In March 2026, Ukrainian military advisors began training Germany’s Bundeswehr.1 An army still at war, still burying its dead, still struggling to hold ground against a predatory enemy while reinventing drone designs on weekly development cycles, turns out to be, perhaps surprisingly, best placed to train Western Europe’s largest military. No one is pretending this is normal but the truth is clear: combat is changing fast, and the doctrine needed to defeat enemies today can’t be learned in the classroom or through exercises. European procurement cycles which have been unreformable will lead to inevitable defeat. These lessons have to be learned from people doing the fighting. Germany at least is honest enough to recognise publicly something that others are hiding: we’re not ready and we won’t be if we don’t listen to the voices of those who know.

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Berlin’s wake up is also financial. In the past year Chancellor Friedrich Merz has committed to an extra €100 billion spend on defence and spending more than NATO’s 2 percent target. While he’s finally catching up, others are steaming ahead. Poland confirmed defence spending of 4.5 percent of GDP.2 Lithuania reached 4 percent. Latvia hit 3.7. Estonia announced it would push towards 5 percent. Even President Macron made the case for increased military expenditure while standing in front of the nuclear submarine Le Téméraire at the Île Longue naval base near Brest and delivered what many observers are calling the most consequential European security speech since the Cold War. France’s leader promised to restructure French nuclear doctrine for the first time in decades: forward-basing nuclear-capable aircraft on allied territory, increasing warhead numbers for the first time since 1992, and establishing bilateral nuclear cooperation frameworks with eight European partners including Britain.3

All this is happening against a backdrop of uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s questioning of NATO, his recent criticism of support from allies for the war in Iran, all while Russian aggression has not abated, have left the pillars of our security more exposed than for decades. That’s leading some to take decisions unthinkable only a few years ago. Finland, Denmark and even France4 have begun pulling back from dependence on American technology platforms.5 Across Northern and Eastern Europe, governments that five years ago would have thought preppers a strange American subculture, have now begun planning evacuations and preparations as a matter of routine civil defence.6

And what about Britain? Here, in the same period, our government published a Defence Industrial Strategy and a shift to a ten-year procurement plan, sensible principles.7 But without a single commitment to buy a specific capability in a named quantity on a certain date, so what? They’re just words. The document that promises the answers, the Defence Investment Plan, has not been published. It was expected late last year, then early this one but nothing has been produced. Without it, the Strategic Defence Review is a diagnosis without a prescription, the ten-year plan is a calendar without entries and the Defence Industrial Strategy is a shopfront without stock. Britain is not rearming; we’re not even planning to rearm. Britain today is planning to plan to rearm.

Today’s London Defence Conference could not be more timely. Under the theme of Readiness,8 speakers have presented analysis of where we are and what we need but none of this matters unless we meet the other side of the obligation. Readiness isn’t a soundbite, it’s a strategy demonstrated by the commitment of assets giving the ability to act: to fight, to sustain, to resupply, to endure. And right now, Britain does not have it. What Britain has, in abundance, is process, bureaucracy and inertia, all delayed by decisions untaken and promises unshifted tied around welfare pledges that have seen our debt and dependency rise, to pushing taxes to levels unseen in peacetime. The temptation at conferences like this is to litigate the past, to rehearse how we got here, there are many historians who could answer that, but the world outside the conference hall is not waiting for a retrospective. It is on fire.

On 28 February 2026, the United States and Israel launched airstrikes across Iran without consulting NATO allies or seeking coalition support. Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and a fifth of its liquefied natural gas stopped moving overnight. The International Energy Agency called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.9 Brent crude passed $120 a barrel at its peak. QatarEnergy declared force majeure on all LNG exports as their plant was hit while European gas storage, already depleted after a harsh winter, remains around 30 percent capacity. Dutch gas benchmarks nearly doubled. The European Central Bank postponed its planned rate cuts, raised its inflation forecast and cut growth projections. All before the last tanker that left the Strait before the war began reaches Europe around now. The damage extends well beyond energy and even if the ceasefire holds, which looks increasingly uncertain, over 30 percent of global urea, the fertiliser on which this spring’s Northern Hemisphere planting depends, is at risk. Urea prices have risen 50 percent since the war began and the impact on global crop production will be felt in smaller harvests and higher animal feed costs.10 The chain reaction that is now arriving in European fields, forecourts and household bills will only grow.

In Britain, petrol has breached 160 pence a litre for the first time in nearly two years. Diesel has risen 35 pence since late February. Shell’s chief executive has warned that the UK will begin to feel the full impact this month, as the last tankers loaded at Gulf ports before the war arrive at European terminals and existing reserves begin to deplete.11 Ryanair’s chief executive has said that the UK is the most vulnerable major European economy to the jet fuel squeeze, predicting summer flight cancellations of five to ten per cent if the Strait stays closed.12 Analysts at Panmure Liberum have warned that diesel shortages could begin hitting the UK by the end of April.13 The EU’s energy commissioner has admitted that fuel rationing across the continent is being considered as an option to manage demand.14

A ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan, was announced on 7 April. On 8 April, four ships crossed the Strait of Hormuz. Only four and only carrying dry cargo, none with oil or gas. That same day, Israel launched what it called Operation Eternal Darkness, its largest strikes on Lebanon since the war began, killing over 250 people. A drone struck the Saudi east-west pipeline, the main alternative route for Gulf oil exports. Iran announced it was suspending tanker transit in response to what it called violations. The President of the United States posted that if the terms of the deal were not met, “the ‘Shootin’ Starts, bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before.”15 Perhaps unsurprisingly, nobody agrees on what was agreed. Iran says Lebanon is part of the ceasefire. Israel says it is not. The United States agrees with Israel. Pakistan, which brokered the deal, agrees with Iran. Talks began in Islamabad but the beginning is hardly auspicious. This doesn’t feel like peace, more like an interval between acts.

And still Britain’s Defence Investment Plan has not been published.

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The gap between British process and action is now wide enough to be visible from Artemis II. It is not that the government has done nothing; it’s that it’s all process, not production. The Strategic Defence Review was thorough and, in its analysis of the threat, largely correct. The creation of the National Armaments Director, consolidating eight procurement budgets into one, is an important structural reform. The shift to ten-year planning, if it proves real, would be a welcome break from the destructive annual shifts that have crippled defence procurement for decades, distorting investment towards whatever can be squeezed into this year’s allocation rather than what the country actually needs. These are not trivial steps. But they are, for now, just words. The test of reform is not the quality of the document. It is output: platforms delivered, munitions stockpiled, units trained, industries mobilised. By that measure, Britain is falling behind allies who started further back and had far more to overcome.

