exploit legal ambiguities, leaving Britain with few viable enforcement options short of escalating a civil maritime dispute into a state-level confrontation.

While the MOD has made tactical adjustments – notably bringing the Multi-Role Ocean Surveillance (MROS) ship RFA Proteus into service and participating in NATO’s Critical Undersea Infrastructure Coordination Cell – the volume of available operational assets is small relative to the geographic scale of threats. The Royal Navy faces a severe escort deficit. Its remaining Type 23 class frigates and Type 45 class destroyers, alongside the nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) fleet and the Royal Air Force’s (RAF) P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, are committed to high-priority, non-negotiable missions. These dictate sustaining the Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD), providing Carrier Strike Group escort duties, and monitoring Russian naval transit through the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap.

Adding continuous, proactive seabed infrastructure patrol to this list is thus non-viable with the current fleet size. Financial constraints mean that new procurement programmes face frequent delays due to funding competition from legacy hardware programmes.

The structural reality of this underfunding was laid bare by the dual resignations of the political leadership at the MOD in June 2026. In his departure statement, Healey explicitly warned that the backloaded DIP financial settlement ‘falls well short of what is required’ and forces choices that ‘reduce the readiness of our forces’. Carns echoed this deficit, stating that Britain is failing to provide the necessary ‘kit to do the job’. Within the subsea domain, this funding ceiling means the Royal Navy cannot transition from a reactive, event-driven posture to the persistent, proactive underwater presence required to deter adversarial sub-threshold actions.

If HM Government intends to mitigate these vulnerabilities prior to long-term budget adjustments, it must pursue low-cost capability shifts. Firstly, it should designate underwater infrastructure protection as a standalone, core statutory task for the Royal Navy and the National Cyber Force, supported by wider deployment of off-the-shelf, low-cost commercial autonomous vehicles for routine monitoring.

Secondly, it should mandate industry-government data integration, establishing a joint, real-time data-sharing hub where commercial acoustic telemetry and cable diagnostic data are fused with military maritime intelligence to accelerate sub-threshold attribution. This initiative should draw directly upon the modern regulatory standards put forward in the recent undersea internet cable strategy published by the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT).

Finally, Wes Streeting, Secretary of State for Defence, should leverage the UK’s leadership within the JEF to establish a strict geographic division of labour. Securing formal commitments from Nordic and Baltic allies to manage localised shallow-water monitoring would free high-end Royal Navy assets for Atlantic surveillance.

Ash Walker is a strategic intelligence analyst specialising in geopolitical risk, defence policy, and hybrid warfare, with a focus on critical minerals and supply chain security and operational resilience analysis.

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Viktorija Starych-Samuoliene is joined by:

• Kevin Craven, CEO, ADS Group;

• Véronique Bardelmann – CEO, SVP Europe; CEI, Safran Group and, ADS Vice President for Aerospace

The conversation unpacks the main themes and aims of the Farnborough International Airshow, the geopolitical context that makes the Airshow so important this year, and the relationships that need to be strengthened to ensure the UK’s aerospace and defence industries see the greatest growth.

On 7th and 8th July, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit, hosted this year in Ankara. Notable pronouncements included commitments to collective defence; the creation of the Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank (DSRB), led by Canada; pledges to increase defence investment and expand defence industrial capabilities; and support for Ukraine against Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Within the alliance, the United States (US) under President Donald Trump is continuing to signal a reduction in military presence across Europe to focus on the Indo-Pacific and Western Hemisphere, with the expectation that European allies will assume a greater share of the defence burden. Being one of European NATO’s two largest defence spenders, the United Kingdom (UK) is ideally positioned to lead in doing so. As such, for this week’s Big Ask, we asked eight experts: How can Britain construct a European pillar within NATO?

Hugo Barker

Chief of Staff, Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank (DSRB) Development Group, and Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Ankara showed that the question for European rearmament has moved from intent to delivery. European allies and Canada added more than US$139 billion (£103.6 billion) to core defence budgets last year. What European nations still lack is the architecture to turn that spending into sustained capability.

Europe has multilateral banks for reconstruction, development, and infrastructure, but none for defence. As argued in Project Syndicate this month, higher spending alone will not deliver capability: NATO needs a defence market built on sovereign-backed finance that lowers the cost of industrial expansion and crowds in private capital.

That is what the DSRB is designed to create. At the summit itself, nine nations led by Canada signed a joint declaration supporting its establishment. The UK was not among them. It should be.

The debate in London is live: Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, called during summit week for the DSRB and Britain’s own Multilateral Defence Mechanism to merge, even as ministers told Parliament that the two do different things. Either way, the UK can only shape the outcome from inside.

With a new Prime Minister imminent, joining the DSRB as a founding member would be an early, concrete signal of intent, and one that fits the incoming administration’s agenda: defence-industrial finance flows to the regions where Britain builds ships, submarines, and munitions – exactly where a government promising industrial renewal must deliver.

A European pillar built on budget lines alone will not last. One built on a durable market and durable institutions will. The UK should help to build both.

Prof. James Bergeron*

Political Adviser to the Commander, NATO MARCOM, and International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

The European pillar of NATO is not Britain’s to construct alone. The UK would not even be the central actor, but it would be a critical one, along with France and Germany.

Why? First, as so many say, the land matters most, and the vast bulk of European territory threatened by Russia is not British. That will always place the centre of gravity on the continent’s mainland. The UK’s army and navy have downsized to the point that the country can no longer leverage the outsized role it had in the Cold War or even the post-Cold War era.

That said, an effective European pillar of NATO – one that could deliver the conventional defence of Europe – is not possible without Britain as a key participant. The UK can leverage its nuclear deterrent commitment to the alliance, along with new nuclear arrangements with France, to bolster Europe’s own nuclear umbrella. Britain leads in technology, avionics, space, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and quantum capabilities, and can play an enabling role for European defence. The City of London can help to finance that defence. The Royal Navy and Royal Air Force (RAF) continue to play irreplicable roles in the security of the North Atlantic, while the British Army’s Enhanced Vigilance Activities (EVA) deployment in Estonia has an important deterrence role. Leadership of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) is also a useful complement to NATO structures.