Germany’s finance minister has confirmed defence spending will reach 3.5 percent of GDP by 2029.16 Britain’s planned path to 2.6 percent by April 2027, with an ambition to reach 3 percent in the next Parliament, beyond the life of this Prime Minister’s tenable promises, is welcome but modest when set against a Hague summit target of 5 percent of GDP by 2035.17 The £800 billion funding gap to 2040, identified by EY analysis for the Financial Times, remains unfunded.18 The Institute for Fiscal Studies has confirmed that equipment budgets are largely pre-committed, leaving minimal room for the new capabilities that the Strategic Defence Review demands.19 The nuclear enterprise continues to consume the lion’s share of capital spending and if the demands of today’s programmes aren’t addressed, conventional forces which have seen almost no real-terms increase (once inflation and nuclear pressures are stripped out) will see defence cuts in ships, planes and troops. The IMF has even placed defence spending and conflict economics at the centre of its April World Economic Outlook, the first time the Fund has treated rearmament as a central macroeconomic question rather than a specialist sidebar.20 When the IMF tells finance ministries that defence is now a core fiscal question, the old argument that rearmament can wait for better times has lost its last institutional shelter.

The munitions crisis described in The Reset in February has, if anything, got worse. RUSI analysis shows that Israel’s Arrow-3 interceptor stocks approached depletion within weeks of high-intensity operations. US THAAD reserves face similar pressure.21 These are not uniquely Israeli or American problems. They are structural, alliance-wide weaknesses that high-intensity conflict exposes with terrifying speed. The eight days of British ammunition stocks described earlier in this series have not improved and the threat has grown faster than the stockpile. Long-term production contracts with guaranteed volumes are the only serious route to rebuilding reserves at the scale required, and that demands political commitment beyond the electoral cycle, together with Treasury rules that treat ammunition as a strategic asset rather than a discretionary line item.

That’s where lessons from Ukraine’s drone ecosystem are so important. They continue to demonstrate what necessity can achieve. Development cycles measured in weeks, even days in some cases, as over 200 companies, focused solely on drone production, compete to build up to five million units in 2025. In this system a First Person View drone costs around $500, subsidised in part by volunteer labour that cannot be replicated.22 The Iran war is providing a second proof of concept. Iran’s use of cheap drones against expensive American platforms (at least sixteen MQ-9 Reapers lost) confirms that mass, speed and disposability now routinely defeat high-end platforms fielded in small numbers. McKinsey’s European Defence Dashboard confirms that equipment stocks across European NATO remain below their 2021 levels despite surging budgets, with platform fragmentation up 10 percent since 2014.23 We are building the exquisite while the everyday dominates the battlefield. The MOD’s new segmented procurement approach promises that commercial buys can move from initiation to contract in as little as three months but the test will be whether it survives contact with the bureaucracy that has defeated every procurement reform of the last quarter-century.

Two wars have now exposed both European strength and dependence. Germany’s Ramstein Airforce Base has been instrumental to the US campaign in Iran.24 But European leaders who have chosen to distance themselves politically from the war have provoked the current US response to NATO that has concerned so many. Some have allowed US access to their bases, even while refusing to participate and criticising the US publicly. Is that prudence? Is it just domestic politics? What it actually represents, for the moment, is power: the power to condition the terms on which the transatlantic alliance operates but also a recognition that that power is inherently temporary. It exists while the war is ongoing and the US remains committed. If Europe does not convert this moment into a durable rebalancing of its relationship with America, one that preserves the alliance while ending the assumption of unconditional dependence, the opportunity will evaporate the moment the last American sortie lands. Macron’s nuclear initiative, Merz’s rearmament, and all the Eastern European defence budget increases, are part of the answer, but Carnegie Europe’s assessment is right that the new nuclear doctrine remains vulnerable to the 2027 French presidential election. It also excludes the Baltic states and Finland, and nuclear reassurance cannot compensate for conventional weakness.25 A nuclear deterrent without the conventional forces to back it up is a bluff; and bluffs get called.

What, then, does readiness actually require? Not another review or strategy. We need three things, all concrete, all urgent:

First, publish the Defence Investment Plan. The armed forces, the defence industry and Britain’s allies all need to know what this country intends to buy, in what quantities, on what timescale, and with what money, and the debt markets need to know what we’re going to cut to pay for it. Every month it remains unpublished is a month in which industry cannot invest with confidence, allies can’t plan for interoperability, and the gap between the Strategic Defence Review’s ambitions and Britain’s actual capability continues to widen.

Second, fund the munitions gap. Eight days is not a rounding error, it is a catastrophic vulnerability that would, in any serious conflict, determine the outcome before the first shot was fired.

Third, compress procurement to a wartime pace. That’s what explains why the whole army has fewer artillery pieces today than a single brigade did a few years ago. The mismatch between the threat and the tempo of the response is now an emergency and we must recognise that.

The London Defence Conference has heard thoughtful speeches about the gravity of the moment with informed panels on deterrence, industrial capacity, and the lessons of Ukraine. But the people in the room who matter will be those who convert words into action. Germany, Poland, the Baltic states and others are spending and planning and training. Ukraine is innovating under fire and even France is extending its military mandate. Britain, for now, is talking about producing plans about plans. Meanwhile, Russia is threatening our seas and our allies. The Strait of Hormuz is still closed and the ceasefire is fragile. The structural weaknesses these wars have exposed, in energy dependence, in munitions depth, in the yawning gap between spending commitments and actual military capability, will outlast this crisis and be waiting for the next one. The question our government must answer now is not what we think, but what we are going to do, and when.

Britain’s armed forces are under pressure on every front. Undersea cables are being sabotaged by hostile states. Ammunition stockpiles would run out in days. The drone revolution is transforming warfare while Britain watches from the sidelines. The nuclear deterrent depends on an ally whose commitment is no longer unconditional. European force structures spend billions and deliver less than they should.

Each of those problems is serious in isolation. Taken together, they reveal something worse: the collapse of the framework within which British defence has operated for almost eighty years.

For most of that period, British defence policy rested on four pillars. The assumption of automatic American support. The credibility of NATO as a guaranteed security provider. The stability of long-term defence planning. And the political consensus that defence could remain a secondary concern. Within the first fifty days of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, all four were effectively dismantled.

The first pillar was the most fundamental. Since 1945, every British defence decision has been shaped by the expectation that America would stand behind it. Not just in nuclear extremis, but in the daily business of operating armed forces: the satellite links, the logistics chains, the intelligence sharing, the interoperability built into every platform and every exercise. This was not merely an alliance. It was an operating system. When the United States signals that its commitment is conditional, it does not simply weaken a diplomatic bond. It calls into question whether British forces can function as designed.

The second pillar fell with the first. NATO’s credibility as a security guarantee has always depended less on the text of Article 5 than on the shared conviction that it would be honoured instantly and without negotiation. Once that conviction wavers, adversaries recalculate. Deterrence does not fail when an alliance formally dissolves. It fails when an opponent concludes that the response will be slow, divided, or incomplete. That calculation has already changed.

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The third pillar, the stability of long-term planning, has been shattered by the sheer velocity of strategic change. Defence procurement operates on cycles of decades. Aircraft carriers commissioned today were designed fifteen years ago. The nuclear deterrent requires planning horizons stretching into the 2060s. All of this assumes a stable framework within which to make choices. When the most important variable in British defence, the reliability of the American alliance, becomes unpredictable from one administration to the next, every long-term assumption is called into question. What platforms to buy, which capabilities to prioritise, how to structure forces: none of these decisions can be made rationally when the foundation keeps moving.

The fourth pillar was political. For decades, both major parties treated defence as important enough to fund at modest levels but not important enough to displace domestic priorities. That consensus depended on the other three pillars holding. If America would always come, if NATO would always deter, if planning could proceed in an orderly fashion, then defence could safely be managed rather than prioritised. Once the other three pillars cracked, the fourth became untenable.

The scale of that disruption is historically unusual. The strategic challenge Britain now faces is arguably more severe than that confronted by the Attlee government after 1945. Then, Britain was exhausted, indebted and losing an empire, but it had clarity about the threat and certainty about its principal ally. Today, Britain is wealthier, technologically advanced and militarily capable, but strategically adrift. The threat is diffuse. The ally is distracted. And the country has not yet accepted what follows from either.

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How did we get here?

These pillars did not crack under external pressure alone. They were hollowed out from within by choices made over decades.

The dependence on American support was not imposed. It was chosen, repeatedly, because it was cheaper and easier than the alternative. Each successive defence review since the Cold War trimmed capabilities that only made sense if someone else provided the enabling architecture. Britain retained world-class platforms, including submarines, fast jets and special forces, but shed the connective tissue that would allow them to operate independently: strategic airlift, satellite communications, air-to-air refuelling at scale, deep ammunition reserves. The result was a force designed to plug into an American-led system, not to stand on its own.

The reliance on NATO followed the same logic. If the alliance guaranteed security, there was no need for European states to build the redundancy that independent action would require. Interoperability became a euphemism for dependency. Command structures, logistics chains, and intelligence-sharing protocols were all optimised on the assumption that the United States would always be the lead framework nation. When that assumption holds, the system is formidable. When it does not, the system has no fallback.

The stability of long-term planning was undermined by something more insidious: the belief that the strategic environment would remain broadly predictable. Defence reviews were conducted on five- to ten-year cycles, each one adjusting to incremental shifts. The possibility of sudden, systemic disruption, whether an ally reversing course, a major war in Europe, or the simultaneous emergence of multiple peer threats, was acknowledged in risk registers but never seriously planned for. The system was built to manage change, not to survive shock.

The political consensus held longest because it was the most convenient. Defence spending could be kept low without visible consequence so long as the other three pillars remained intact. No government paid a political price for underfunding defence. No opposition made it a central issue. The public, understandably, had no reason to question an arrangement that appeared to work. By the time the foundations had eroded, the political habit of deferral was so deeply ingrained that even a land war in Europe did not fundamentally alter the terms of debate.

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At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz announced that Germany would raise defence spending towards 5 per cent of GDP and argued that Europe must become capable of defending itself independently.1 That a German chancellor felt compelled to say this publicly tells you how far the old order has already shifted.

The NATO commitment agreed at The Hague in June 2025 formalised the scale of what is now required. Allies committed to spending 5 per cent of GDP on defence and security by 2035, split between 3.5 per cent on core defence and 1.5 per cent on broader security and resilience.2 For Britain, that means roughly doubling current defence-related spending within a decade. This is not an aspiration. It is an admission that the existing level of investment cannot sustain credible deterrence.

What can be done

If the pillars have fallen, what replaces them? Neither nostalgia nor incrementalism. The task is to build a new framework on different assumptions.

The first assumption must be that American support, while desirable, cannot be guaranteed. This does not mean hostility towards Washington. It means prudence. Britain must identify which US-provided capabilities are most critical to its own force and begin building alternatives or redundancy into them: sovereign or allied satellite communications, European strategic airlift, integrated air and missile defence that does not depend on a single provider, and command-and-control systems that function when the principal ally is engaged elsewhere.

Consider just one of those capabilities. SpaceX invested at least $10 billion to build the Starlink constellation, now more than 9,000 satellites providing communications that have proved essential in Ukraine.3 No European country can replicate that alone. But could Britain share it with France? Or Germany? Or Australia and Japan? A shared satellite communications programme, built on existing British and French space expertise, reaching around the world would cost a fraction of what each nation would spend duplicating it independently. The same logic applies across the enabler gap. The question is not whether these things are affordable. It is whether we can afford not to build them together.

The second assumption must be that NATO endures but changes character. The alliance will remain the essential framework for European security, but it will operate increasingly as a coalition in which Europeans bear the principal burden for their own defence. Britain, as one of only two European nuclear powers, with one of the continent’s largest defence budgets and most deployable forces, cannot avoid a leadership role in that transition. The question is not whether Britain leads, but whether it leads deliberately or is dragged into responsibility unprepared.

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The third assumption must be that planning cannot depend on stability. Defence procurement and force design must become more adaptive. Shorter development cycles, modular platforms, and the ability to scale production rapidly matter more than exquisite systems optimised for a single scenario. The countries that have adapted fastest to the realities of modern conflict, building new industries from scratch, converting civilian logistics into military supply chains, iterating weapons systems in weeks rather than years, are the ones setting the pace. Britain must learn from them.

The fourth assumption must be that political consensus on defence will not form by itself. It must be built. Air Chief Marshal Sir Rich Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, has said that the current threat environment is more dangerous than at any point in his career and that responding to it requires a whole-of-nation response: building industrial capacity, growing the skills we need, and increasing the resilience of society and the infrastructure that supports it.4 That language is not routine. It is a serving military chief telling the country that defence is no longer a problem the armed forces can solve alone.

Building that consensus requires honesty. The British public has not been told clearly what the country faces, what it will cost, or what the consequences of inaction would be. Governments of both parties have preferred reassurance to candour. That must change and that’s why I’ve been writing these articles. The public are not children. They can weigh difficult choices if they are trusted with the facts.

Four pillars of British defence were dismantled in fifty days. They will not be rebuilt on the same foundations. The assumptions that sustained them, American constancy, allied automaticity, strategic predictability, political convenience, belong to a world that no longer exists. The only real question is whether Britain builds something new before events force our hand.