Two geopolitical dynamics underpin such a role for the UK. Firstly, that London keeps Washington onboard. Secondly, and in tension with the first to a degree, is to deepen economic and political ties with continental NATO and the European Union (EU), the underpinning of defence solidarity. The Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) is an excellent example. Other cooperative defence initiatives should follow.

*This response is written in a personal capacity, and does not necessarily reflect any official national views, nor those of NATO.

Prof. Klaus Dodds

Professor of Geopolitics and Faculty Dean, Middlesex University London, and Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Britain’s strategic position has shifted in the Trump era. Recognising implicitly that the US is a volatile security partner, His Majesty’s (HM) Government has pivoted towards Norway and other JEF members, Finland, and Poland. Additionally, Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has decisively shaped the European security landscape.

A European pillar within NATO allows the UK (and potential JEF members such as Canada) to showcase how NATO and EU/broader European priorities can and should be aligned. It foregrounds collective responsibility for continental security, and responds directly to Trump’s complaints that alliance members are ‘not doing enough’, as he told participants at the Ankara summit. Finally, it highlights the importance of aligning EU-level initiatives such as the European Defence Fund with a NATO-first mindset. All of this requires a cross-party political consensus in Britain – and elsewhere in Europe – regarding defence investment, political leadership, and NATO-European complementarity.

The UK should help to support and clarify a division of labour. NATO must remain the primary collective defence organisation, and the EU should focus on developing a defence industrial policy and investment package that responds to NATO’s operational requirements. European capacity building in toto signals to Washington that the continent is taking its responsibility for its own security seriously. The US turning away from NATO would be a disaster for Britain and European allies.

A European pillar would help to make those collective European defence efforts more coherent and signal to America, both now and in a post-Trump era, that burden sharing is mutually beneficial. While Trump will continue to amplify grievances and demands, including purchasing Greenland, the best response from Europeans is to demonstrate determination to buttress a NATO-first posture. The harsh reality remains; Russia is an ongoing threat to the UK and its European allies.

Artur Honich

Senior Defence Analyst, RAND Europe

In June, the Pentagon announced a six-month review of American military posture and basing in Europe. As the US clarifies its future footprint, burden shifting should produce ‘a stronger Europe in a stronger NATO’ (as set out in the Ankara Summit Declaration), rather than a stronger Europe in a weaker NATO.

British leadership will be important across several areas as European NATO members prepare to assume primary responsibility for the alliance’s conventional defence and deterrence. The first element of this is to implement the capability targets apportioned to the UK and deliver a fully deployable and enabled Strategic Reserve Corps.

Second, Britain’s investment in airpower, the development of ballistic and cruise missile capabilities in the 300-2,000+ kilometre (km) range, and its return to NATO’s nuclear sharing arrangements will provide significant opportunities to strengthen deterrence and develop new concepts for escalation management.

Third, the UK should further increase its role in planning and executing exercises within NATO and complementary multinational frameworks such as the JEF. If burden shifting leads to reduced American participation, European allies will need to sustain exercise patterns that signal credible deterrence by visibly demonstrating the capacity for high-intensity warfighting.

Fourth, Britain should further strengthen its representation in NATO’s command structure, leveraging the deep experience of its officers in defence planning, doctrine development, and operations.

Finally, the UK must overcome fiscal pressures to meet the agreed 3.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) defence spending target by 2035. This would require an additional £25 billion every year by that date beyond the commitments made in the Defence Investment Plan. Without a credible roadmap towards this, important capability areas and allies’ confidence in British leadership could be put at risk.

Liberty Hunter

Project Manager and Researcher, Ax:son Johnson Institute, and Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

As the host of maritime command architecture, the UK occupies a credible position as the organiser of a European pillar within NATO that holds a focus on maritime security. The alliance’s Maritime Command (MARCOM) and the JEF Standing Joint Force Headquarters both sit at Northwood, meaning maritime planning and European coalition building in Britain is well practised. Geography offers other strengths: the UK, as host to His Majesty’s Naval Base (HMNB) Clyde, the closest submarine base to the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap, and Devonport, Western Europe’s largest naval base, can commit assets in days rather than weeks.

The JEF’s members already coordinate on the same threats that a maritime pillar would need to address: Russian activity in the GIUK gap, undersea cable and pipeline security, and the Kremlin’s ‘shadow fleet’. Britain’s leadership of NATO’s Standing Naval Maritime Group 1, and the recently selected command of Joint Force Command Norfolk, only boosts its institutional strength within this pillar.

The strategic importance of a maritime European pillar is interesting. Such a pillar allows the UK to demonstrate real European leadership as the US reorients its threat assessment toward the Indo-Pacific, while not displacing American capability elsewhere. While a European land forces pillar could be seen as duplication, a maritime pillar becomes complementary – a response to the ‘burden shifting’ that Washington demands. It reflects an alliance-wide paucity of maritime resources, such as in escort fleets, which necessitates pooling and burden sharing.

A British-led European pillar in NATO, coordinating maritime security in the North Atlantic, Baltic, and Mediterranean (all Eurocentric security concerns), is a plausible and useful model for strategists to consider.

James Langan

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

The UK is well placed to lead the development of a stronger European pillar within NATO by leveraging its position at the centre of several NATO-adjacent minilateral and multilateral frameworks, most notably the JEF. Comprising ten Northern European nations, the JEF provides a ready-made mechanism for coordinating regional deterrence, enhancing interoperability, and responding rapidly to emerging security challenges across the High North and Baltic regions.

Historically, Britain has been most successful when acting as the balancer of European security. The enduring foundations of the UK’s grand strategy rested on three principles: securing Europe’s sea lines of communication, safeguarding commercial trade, and building flexible coalitions of smaller states capable of resisting aspiring hegemons. This approach enabled Britain to aggregate collective power while avoiding unsustainable continental commitments. It also helped to sustain a favourable European balance of power that endures today, despite the UK lacking many of the conventional foundations of great power status – most notably a large standing army.

A contemporary European pillar within NATO should therefore be built around British convening power rather than British primacy. By strengthening the JEF, deepening defence cooperation with Nordic and Baltic allies, and integrating complementary initiatives such as the Combined Joint Expeditionary Force and Weimar+, the UK can help to aggregate European military capabilities within a coherent strategic framework.

In doing so, it would reinforce the alliance’s collective deterrence, promote more equitable burden sharing, and reduce European dependence on direct American military engagement, thereby strengthening the resilience and credibility of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture.

Matthew Palmer

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Greater Europeanisation of NATO is an urgent requirement as the US becomes a more structurally unreliable ally with diverging priorities.

Britain has already proved successful in establishing an American-free European framework in the JEF, now a notable ‘pillar’ of Northern European security. This puts it in a good position to encourage the Europeanisation of NATO itself. Both within and without the alliance and the JEF, the UK should prioritise exercises with European allies to improve interoperability, ideally in contexts where US support is absent or not guaranteed.

Britain should also reduce its reliance on American weaponry and technology and replace them with European alternatives. This includes continuing to strengthen defence industrial ties both bilaterally with European nations and with the EU.

However, the UK’s influence will be constrained if it does not adequately resource its defences and show actual leadership on broadening military capacity. Britain currently holds significant structural power within NATO, but this is not guaranteed to continue. The customary holding of the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (DSACEUR) posting may not be tenable in the future, especially considering the growing power and strategic importance of Germany and Poland. Likewise, the UK’s leadership of MARCOM may also be questioned if the Royal Navy’s readiness cannot be improved.

British power – soft and hard – continues to decline due to the unwillingness to resource either defence or broader foreign policy commitments, and to make bold strategic choices. If the UK wants to remain influential in NATO, it will have to start putting its money where its mouth is.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

To construct a credible European pillar within NATO, Britain must establish itself as the centre of gravity – a strategic hub around which other European allies can rotate. To avoid duplicating capabilities though, HM Government should focus resources on two essential lines of effort.

First, the UK should enhance its high-end conventional capabilities. This involves co-investing with France in critical enablers, such as strategic lift, air-to-air refuelling, and force projection platforms – including deep strike, orbital systems, and the New Hybrid Navy – to allow European forces to deploy power without the US. Simultaneously, Britain should work with Germany and Poland to build up a robust conventional deterrent on the alliance’s eastern front. From Finland to Bulgaria, the UK should forward-deploy around 300 troops to each ally, backed by force multipliers such as autonomous combat systems, to signal its geopolitical intent and compound the extension of its nuclear deterrent.

Second, Britain should re-establish a sub-strategic nuclear capability. Currently, the Royal Navy’s Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD) offers only a strategic, all-or-nothing response. Reintroducing a lower-yield option would fill a critical escalatory gap, which is vital for addressing Russian non-strategic nuclear coercion. This sovereign capability would reassure eastern allies and provide NATO with flexible response options to the Kremlin’s provocation.

Ultimately, a European pillar cannot be built on institutional frameworks or political rhetoric; it demands a militarily capable core. By binding together key regional powers and restoring a full spectrum of deterrence, the UK can secure its continent and draw European allies into its defence industrial ecosystem – with all the positive implications this would have for the British economy.

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Paul and Viktorija are joined by:

• Sir Stuart Atha KBE CB DSO, Director at BAE Systems, Head of the UK NATO Industrial Advisory Group;

• Emma Baker, Group Facilitator, UK NIAG Delegation;

• Charles Clover, Defence and Security Correspondent, Financial Times.

The conversation tackles the primary geostrategic pressures driving the alliance. We unpack the key takeaways from the summit and the recent NATO Industrial Advisory Group Plenary hosted in the United Kingdom (UK) for the first time this century. We also explore the practical implications of a ‘NATO-first’ posture for UK defence planning, and the critical capability gaps European allies must address as the United States’ priorities shift.

Last week, His Majesty’s (HM) Government published the long-awaited Defence Investment Plan (DIP) – the follow-up to 2025’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR). Backed by almost £300 billion, the DIP lays out how funding will be allocated to the British Armed Forces over the next four years.

However, the DIP has proved contentious within HM Government, having led to the resignations of John Healey and Al Carns as Secretary of State for Defence and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces respectively over its shortfalls in defence funding. As Sir Keir Starmer has also announced his resignation as Prime Minister, this week’s Big Ask posits the following question to five experts: Should the next Prime Minister reopen the Defence Investment Plan?

Samira Braund

Defence Director, ADS Group

The publication of the DIP provides long-awaited clarity for the United Kingdom’s (UK) defence sector after an extended period without a comprehensive equipment plan. While there is still more to do to meet the ambitions set out in the SDR fully, the DIP establishes an important foundation from which HM Government and industry can now build.

For industry, the priority should not be reopening the DIP, but delivering it. Stability and clarity are essential to enable businesses to invest in skills, facilities, innovation, and resilient supply chains that underpin sovereign capability. Frequent revisions to strategic priorities or funding allocations risk delaying programmes, increasing costs, and weakening industry confidence at a time when the global security environment demands greater pace.

The next Prime Minister should therefore ensure the full delivery of the DIP while building out a credible, fully funded roadmap to increase defence spending to 3% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 and 3.5% by 2035, consistent with Britain’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) commitments. Such a roadmap should provide clear milestones, sustained investment profiles, and confidence that today’s commitments will translate into tomorrow’s capabilities.