4

Chief of the Defence Staff speech, 15 December 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/chief-of-the-defence-staff-speech-15-december-2025.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European countries have dramatically increased defence spending. That surge has exposed not just the gap between what Europe has and what it needs, but a deeper and more corrosive structural weakness. According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, European NATO members sourced approximately 78 percent of their major new weapons systems from outside Europe between 2022 and 2024, with nearly two thirds of that total coming from the United States.1

This has happened at precisely the moment when American political commitment to European security has become less certain. In other words, as strategic dependence on Washington has grown more uncertain, industrial dependence on Washington has grown stronger.

That is not coincidence. It is the consequence of how European defence has been organised for decades.

European armed forces collectively operate around 180 major weapons systems. The United States operates roughly 30.2 Europe fields 17 different types of main battle tank, including the Leopard, Leclerc, Challenger, Ariete, PT-91, and several modernised Soviet legacy designs still in service across eastern Europe. The United States fields one, the M1 Abrams.3

The same pattern repeats across the force. Europe produces three frontline combat aircraft in parallel, the Eurofighter Typhoon, the Rafale, and the Gripen. The United States produces one. European navies operate more than two dozen classes of frigates and destroyers, each with distinct combat systems, weapons fits, training pipelines, and logistics chains. The US Navy operates a small number of standardised classes at scale.4

The result is European duplication on an industrial scale. Multiple design bureaux, parallel production lines, short manufacturing runs, and incompatible sustainment systems. In peacetime, this inflates costs. In war, it also constrains output.

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Ukraine has made the consequences visible. Supplying Kyiv has required scavenging spare parts from across the continent, refurbishing incompatible platforms, and running parallel training programmes for weapons that perform broadly similar functions. The limiting factor has not been money but finding available kit.

How did we get here?

European defence fragmentation is not the product of incompetence. It is the product of rational national decisions that, taken together, amount to collective failure.

For most of the Cold War, defence procurement was a national responsibility. States that had recently emerged from occupation or dictatorship wanted sovereign control over weapons production for reasons that were both economic and strategic. Defence factories meant skilled jobs, regional investment, and political leverage. They also meant freedom of action. If you could build your own tanks, ships, or aircraft, you were less dependent on allies whose priorities might change.

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That logic never disappeared. Even today, around 80 percent of European defence contracts are awarded to domestic suppliers.5 Governments protect local industry. Unions defend jobs. The huge defence companies lobby to keep production lines alive. From a national perspective, this is understandable. From a continental perspective, it is ruinously inefficient.

Recent events have sharpened the dilemma. Public threats by senior US political figures to reconsider America’s global commitments have forced European leaders to confront an uncomfortable reality. The strategic environment has changed, but European defence structures have not. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that the post-war order was breaking down and that “nostalgia is not a strategy.”6

The fear is not abstract. Stefano Stefanini, a former Italian ambassador to NATO, warned that a significant reduction in US military presence could cause not just NATO, but even the EU, to fragment.7 Security guarantees underpin political cohesion. When those guarantees weaken, things fall apart.

The European Union’s response has been the ReArm Europe Plan, announced in March 2025. In scale, it is unprecedented. The plan envisages up to €800 billion in additional defence-related spending by 2030, combining national fiscal flexibility, expanded European Investment Bank lending, and a new €150 billion joint loan instrument known as SAFE, the Security Action for Europe facility.8

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The logic is straightforward. Countries that buy together reduce unit costs, standardise equipment, and increase output. SAFE loans are designed to incentivise joint procurement and to rebuild Europe’s industrial base at scale, particularly in ammunition, air defence, drones, and armoured vehicles.

The first tranche of SAFE funding for eight member states was approved in January 2026, with disbursements beginning in March.9 Fifteen EU states are already planning collaborative projects involving Ukraine, both to support Kyiv and to integrate its battle-tested industry into Europe’s supply chains. The EU has set an explicit target that 40 percent of defence procurement should be collaborative rather than national.

This is not about creating a European army. That idea collapses the moment it encounters reality. Allied deployments in Libya and Afghanistan demonstrated how national caveats can paralyse operations: German aircraft restricted from striking, Swedish troops limited in where they could deploy, and political vetoes exercised in real time, all exposed the limits of multinational forces without unified political authority. An army that cannot fight under pressure is not an army.

What Europe is attempting instead is to build a European defence market that can function under stress.

Britain sits awkwardly outside this structure. The UK was not offered meaningful access to SAFE but has signed a Security and Defence Partnership that allows participation in joint procurement alongside partners such as Norway and Ukraine.

Britain’s position is distinctive. Deeper participation in European procurement makes strategic sense in reducing unit costs, improving interoperability, and strengthening deterrence. But there is a powerful domestic argument. Britain’s defence sector supports hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly. Industry analysis suggests that sustained defence spending at around 3 percent of GDP could generate an additional 50,000 jobs and around £8 billion in economic value by the mid-2030s.10 Every pound spent abroad is a pound not spent in Barrow, Bristol, or Glasgow.

The same tension exists across Europe, but Britain faces it from outside the EU’s institutional framework.

Politics compounds the problem. Britain remains one of the NATO members most closely aligned with the United States. Some European officials privately describe the UK, alongside countries such as Italy, as among the most reluctant to embrace reforms perceived to dilute American influence. Negotiations over UK access to EU defence mechanisms reflect that unease. British ministers speak of agreements by mid-2027. EU officials describe that timeline as optimistic.

Yet doing nothing is itself a decision.

Europe is moving towards greater integration because fragmentation has become unaffordable. Seventeen tank variants versus one is not a slogan. It is a measure of wasted capital, constrained output, and reduced resilience in the face of war.

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What can be done

First, Britain should deepen alignment with capable allies beyond purely European structures. The Global Combat Air Programme with Japan and Italy demonstrates what is possible when partners align around shared requirements, clear governance, and industrial scale. GCAP spreads development costs, accelerates innovation, and creates an exportable platform rather than a bespoke national system. It also avoids the paralysis that has plagued previous European programmes by enforcing discipline on requirements and timelines.

Second, Britain should take a leading role in capability coalitions anchored firmly in NATO. Long-range strike, integrated air and missile defence, counter-drone systems, and maritime security are areas where Britain brings real operational credibility. Coalitions that share capability without surrendering political control work. Pretend supranational armies do not.

Third, Britain must be honest about what it can and cannot do alone. We cannot build everything. We do not have the scale. But we do have areas of genuine excellence: nuclear submarines, complex warship design, jet engines, advanced sensors, and electronic warfare. The strategic task is to trade access to those strengths for access to others, not to pursue the illusion of autonomy.

Europe’s problem is not that it lacks money. It is that it lacks coherence. Fragmentation weakens deterrence. Integration, done properly, strengthens it.