The focus should now shift from debating the settlement to accelerating delivery. Converting investment decisions into contracts, reforming procurement, strengthening export potential, and building long-term industrial capacity will ensure that the UK maximises the return on every pound invested. Industry stands ready to partner with HM Government to turn strategic ambition into enduring military capability and economic growth.

William Freer

Research Fellow (National Security), Council on Geostrategy

The answer is both no and yes.

No, because it has taken over two years of defence, national security, and investment reviewing and planning to get to the point that the DIP could be published in the first place. A reopening of the entire process risks months of delay, where major contracts might be pushed back at a time when British defence requirements and defence firms are desperate for movement from Whitehall. Starting from scratch, tempting as it may be, could cause another several-month period of drip-feeding investment.

With that said, it is evident that the DIP as it stands is below what is needed to meet the threat environment and the UK’s commitments to NATO, with many of the key investment decisions delayed to the 2030s. The next Prime Minister should overrule Treasury objections and force through – ideally with cross-partisan support – a clear and appropriate financial settlement. A year-on-year incremental increase in percentage of GDP from now to 2035, roughly 0.14 percentage points each year, should be agreed to deliver certainty.

With this agreed to, a ‘bolt-on’ to the DIP can be worked towards. This should be far more concise, plainer in language, and simply outline additional investments planned with this further uplift in spending. The air and maritime domains should be the focus, to complement the growing land domain capabilities of European allies and backfill the presumed withdrawal of American air and naval assets needed for deterrence in the Indo-Pacific.

Dr Mike Martin MP

Member, Defence Committee

Should the next Prime Minister reopen the DIP? Indisputably. Two-thirds of the DIP is unfunded, the remaining third is insufficient, and together they sign the Royal Navy’s death warrant.

The DIP fails HM Government’s threat assessment. Sir Keir says that Russia could attack NATO by 2030, yet the funded third of the plan expires that year. It requires finding £4.7 billion at the Budget and £10.7 billion in ‘efficiencies’ on a scale that the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has never achieved. Two-thirds of the investment falls after 2030 and is unallocated, subject to next year’s spending review.

Worst of all, the DIP kills the Royal Navy as we know it. The UK will end this year with five frigates, and the DIP accelerates their retirement to 2033. Their replacements will arrive after 2030, meaning the country’s frigates retire on a fixed schedule while their replacements arrive on an unfunded one. By my maths, Britain will have three frigates in 2030 – the moment of peak danger.

The UK’s destroyers will retire from 2035, and their replacement is the Common Combat Vessel (CCV), alongside other uncrewed ships. A hybrid fleet is admirable, but it only exists on PowerPoint and is unfunded, with the money coming after 2030. Expecting to get ships from PowerPoint to projecting power in nine years is implausible.

The intelligence is unequivocal: Britain must be ready for war by 2030. The new Prime Minister should scrap the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) to invest £8.6 billion in the fleet, fund the entire plan at the Budget, and pull every timeline to this side of 2030. Anything else would be negligent.

Paul Mason

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

The DIP was designed to be ‘scalable’. Like the classic Greek family villa, you can build the first storey and leave the second as a bunch of iron rods protruding from the concrete until you find enough money to complete it.

So, the general design of the DIP should not be reopened. By going for a hybrid navy; a Ukraine-style uncrewed systems taskforce; and backing AUKUS, GCAP, and the Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD), plus nearly £2 billion for a digital targeting web, HM Government has made the right choices.

However, there is an obvious missing piece with Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD), and that is the ‘second storey’ I would build if the money becomes available. The critical milestone is now the 2027 Spending Review. The defence sector needs to win the argument with politicians, the public, and HM Treasury that a verbal commitment to spending 3.5% of GDP by 2035, backed by a fiscal commitment to just 3%, is not sustainable.

Rob Murray

Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Yes. Reopen the DIP. Then throw away the thinking behind it.

The SDR answered the first question: What threats does the UK face, and what capabilities does it need? The DIP tried to answer the second: How does Britain pay for them? In this, it failed.

The DIP did not fail because HM Treasury cannot count. Rather, it is because the UK is trying to prepare to fight a 21st century war with a 20th century financing model. Britain made the strategic mistake every successful organisation fears: it put the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in charge.

HM Treasury should not decide how much security the UK can afford. It should figure out how to afford the security that the country needs. Stop asking what drones will be needed in 2035. Nobody knows. Ask one question instead: what outcomes must Britain always deliver?

The objectives laid out by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) – i.e., the Prime Minister – to the defence chiefs should be: deter war, win if deterrence fails, out-build the UK’s adversaries, and adapt faster than they can.

The next step is to finance those outcomes. Britain has already committed to spending up to 5% of GDP on defence and security. The issue is not whether it spends more. It is whether it mobilises capital intelligently.

No great company finances transformation from cash flow alone. It mobilises capital. Nations should too. This is not financial engineering. It is how every successful multilateral bank creates fiscal space. Defence should not be the exception.

Wars are not won by defence budgets. They are won by financing systems that can out-build the other side. Capital has become a weapon of national power. The UK should start treating it like one.

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On 30th June 2026, Sir Keir Starmer, outgoing Prime Minister, finally released the much-delayed Defence Investment Plan (DIP) , which sets out how His Majesty’s (HM) Government will resource the prior year’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR). The process of arriving at the DIP was nothing if not painful, resulting in the resignation of John Healey, Secretary of State for Defence, and Al Carns, Minister of State for the Armed Forces. Putting the political machinations behind and pain of delivery aside, there is some good news buried within the DIP for the United States (US).

First, the United Kingdom (UK) is consciously making choices in its defence policy and strategy. While the SDR identified and enumerated priorities, it singularly failed to make definitive choices. This meant that Britain was pursuing a multi-domain ‘Integrated Force’ without prioritisation or the resource base to support or sustain such an order of battle. It had consequently – the quality of its men and women in uniform notwithstanding – suffered a crisis of credibility as of late within the political circles of defence in Washington ( the British Armed Forces remain highly regarded within American military circles). At least now there is a clearer direction that the UK’s military is taking.

Emblematic of these choices is the DIP’s emphasis on uncrewed and autonomous systems across multiple domains, which reflects lessons learned from Ukraine and the changing character of war. It also establishes a course for the UK to develop key enabling capabilities that would complement those of the US in-theatre, allowing the British to offset these capabilities should a crisis – such as one over Taiwan, or as Operation EPIC FURY vividly demonstrated – require American attention elsewhere.

There are, however, risks in doing so. It is too early to tell what the right balance is between crewed and uncrewed systems. Clearly the British Armed Forces are leaning more into autonomous systems than some of their partner militaries. The UK’s experience in developing this hybrid force will be informative. How will the ‘New Hybrid Navy’ execute traditional sea control operations in the North Atlantic and in support of Atlantic Bastion? How will it manage operating crewed assets in traditional missions along with autonomous subsurface and undersea operations?

Here, the DIP, while retiring the Type 45 class destroyer in favour of six Common Combat Vessels (CCVs), retains a commitment to crewed systems – including the reinvestment in the Defence Nuclear Enterprise, partnership with Norway for the Type 26 class frigate, and the SSN-AUKUS class nuclear submarine. Notably, if the Defence Nuclear Enterprise is removed from Royal Navy’s budgeting, the Royal Navy receives less than the British Army and Royal Air Force (RAF), despite the UK being an island nation.

Washington will look to London’s experiences in this area, as the question of what that future force looks like is as yet unanswered in the Pentagon. The Department of War is pushing to achieve its own version of drone dominance and recently announced a drone ‘tsar’ to oversee most uncrewed programmes, but what the high-low mixture looks like is still in development. If HM Government sticks with the 20-40-40 model of crewed, uncrewed, and attritable effectors as outlined in the SDR, it could well end up with a more balanced force. Seeing drones as, however, a cheaper and cost-saving alternative to crewed systems is ill-advised – much of the present conversation focuses on what drones can do, not what they cannot.

Second, the DIP recognises the changing strategic landscape of European defence and adapts accordingly. In response to both the threat posed by Russia and the demands by Donald Trump, President of the US, that North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) member states shoulder more of the defence burden, the European pillar of the alliance is stepping up in a big way. Germany’s ‘Responsibility for Europe’ envisions a force of 460,000 by 2039. Poland aims to double its military to 500,000 by the same year.

Beyond raw personnel numbers, Berlin is investing heavily in space and enabling capabilities to shift some of the burden away from America as it seeks to pivot to the Pacific. This, in turn, means that Britain can reconceptualise its own defence strategy and position within NATO. Here again there are risks. If the plans Berlin and Warsaw have set out fail to materialise, or national politics charts a different course while the US is rebalancing its attention away from NATO, gaps could emerge.

More broadly, the UK is stepping up its partnership with and support of NATO’s defence and deterrence mission. Through bilateral cooperation with Norway on the aforementioned Type 26s, co-development of long-range precision strike with Germany, and commitment to the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) with (thus far) Italy and Japan, Britain is working to embed itself deeper into NATO’s European defence architecture while expanding its defence industrial base and reach. These are, in aggregate, welcome developments from Washington’s point of view, demonstrating practical burden shifting through planning and acquisition.

Third, and least appreciated, the DIP is indicative of at least an upward trajectory in defence spending for the UK. The £15 billion uplift is well short of the £28 billion service chiefs said was necessary, and it means that HM Government will not hit the 3.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) core defence spending target in the near term. That Washington had any belief that London would be able to do so was, however, misguided from the start.

HM Government stated that defence would be its top priority in the next spending review, but it has thus far been unwilling to cut anything other than international development spending in order to make that happen (beyond what is already outlined in the DIP). Put simply, the increase is welcome, but not nearly enough for Britain to act independently, or to lead within NATO.

Trump is overwhelmingly a president who focuses on outcomes, not processes. That the DIP is finally published counts, but only just. The President will almost certainly lambast the UK for failing to reach NATO’s 3.5% of GDP core defence spending target agreed to at The Hague last year, even if reaching it within one year was never likely.

There is certainly a risk that at the forthcoming Ankara Summit Trump singles out Britain for its underperformance in the spending league tables. His previous, curiously cordial, relationship with Sir Keir has all but evaporated, and the delay in issuing the DIP will not have improved 10 Downing Street’s standing. He is less interested in the details (and the devil of creative accounting is very much in the DIP details), but London’s counterparts, both political and military, in the Pentagon will be watching closely to see how these precious pounds are spent.

The pressing challenge is whether and how HM Government executes on the funding plan, and if the plan survives first contact with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester and expected successor to Sir Keir. As the second largest economy in Europe, what the UK does matters, certainly more than the smaller NATO partners (whose respective contributions are absolutely to be welcomed and applauded). HM Government needs to find more resources to meet the 3.5% defence spending target and the additional 1.5% of non-military defence-related expenditures.

Given Britain’s current political challenges, the question is whether the DIP survives the transition between prime ministers. Assuming Burnham enters No. 10, will he demand a refresh of the SDR? Will he support the decisions his predecessor made, given his priorities and the challenge of balancing an eclectic Labour Party? Will he in fact make defence the top priority in any future spending reviews?

The savings found in departmental budgets, halted road improvement works, and Net Zero targets (sacrifices which are fundamentally necessary), will almost assuredly cause the incoming prime minister political headaches from within their own Labour Party. They will also undoubtedly be less than pleased with the fact that there is at least £4.7 billion in unfunded mandates over the duration of the four-year plan itself.

There are, of course, issues within the DIP, and at times creative accounting undertaken to facilitate the increased budget. They should not be dismissed, and HM Government should be held to account by its allies in Washington and indeed across NATO. Nonetheless, Britain is taking steps in the right direction and on the journey to increased defence spending. Along the way, it is recognising both the changing character of war and the shifting strategic landscape on the continent of Europe and responding accordingly.