Seventeen tanks versus one tells you who can fight at scale. The only remaining question is whether Europe, and Britain, chooses to learn that lesson before the next war, or during it.

10

ADS Group, Increase in defence spending could deliver 50,000 new jobs by 2035 https://www.adsgroup.org.uk/knowledge/increased-defence-spending-50000-jobs/.

Where we are now

For almost 80 years, Britain’s ultimate guarantee of security has depended not just on our own Continuous At Sea Deterrence, but on another, largely unspoken assumption: that we have the United States in our corner.

America’s nuclear umbrella, at sea, through strategic forces based in the United States, and through NATO’s wider nuclear arrangements in Europe, has underpinned European security since 1945. The United States maintains roughly 3,700 nuclear warheads, of which around 1,700 are deployed.1 Attack Britain, or any NATO state, and you risk American retaliation. That logic carried Europe through the Berlin Airlift, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the long-frozen decades of the Cold War. It allowed European states to disarm, demobilise, and redirect national wealth away from warfare and towards welfare.

Closer to home, the United States is not simply a political guarantor of Britain’s deterrent; it is part of the delivery system. Britain’s deterrent is operationally independent, only the Prime Minister can authorise its use, but Trident missiles are leased from a shared pool in the United States. Maintenance and key aspects of support depend on US facilities and industry.2

This arrangement has functioned because political alignment between the US and UK was assumed to be permanent. If that alignment becomes conditional, the question becomes unavoidable: how resilient is Britain’s deterrent if American support becomes uncertain at precisely the moment it matters most?

Today, that assumption is creaking.

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Confidence has been eroded by President Donald Trump repeatedly stating that allies who do not meet defence spending commitments should not expect automatic American protection.3 His administration has openly discussed reducing US troop levels in Europe, which have been around the 100,000 mark in recent years.4 Senior figures around him have questioned whether extended deterrence in Europe remains central to American interests when the primary strategic focus has shifted towards China. None of this constitutes withdrawal. But deterrence is about belief, not legal text, and belief has turned to doubt.

For Britain, this creates an uncomfortable reality. Our ultimate security guarantee, the one that has underwritten every defence choice since the Second World War, can no longer be assumed. It must be recalculated every day.

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How did we get here

Britain’s nuclear journey began in the early 1940s, when the existential threat posed by Nazi Germany drove unprecedented scientific collaboration. Through Tube Alloys, Britain pooled nuclear research with the United States, feeding directly into the wartime effort that became the Manhattan Project.5 The partnership never fully ended. Britain built an independent warhead, but over time it embedded itself in an unusually close nuclear relationship with Washington, formalised through post war agreements on cooperation and sustained through shared systems, shared facilities, and shared supply chains.6

The Suez Crisis in 1956 hardened that dependence into doctrine. Britain and France acted militarily without American backing and found themselves brought up short by US financial pressure, which accelerated a withdrawal that London experienced as humiliation.7 The lesson Britain drew was that strategic independence without American support was not a plan, it was a gamble. Britain embedded itself more tightly within a US led system. France drew the opposite conclusion. Under de Gaulle, it accelerated a sovereign force de frappe designed to ensure that French national survival could never again be subject to allied veto.8

From different paths, Britain and France emerged as Europe’s only nuclear armed states.

Britain is assessed as holding approximately 225 nuclear warheads.9 France is assessed at around 290.10 Combined, that gives Europe’s two nuclear powers roughly 515 warheads.11 Russia, by contrast, is assessed at roughly 5,500 total nuclear warheads, with around 1,700 deployed and a large non-strategic stockpile often estimated in the low thousands.12

On paper, the disparity is overwhelming.

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Yet nuclear deterrence has never been about matching numbers. It is about the ability to impose unacceptable damage. In that sense, 515 warheads are more than enough. A small fraction of Britain’s and France’s arsenals could devastate Russia’s political leadership, military command, and critical national infrastructure. No rational leadership would choose that outcome.

But deterrence is not a mathematical equation. It is a psychological contest shaped by escalation ladders, perceived options, and credibility.

Russia’s advantage is not merely numerical. It is doctrinal. Moscow retains a substantial stockpile of lower yield, non-strategic nuclear weapons, designed to threaten limited use in order to coerce an opponent and shape escalation.13 Britain and France, by contrast, have overwhelmingly strategic postures. That asymmetry creates a dangerous grey zone in which Russia can threaten limited nuclear use while betting that Europe would hesitate to respond in kind.

The hardest challenge is not capability but credibility.

Would Britain launch nuclear weapons to defend Estonia? We say yes. Would Moscow believe it? More pointedly, would Moscow believe Britain would act even if the United States opposed or withheld support?

This is the dilemma identified by European strategists and institutions such as Bruegel and others analysing post American extended deterrence.14 Smaller nuclear states face a sharper escalation problem. Britain is a densely populated island. France is compact and highly centralised. A nuclear exchange would be existential for both. Russia, by contrast, has greater geographic depth and a broader, more graduated toolkit. That reality shapes adversary calculations. Moscow may gamble on hesitation, delay, or political fracture.

Deterrence fails not when intentions change, but when belief does.

This is why confidence in the American guarantee has mattered so much. The United States can absorb damage and continue to fight. Its credibility rests not only on resolve, but on scale. Europe does not have that luxury.

In July 2025, during a state visit by President Macron, Britain and France signed what became known as the Northwood Declaration. It passed with little public debate. Strategically, it was momentous. For the first time, Britain and France committed to coordinate their nuclear forces in response to threats affecting their vital interests, with language intended to signal that there is no extreme threat to Europe that would not engage them both.15

This was not a merger of deterrents. But it was a clear signal that Europe’s nuclear powers were preparing for a world in which American guarantees could no longer be assumed to be unconditional. Northwood marked a shift from parallel postures to shared intent.

Similar conversations are taking place, more quietly, in Europe’s capitals, including public debate in Germany about whether Franco British capabilities could play a larger role in European deterrence.16 This is not an attempt to replace NATO. It is an attempt to insure against the weakening of the assumption that has underpinned it.

What can be done

Amongst these changes, there are no silver bullets but there are choices.

First, Britain must ensure its deterrent is unquestionably reliable. Missile test failures, submarine availability gaps, and skills shortages erode confidence.² That means sustained investment in the deterrent, and clear delivery against commitments already made, including the UK’s warhead programme and submarine renewal. A deterrent doubted by its owner is already failing.

Second, deeper coordination with France now looks necessary for both political and operational credibility. That does not mean proliferation. It means shared planning assumptions, coordinated exercising, and clear consultation mechanisms so that adversaries face fewer ambiguities about how Britain and France would respond under pressure. Northwood is a start. It is not yet a system.¹⁵

Third, Britain must be honest about the limits of nuclear weapons. They deter nuclear attack. They do not deter cyber operations, sabotage, election interference, or economic coercion. Russia and China operate below the threshold precisely because they know nuclear weapons are irrelevant there. Deterrence in the grey zone requires resilience, redundancy, and conventional strength, not slogans.