These are all messages that will be welcomed by Washington. The challenge is turning commitments into action.

Joshua Huminski is Senior Vice President for National Security and Intelligence at the Centre for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, and an International Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

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On 6th July 2016, Her Majesty’s Government published The Report of the Iraq Inquiry – the ‘Chilcot Inquiry’. Led by Sir John Chilcot, the investigation into the United Kingdom’s (UK) participation in the Iraq War found that it began before all diplomatic avenues had been exhausted, that the threat of Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) was presented with unjustified certainty, and that the legal basis for British military action was ‘far from satisfactory’.

The UK’s entry into the Iraq War occurred during the period in which the Ministry of Defence (MOD) prioritised Counter-Insurgency (COIN) capabilities over those designed for peer conflict. As the global geopolitical stage becomes increasingly volatile, however, there are still valuable insights to be gained from examining Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War. Therefore, for this week’s Big Ask, we asked six experts – as well as Gemini, Google’s Large Language Model (LLM): What are the lessons from the Chilcot Inquiry?

Richard Ballett

Council on Geostrategy

The publication of the Chilcot Inquiry was an important moment in British history. The document showed that Her Majesty’s Government exhibited deeply entrenched bureaucratic qualities that contributed to strategic blunders, such as informal, sofa government with a small group of like-minded and ill-informed individuals, poor information flows, and a culture of ‘winging it’ rather than conducting serious planning or analysis.

The key lessons are thus the importance of serious deliberation and sourcing alternative perspectives; the imperative of rigorous, impartial assessments that provide policymakers and elected leaders with an unvarnished picture of the truth; and the need to foster a culture of challenge where officials feel empowered to speak truth to those in power.

In my own civil service career, which started shortly after the Inquiry’s publication, I saw a lot of progress in rooting out these inimical pathologies. The UK’s intelligence assessment community has significantly improved its processes and capabilities over the last decade.

The creation of the Secretary of State’s Office of Net Assessment and Challenge (SONAC) at the MOD also played an important role, by providing leaders alternative perspectives and rigorous analysis to support some of the most consequential resource and budgetary prioritisation choices made in defence in recent years. Particularly from 2022 to 2024, SONAC acted as a lightning rod of challenge, empowered voices across the department, and forced leaders in defence to question their assumptions. The external appointment of Prof. John Bew as the Prime Minister’s Foreign Policy Adviser had the same impact on other matters of national security and diplomacy. These are just three examples of where things improved.

Ten years on, the real lesson from the Chilcot Inquiry is that Britain can never take for granted the positive changes that have been gained. Multiple and overlapping initiatives like those mentioned above can become self-reinforcing when sustained over long timeframes. However, momentum can also be lost when concurrent crises hit, when the wrong people are appointed to senior advisory positions, and when the memories of strategic blunders fade, causing bureaucracies to slip back into bad habits.

The challenges that the UK will face in the years ahead will be far more serious, complex, and numerous than those faced in the early 21st century. Adversaries today are far more powerful and dangerous than the tiny rogue states and terrorists that British leaders had to contend with in the 2000s. Consequently, the UK’s rivals will be able to exploit strategic blunders in ways that Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein could only have dreamed of.

Ten years after the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry, and with Britain about to see its seventh Prime Minister enter 10 Downing Street in less than a decade, it is more important than ever before that the UK’s leaders heed its lessons.

Brig. (rtd.) Rory Copinger-Symes CBE

Senior Adviser, Bondi Partners and SecureCloud+, and Non-Executive Director, Halo International Group

The Chilcot Inquiry’s main lessons, as I see them from a military perspective, are as follows:

Intelligence: WMD judgements were presented with unjustified certainty, the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) failed to maintain analytical distance, and ministers were not given sufficiently caveated assessments – the 45-minute claim being the obvious example. The lesson is not ‘do not trust intelligence’, but ‘do not let policy eagerness convert probabilistic intelligence into public certainty’.

Post-war planning: Planning assumed a well-executed United States (US)-led and United Nations (UN)-authorised operation in a relatively benign security environment. Phase 4 (Stabilisation) got a fraction of the attention that Phase 3 (Combat Operations) did – it was an afterthought.

Endstate definition: Commanders lacked clear direction on what ‘winning’ looked like post-Phase 3: warfighting, peacekeeping, COIN operations, or nation building? Objectives need explicit redefinition at phase transition, with commanders pushing back when that has not happened.

Civil-military integration: The split between MOD-led combat operations and a separate, under-resourced stabilisation effort meant security gains were not converted into governance gains. This fed directly into the establishment of the Stabilisation Unit and its associated doctrine, but the underlying lesson is that the military can win the fight and still lose the follow-through if civilian capacity is not resourced and integrated from day one.

Resourcing: The British Armed Forces spread themselves too thin between Iraq and Afghanistan, and were sharply criticised for their slow response to the Improvised Explosive Device (IED) threat, with the Snatch Land Rover being inadequate for the environment. Urgent operational requirements need to move fast, and admit that pre-war equipment assumptions were wrong.

The overarching lesson from the Chilcot Inquiry is: do not go to war on uncertain evidence, weak process, or without a credible plan for what comes next. Reforms alone will not fix this without genuinely challenging prevailing culture. However, the real question is whether any of this has actually been learned.

Prof. Beatrice Heuser

Distinguished Professor, Centre for Security, Diplomacy and Strategy, Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The most popular definition of ‘strategy’ seems to be that of Arthur Lykke: it is simply about ends, ways, and means. There is an equally simple – nay, a simplistic – assumption that this describes a process; that strategy is about first defining ends (what did the US want to achieve?), then identifying the means that are needed (assumption: the means exist or can be procured in time), and finally thinking about ways to apply them.

Reality is different, as the findings of the Chilcot Enquiry emphasise: ‘[Her Majesty’s] Government should not commit to a firm political objective [i.e., identify ends] before it is clear that it can be achieved [i.e., the means exist and ways align]’. Her Majesty’s Government was criticised for having accepted military responsibilities ‘without a robust analysis...of the military’s capacity to support the UK’s potential obligations in [Iraq]’, and whether ‘a step of such magnitude should [have been] taken…having considered the wider strategic and resource implications and contingent liabilities.’

Even key American strategist-practitioners recognise that this is the more realistic approach: Donald Rumsfeld, who listened to British-American strategist Colin S. Gray, famously noted that one goes to war with the armed forces one has, rather than the armed forces one wished one had. Lykke’s definition of strategy also does not mention the crucial dialectic with the enemy…

The lesson of the Chilcot Inquiry is that the ends, ways, and means approach should be laid to rest.

Joshua C. Huminski

International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Senior Vice President of National Security and Intelligence Programmes, Centre for the Study of the Presidency and Congress

Thematically, several of the most significant lessons woven throughout the Chilcot Inquiry (and the Butler Review) relate to the risks associated with the use and misuse of strategic intelligence in politics. A central failing of the Iraq War was the use of intelligence without its necessary caveats and acceptance of its limitations.

Much as intelligence professionals and politicians alike would wish to have an unfailing crystal ball, providing a palantír-like (the JRR Tolkien, not Alex Karp version) window into the thinking of adversaries, it simply does not exist. Raw intelligence is incomplete, muddled, and often contradictory. Absent its context and its origin (which often cannot be disclosed due to the risks to sources and methods), it offers only one piece of a much broader jigsaw puzzle; one for which there is no image on the box.

Moreover, as the Iraq War demonstrated, the desire to make a compelling case to justify a chosen course of action led to the manipulation and cherry-picking of intelligence to fit predetermined narratives. There was far too much twisting of data to support theories, not theories to fit data. Today, and consequently, the British intelligence community is a much-changed entity using a single common language for interpretation, providing analysis and not raw intelligence to politicians, and internally stress testing assumptions and analysis.

The run-up to Russia’s expanded offensive in Ukraine was a much different affair. Washington and London used (declassified) strategic intelligence, seeking to signal publicly that both capitals knew what the Kremlin was planning and to communicate the imminent threat to sceptical allies across Europe, as well as into Ukraine.

While the selective use of strategic intelligence (which certainly benefited from open-source intelligence) neither deterred Russia, nor convinced even Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President of Ukraine, of the risk to his country, it was nonetheless used with far more aplomb in 2022 than in 2003.

Dr Robert Johnson

Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Director, Oxford Strategy, Statecraft, and Technology (Changing Character of War) Centre

Much of the commentary on the anniversary of the Chilcot Inquiry will focus on the extent to which His Majesty’s (HM) Government has adhered to the principle that all policy decisions should be subject to ‘constructive challenge’ – that is, that subordinates should be willing to offer a critical review and test assumptions without fear of accusations of disloyalty. The imperative was to avoid hasty, ill-thought through, and erroneous decisions.

The track record of British governments has not lived up to that expectation. Ministerial dependence on Special Advisers (SpAds), a focus on spin or ‘narratives’, and a lack of specialisms or incentives in the civil service are the chief problems. However, the idea of accountability upwards is only part of the story.

In one respect, the failure of accountability downwards also remains. In Iraq, many soldiers were wrongly accused of war crimes by the Iraq Historic Allegations Team (IHAT) inquiry. Not a single case led to a conviction, and the investigation revealed that the lawyers responsible were inventing accusations for profit. The same approach is being taken against British veterans deployed in Northern Ireland in the so-called Troubles Bill.

It is a reminder that loyalty goes in both directions. Regrettably, that lesson has not been learned.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

The Chilcot Inquiry provided a damning indictment of the 2003 Iraq War, offering enduring lessons on flawed intelligence, institutional groupthink, and the erosion of Cabinet scrutiny. One of its core conclusions – that HM Government must adhere to international law – rightly sought to curb erratic, badly planned interventions. Yet, subsequent British foreign policy has suffered from a severe overcorrection. The lesson of legality has morphed into a dogmatic legalism that blindfolds strategic realism.

Nowhere is this paralysis more evident than in the decision (now failed) to cede sovereignty of British Indian Ocean Territory, including the vital joint UK-US military facility at Diego Garcia, to Mauritius. Driven by a desire to conform to non-binding international decisions, HM Government attempted to trade away one of Britain’s geopolitical crown jewels. In an era defined by a fracturing international order and growing alignment between the CRINK – the People’s Republic of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – such compliance does not project moral authority; rather, it weakens the UK and invites others to make claims on British interests.

Per Chilcot, this is not to say that the UK should ignore international law. While poorly planned interventions should be resisted, a mature foreign policy – underpinned by the pursuit of strategic and asymmetric advantage, as per the 2025 National Security Strategy – demands a balance between legal frameworks and cold strategic realities. If HM Government fails to maintain this equilibrium, rigid adherence to international law will cease to be a shield, becoming instead an open invitation for geopolitical adversaries. Even Chilcot’s lessons should not go unchallenged.

Gemini

Council on Geostrategy staff have prompted Gemini, Google’s LLM, to reflect on this week’s Big Ask.

The Chilcot Inquiry remains the definitive critique of British strategic decision-making, offering enduring lessons for contemporary British statecraft as it navigates an increasingly contested Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific landscape.

First, it exposed the dangers of insular thinking. The Inquiry revealed how intelligence was presented with unwarranted certainty and left unchallenged. For modern policymakers, fostering a culture of rigorous, adversarial debate – where alternative assessments and dissenting views are integrated – is paramount to avoiding critical blind spots.