Finally, Britain must resist the temptation to treat nuclear weapons as a substitute for conventional capability. They are not. They are an insurance policy against catastrophe, not a tool for everyday defence. If the only credible response to aggression is nuclear annihilation, then deterrence becomes less credible, not more.

What ultimately matters is whether potential adversaries believe that Europe’s nuclear powers know exactly what they are prepared to do, and exactly what they are not. Deterrence rests on clarity, credibility, and confidence. Ambiguity, once a strength, is becoming a liability.

We are approaching a moment when assumptions forged in the twentieth century will be tested in the twenty first. The question is whether Britain adapts before that test arrives, or learns the hard way that deterrence only works when it is believed.

16

CSIS, Can France and the United Kingdom Replace the U.S. Nuclear Umbrella?, March 2025: https://www.csis.org/analysis/can-france-and-united-kingdom-replace-us-nuclear-umbrella.

Where we are now

In the summer of 2023, artillery accounted for 90 percent of battlefield casualties in Ukraine. Eighteen months later, drones account for somewhere between 70 and 80 percent.1 That is not a gradual evolution in how wars are fought. It is a rupture.

The shift has happened in real time, under constant observation, and at a pace that should unsettle anyone responsible for Britain’s defence. What we’re watching in Ukraine isn’t a niche capability maturing on the margins. It’s the centre of gravity of modern warfare moving decisively away from traditional platforms and towards mass autonomy, and attrition.

The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins was recently taken inside a secret Ukrainian drone factory. What he found was not a cavernous weapons plant, but something closer to a university lab. Women in their twenties tended rows of 3D printers. Music played in the background. The factory produces around a thousand drones a day, each costing roughly five hundred dollars. In one video shown to Filkins, a drone plunges into a Russian TOS-1 heavy flamethrower system, a platform worth several million dollars, and destroys it completely. As the factory manager put it, one of their drones costs a tiny fraction of what it destroys.2 That is the advantage.

In 2024, Ukraine produced approximately two million drones. Around 96 percent of all drones used by its armed forces were domestically made.3 By the end of 2025, production had reached 4.5 million, more than doubling in a single year.4 These are not exquisite systems designed to survive. They are cheap, disposable, and built to be lost. Ukrainian commanders have learned that a thousand adequate drones matter more than ten perfect ones.

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The human cost of this shift is staggering. Russia has now suffered close to a million casualties in its invasion of Ukraine. According to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, roughly 80 percent of those losses have been inflicted by drones.5 This is not just about frontline skirmishes.

Drones now also account for more civilian casualties than any other weapon. A United Nations Human Rights Commission report recently concluded that, along a 185-mile stretch of the Dnipro River, Russian drones are part of “systematically coordinated actions designed to drive Ukrainians out of their homes,” a crime against humanity. One local resident told investigators, “We are hit every day. Drones fly at any time, morning, evening, day or night, constantly.”6

In June 2025, Ukraine launched the most audacious long-range drone attack in modern history. More than a hundred drones struck targets deep inside Russia, as far away as Siberia, only a few hundred miles from the Chinese border, damaging or destroying around twenty military aircraft. The drones were smuggled into Russia in pieces, assembled, and loaded onto trucks by a fake logistics company without the drivers’ knowledge. They flew from locations up to 2,500 miles inside Russian territory.

This was a stunning example of the new tech capability, shrinking Russia’s vaunted strategic depth without sending an army across the border. Austria’s foreign minister, Alexander Schallenberg, called it “the Oppenheimer moment of our generation”.7 The analogy is not hyperbole. Just as nuclear weapons rewrote the logic of great power conflict, cheap autonomous systems are rewriting the logic of conventional war. Britain is watching this revolution from the sidelines.

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How did we get here?

Ukraine is not simply using drones. It is reorganising the battlefield around them.

Along the front line, Ukrainian forces are creating a 15-kilometre-deep unmanned kill zone, with plans to extend it to 40 kilometres. Within that space, movement is detected, classified, and targeted automatically as partnership with companies like Palantir is transforming the understanding of the battlespace. More than 70 types of unmanned ground vehicles have been tested, performing tasks from reconnaissance to logistics and evacuating wounded soldiers under fire.8

At sea, the transformation has been even more dramatic. Ukraine entered the war with a negligible navy. It now possesses one of the most innovative maritime strike capabilities in the world. Magura naval drones, small low-profile vessels made of fibreglass and polyethylene, have repeatedly struck Russian warships. In early 2024, Magura wolf packs, inspired by World War 2 U-boat commanders, sank five Russian vessels in a matter of weeks.9 The rest of the Black Sea Fleet retreated from Sevastopol and dispersed. By March 2025, Russia agreed to a ceasefire covering large parts of the Black Sea. They didn’t have a choice.

These techniques are not dissimilar to those of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Fast boats with explosives that will harass and outmanoeuvre larger vessels have been normal in the Persian Gulf for years. The difference is that the Black Sea capabilities are unmanned.

More remarkably still, Magura drones shot down two Russian Su-30 fighter jets.10 It was the first time in history that combat aircraft had been destroyed by maritime drones. The implications for air defence, naval protection, and the survivability of high-value platforms are profound.

The technological curve is steepening. Half of all Ukrainian drones procured in 2025 are intended to have some form of AI guidance, up from less than one percent previously. These systems can identify targets and attack without continuous human control. This is no longer science fiction. It is happening on a battlefield three hours’ flight from London.

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The electronic warfare contest is equally revealing. Russian forces are highly effective at jamming, to the point where only around 30 percent of Ukrainian drones make it through Russian defences.11 Ukraine has responded by equipping drones with thermal sensors that take control in the final approach. Russia has countered with fibre-optic guided drones, controlled through physical cables running back to the operator. The cables snag like spiders’ webs across fields and on trees and power lines, but they cannot be jammed. They work.

In turn, Ukraine has engineered countermeasures: rotating barbed wire traps to snare the filaments as they drag along the ground, as well as drone interceptors that can knock the un-jammable drones out of the sky. Each breakthrough is quickly met with a response, an echo of the war of attrition seen in mud on the ground.

Perhaps most striking of all is how this ecosystem is managed. Ukraine runs a gamified digital platform where soldiers upload videos of drone strikes and earn points. Six points for an infantryman, forty for a tank, fifty for a rocket battery.12 Those points can be redeemed in an online marketplace for more drones. War has been turned into a feedback loop of data, incentives, and rapid adaptation.