Second, it underscored that formal cabinet governance is non-negotiable. The informal style of the era bypassed established bureaucratic mechanisms, undermining collective ministerial responsibility and reducing vital scrutiny. Effective geostrategy requires robust, institutionalised decision-making, a lesson that later informed the creation of the National Security Council (NSC).

Finally, its most damning indictment was the failure of post-conflict planning. The UK committed to military intervention without a coherent, fully resourced strategy for stabilisation and reconstruction. It proved that military force is merely an instrument; without a clear endgame, tactical operational successes quickly dissolve into long-term strategic failures.

Ultimately, the Chilcot Inquiry’s core lesson is that successful statecraft demands intellectual humility, institutional rigour, and a realistic alignment of military means with sustainable political ends.

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The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) ends more than a decade of fiction in British defence finance. By the time the Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) last ten-year Defence Equipment Plan was published, around a month into the premiership of Rishi Sunak, the gap between spending and money available was £17 billion. After that, the Conservative administration produced no long-term costings at all.

The DIP was supposed to deliver the commitments that the administration of Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, signed up to in last year’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR): a ten-year programme to match the ten-year vision of the Review. However, it does not.

Sir Keir made the reasons explicit in his speech announcing the DIP. He was unwilling to use increased borrowing in any form – including the ‘defence bonds’ requested by industry groups such as Make UK – and had reached the limits of departmental budget reallocation.

As a result, the ten-year programme is only financed over the next four years, and takes the United Kingdom’s (UK) defence spending only to 2.7% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the fiscal year 2029, leaving the Prime Minister’s pledge of 3% by 2030 hard to reach, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) target of 3.5%+1.5% of GDP on defence and related infrastructure effectively notional. Just under £5 billion of the allocated cash is to be found at the next Budget.

As John Healey, former Secretary of State for Defence – who made most of the choices contained in the DIP before resigning – put it, the Prime Minister was ‘unable’ and Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was ‘unwilling’ to fund rearmament at the scale required by the SDR. Whatever happens under the expected premiership of Andy Burnham, the DIP must be judged a failure against the aspirations laid out in the SDR.

During the political spat that led to Healey’s resignation, the descriptor used internally by those with sight of the DIP was ‘scalable’: it is built for a necessarily constrained spending envelope today, but contains choices that would allow capabilities to be expanded should the political argument over money turn in favour of comprehensive rearmament.

What is welcome is the strategic nature of the choices made. The standout commitments are to upgrade the nuclear deterrent, the next generation of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) via AUKUS, the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), and the munitions stockpile. The standout platform deletions are commitments to crewed air defence destroyers, reconnaissance helicopters, and the so-far notional Type 32 general purpose frigate.

In their place, the vision of Gen. Sir Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord, for a ‘hybrid navy’ by 2029 gets backing for the purchase of a mixture of crewed and uncrewed naval drone and missile platforms. No other major naval power is abandoning conventional power projection platforms with such alacrity, and the proof of the pudding will be in the eating (sometime in the 2030s).

The GCAP budget allocation is a major signal – not just to allies and industrial partners, but geopolitically. Once operational, the Tempest airframe will give Britain a genuine, sixth-generation air combat system that is independent of the United States (US), in a world where European partners have failed to produce one and where the other major players will consist of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and America. It is a bet not only on the concept of a ‘system of systems’ in air combat, but on British industry, with BAE Systems and its supply chain standing to become global players in a very limited but strategically vital ecosystem.

The irony is that, since the publication of the Defence Industrial Strategy in 2025, and the formation of the National Armaments Directorate within the MOD, the UK has had a metaphorical Formula 1 car ready to race in terms of industrial transformation. With the appointment of Rupert Pearce as National Armaments Director (NAD), it has a driver. What it has lacked is fuel in the tank and a race plan. The DIP provides fuel for four out of the next ten years, leaving the next administration to take the tough decisions.

Sir Keir’s determination to slap down the idea of defence bonds, and the allocation of £400 million to the Multilateral Defence Mechanism (MDM), backed by His Majesty’s (HM) Treasury, might both be read as attempts to limit the options of the incoming administration. The MDM – a joint procurement initiative with Finland and the Netherlands – has been counterposed by HM Treasury to the Canadian-backed Defence Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB), which looks set to launch at the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara. Defence bonds have been advocated by numerous industry bodies and think tanks. It is clear that without either major welfare cuts or some mixture of hypothecated and multilateral borrowing, British rearmament cannot match the escalated nature of the threat.

Assuming he becomes Britain’s next Prime Minister, Burnham’s first budget is unlikely to prioritise defence. Thus, the framework for the next phase of rearmament will likely be set at the next Spending Review, in Q1 2027 – a milestone Starmer signalled in his speech, and Healey in his backbench intervention. By then, either the Labour government finds more money – whether through borrowing, taxation, or reallocation – or the 3% target is toast and the 3.5% might be judged fictional.

The contrast between the UK’s hesitant spending commitments and those of its allies is already stark. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Norway, Denmark, Greece, Türkiye, and Germany all have firm spending commitments of 3.5% of GDP by 2030. More importantly, Germany has, for the first time since 1995, overtaken Britain in absolute cash spending terms (in current US dollars).

This places the UK’s ambition to be America’s ‘leading European ally’ in question. With the European Union’s (EU) Security Action For Europe (SAFE) instrument giving the European Commission shaping power over allied defence industrial collaboration, this could, in the worst case, leave British firms out in the cold, and the UK without the power to shape capability and force structures for the defence of the continent.

Although the DIP is a major and immediate uplift, sending a clear demand signal throughout the British defence sector, it falls way short of what is needed to deliver the NATO target. Additionally, the fact remains that it is a plan issued by an administration that will not exist by 20th July, after a political crisis that saw two defence ministers – both highly respected in the sector – quit.

In other words, the story of the SDR, the DIP, and the NATO targets is far from concluded.

Paul Mason is an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy; and a journalist, author, and political researcher.

This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Strategic Defence Unit.

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