This feedback loop now extends to foreign companies. According to Kateryna Bondar, a former Ukrainian government advisor, some Ukrainian units have begun charging Western defence firms a fee to operate their drones in battle. In return, the companies receive reams of real-world data that cannot be replicated on a test range. Ukraine has become Europe’s living laboratory for the future of warfare.13

Britain’s Strategic Defence Review acknowledges that something fundamental has changed. It commits to creating a Defence Innovation organisation and ringfences 10 percent of equipment spending for emerging technologies. It calls for a digital targeting web linking sensors, shooters, and decision-makers across all domains, crewed and uncrewed. The Army is supposed to become ten times more lethal.

This vision is already being tested. Last spring, 3,000 soldiers of the UK’s 4th Light Brigade, the Black Rats, deployed to Estonia for a NATO’s Exercise Hedgehog. It wasn’t the 69-ton battle tanks, Apache helicopters, or truck-mounted rocket launchers that made a difference, but an invisible automated intelligence network, conceived and assembled in just four months, known as Project ASGARD.

“ASGARD helps double our lethality and exponentially reduces the time to see, decide, and strike. What took hours, now takes minutes,” according to the Chief of the General Staff, the head of the British Army, General Sir Roly Walker.14

What it does is simple: connecting everything that looks for targets with everything that shoots at them through a single, shared electronic brain.

Reconnaissance drones scan the ground so that when a tank is detected, it transmits the image and location directly to whatever can destroy it: an artillery cannon, another tank, or an armed loitering munition drone. The soldiers responsible for each weapon interface with the targeting web through Samsung smartphones selecting targeting options based on the probability of kill.

British officials claim the targeting web’s kill-chain, from first detection to strike decision, could take less than a minute. It is slated to be completed by 2027. Germany plans to deploy its own targeting web, Uranus KI, as early as 2026.15

On paper, this sounds like recognition of reality. In practice, the picture is muddier.

The Ministry of Defence has begun to move. The government has spent around £2 billion on 30,000 first-person view drones, £1 billion on new air defence systems, and £316 million to accelerate the DragonFire directed energy weapon programme by five years.16 These are not trivial sums. But they sit alongside the reality that much recent defence spending has been absorbed by inflation, accommodation costs, and nuclear modernisation.

The Defence Investment Plan, intended to set out spending priorities for the next decade, was due last autumn. It has still not appeared.

The review itself admits that previous attempts to create integrated digital networks have failed. That should raise alarm bells. General Walker already had a target to double Army combat power by 2027 and double it again by 2030.17 How that ambition maps onto a claim of being ten times more lethal has not been explained. The Defence Uncrewed Systems Centre is meant to be operational by February 2026. That is weeks away. It remains unclear whether it will be an engine of rapid delivery or simply another committee with a modern name.

Meanwhile, the British Army currently fields just 14 modern self-propelled artillery guns.18 Fourteen. In a war where massed fires once dominated and are now being overtaken by drones, Britain risks having neither.

The scale of the challenge is staggering. EU Defence and Space Commissioner Andrius Kubilius has estimated that in the event of a wider war with Russia, the EU would need three million drones annually just to hold Lithuania, a country of 2.9 million people, less than 1/3 of one percent of NATO’s population.19

European defence firms are scaling up, but the gap remains vast. The German startup Helsing says its first factory in southern Germany can produce 1,000 drones a month, roughly six per hour. At that pace, it would take a year to fill Germany’s current order. But Helsing now argues that Germany alone should maintain a stockpile of 200,000 of its HX-2 strike drones to tide it over for the first two months of a Russian invasion.20

The deepest obstacle is not technology. It is culture.

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British defence procurement is built around long-term programmes, fixed requirements, and established suppliers. That model provides stability, but it resists speed and change. It struggles in an environment where old systems, even the latest drones, are obsolete in days, not decades. That’s a massive change: defence procurement has to shift from periodic acquisition to continuous acquisition.

Ukraine has shown what happens when necessity forces change. New drone variants are designed, built, tested, and deployed in weeks. Failed designs are discarded without sentiment. Success is measured in effect, not pedigree.

But not all claims of progress should be taken at face value. Bohdan Sas, founder of the Ukrainian drone company Buntar Aerospace, told MIT Technology Review that he finds it amusing when Western companies claim to have achieved “super-fancy recognition and target acquisition” in testing, only to reveal that the test site was an open field and a target in the centre.

“It is not really how it works in reality,” Sas says. “In reality, everything is really well hidden.” Russian forces have reportedly deactivated the autonomous functionalities of their Lancet loitering munitions when AI fails in real-world conditions.21

Contrast the UK with Silicon Valley firm Anduril. Its founder, Palmer Luckey, described building an autonomous underwater vehicle capable of travelling a thousand miles without surfacing in a matter of days.22 Traditional naval procurement would take years. The Pentagon has responded with its Replicator initiative, aimed at mass-producing drones for a potential conflict over Taiwan. Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of US Indo-Pacific Command, has said he intends to “turn the Taiwan Strait into an unmanned hellscape”.23

Even in the United States, officials acknowledge the scale of the challenge. Former National Security Adviser under President Joe Biden, Jake Sullivan, has described rebuilding the defence industrial base as “a generational task”.24 Britain’s industrial base is smaller, older, and under even greater strain.

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What can be done

Preparing demands more than we have done so far and that means rethinking how we buy, not just what we buy.

First, the Defence Uncrewed Systems Centre must be empowered to deliver at speed. If it becomes another layer of governance rather than a fast track to the frontline, it will fail. Its measure of success should be how quickly new systems reach combat units, not how neatly processes are followed.

Second, Britain must learn directly from Ukraine. That means drawing the lessons embedded British officers can learn from Ukrainian drone units and bringing Ukrainian engineers into British programmes. Ukraine has accumulated more practical knowledge about modern warfare in three years than most NATO armies have in three decades. That experience is priceless.

Third, we must confront the implications for legacy platforms. If a £100 million system can be destroyed by a £1,000 drone, the economics of war have changed. That does not mean abandoning sophisticated capabilities, but it does mean rethinking their strategic value and how that value is protected. At some point, we need to accept that the world has changed, and if these ratios do not change, we will be destroyed without any ability to respond.

Instead of building exquisite weaponry costing hundreds of millions, modern war, including the counter insurgencies we fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, favours low-cost, high-volume systems that are effectively disposable. The question is whether Britain’s procurement culture, industrial base, and political leadership can adapt fast enough. The reason for writing articles like this one is to ensure that we have a public debate on the threats we face and the reality of the challenge of retooling our defence.

Ukraine is showing what adaptation looks like when survival is at stake. Britain may not have the luxury of learning slowly.

24

The American Presidency Project, Remarks by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan on Fortifying the U.S. Defense Industrial Base, December 2024. https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-national-security-advisor-jake-sullivan-fortifying-the-us-defense-industrial-base.

Where we are now

In an exercise preparing for a peer-on-peer conflict, how the military describe a war against a state like Russia, the British Army ran out of ammunition within eight days. Not eight months. Not eight weeks. Eight days.

That is not a leak or a scare story. It was confirmed in public by General Ben Hodges, the former commander of US Army Europe, 1 and it was not denied by Britain’s Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS). Instead, the explanation offered was procedural. Ammunition stockpiles, the CDS said, are calculated based on assumptions about rates of fire, expected duration of conflict, and operational priorities.2

What was left unsaid is that those assumptions were designed for a different era.

The war in Ukraine has demonstrated that high intensity state on state conflict is neither short nor decisive but industrial and attritional. Ukrainian forces fire thousands of artillery rounds a day. At points in 2023 and 2024, Russia was firing more than ten thousand shells every 24 hours. By comparison, the British Army’s stockpile of 155mm artillery ammunition is widely assessed to be sufficient for little more than a week of sustained fighting at Ukrainian rates of fire.3

Britain is not alone in this. Most European armies face similar shortages. When the Ukraine war started, Germany’s parliamentary commissioner for the armed forces warned that ammunition stocks would last only one to two days in wartime.4 France’s parliamentary defence work on munitions has also warned about the thinness of stocks and the scale of reconstitution required for high intensity war.5 Even the United States, with far deeper reserves, has struggled to replenish ammunition after supplying Ukraine and Israel simultaneously.6

But Britain’s problem is compounded by the gap between rhetoric and reality.

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The Prime Minister has said the Strategic Defence Review is fully funded. Senior military leaders have said something rather different. In January 2026, the Chief of the Air Staff told Parliament that the review had not been properly costed. The funding gap itself is classified, but its existence is now widely accepted across Whitehall.

Treasury linked estimates and independent fiscal analysis suggest that meeting existing commitments to AUKUS, the Global Combat Air Programme, and nuclear modernisation would require defence spending materially above the current plan, with some analysis putting the pressure point in the 3 to 3.5 percent of GDP range.7 The government’s public commitment is to reach 2.5 percent by 2027.

Independent analysis has put hard numbers on what that difference means. Work published by the Financial Times, drawing on EY modelling, concluded that Britain would need around £800 billion in additional funding by 2040 to meet NATO’s proposed 5 percent defence spending benchmark. 8 Even achieving a 3 percent level would leave a combined funding gap of £1.7 trillion once unfunded health, energy, and transport projects are included. Defence is no longer a marginal budget line. It is reshaping our country’s entire capital agenda.

Yet the immediate picture is even more troubling. According to the Financial Times, Britain has spent little additional money on its conventional forces in the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House. 9 Despite repeated claims of the biggest sustained increase in defence spending since the Cold War, defence economists and industry executives warn that most new funding has been absorbed by inflation, housing costs, and the nuclear programme.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has highlighted that because so much of the budget is effectively committed, spending on core equipment is now a real area of concern.10 The nuclear enterprise alone has been reported as costing £10.9 billion in 2024 to 2025, close to a fifth of the defence budget.11 Treasury facing parliamentary briefings show a real terms squeeze in the planned defence budget in the mid 2020s before the larger uplift later in the decade, meaning that in practical terms Britain is contracting before it grows.12

That gap represents tens of billions of pounds. And no one has yet explained honestly how it will be closed.

How did we get here?

When the Cold War ended, Britain reaped what was heralded as the peace dividend. Defence spending fell from over 4 percent of GDP in the late 1980s to under 2.5 percent by the early 2000s.13 The Army shrank dramatically over the same period, and the regular force now sits around the 70,000 level.14 Defence equipment programmes were stretched out to save money and stockpiles were run down.

At the time, this seemed reasonable. The Soviet Union had collapsed and Russia was expected to integrate into the international system. China had joined the World Trade Organisation and was expected to liberalise as it grew richer. War between industrial powers appeared not just unlikely, but obsolete.

Britain’s wars reflected that worldview. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya demanded highly trained professional forces, precision weapons, intelligence, and air power. They did not require mass mobilisation or sustained industrial output. Ammunition was consumed slowly. Equipment losses were limited. Supply chains could be global, just in time, and commercially optimised.

We could rely on allies, particularly the United States, for strategic lift, satellite coverage, and stockpiles. Why pay for our own expensive depth when we could draw on an ally in a moment of need.

Ukraine has destroyed those assumptions.

That conflict has consumed ammunition at a scale not seen since 1945. Western countries have been forced to relearn lessons that had faded from memory. Wars are won not only by technology, but by production. The side that can manufacture more shells, more drones, more vehicles, faster and for longer gains not only advantage but victory.

Russia, despite sanctions, has expanded defence industrial output. Credible assessments argue that Russian shell production has surged and that Europe’s and America’s combined output has struggled to keep pace, at least in key munitions categories. 15 By contrast, European production lines were hollowed out decades ago and restarting them has taken years rather than months.

Britain’s industrial base reflects that legacy. It is excellent at producing small numbers of highly sophisticated systems and poor at turning out large volumes of basic equipment quickly. Moreover, we lack the ability to pivot domestic manufacturing at speed. Surge capacity does not exist because the factories, skills, and supply chains were allowed to wither.

The transition in artillery illustrates the point. The British Army is operating 14 Archer systems as an interim replacement, with a longer-term Mobile Fires Platform solution now being pursued.16 The problem is not that Archer is inadequate. It is that the scale is inadequate, and the timetable for permanent replacement is long.

There are signs of what recovery could look like. In Sheffield, on the site of a former steelworks, BAE Systems has invested in new production capacity linked to artillery supply chains.17 Nearby, Sheffield Forgemasters is benefiting from a £1.3 billion government funded recapitalisation programme over ten years.18 These investments matter. But they remain exceptions in a system built for peace, not war.

Perhaps the most alarming revelation is not about ammunition or budgets, but planning.

The Government War Book, once the interdepartmental plan for the transition from peace to war, is now sitting in the National Archives and Whitehall has been relearning lessons from it rather than operating a modern equivalent.19 If Britain faced a serious crisis tomorrow, it would be improvising.

What can be done

The first requirement is honesty about money. The government says the Strategic Defence Review is fully funded. Senior military leaders say it is not. Defence policy built on ambiguity is policy built to fail.

The second priority is munitions. The government has committed £6 billion for munitions and announced plans for “always on” production capacity.20 But parliamentary scrutiny has repeatedly warned that replenishment and sustainability require long term contracts, predictable demand, and industrial scale that cannot be conjured in an emergency.21 The difference between a credible stockpile and a paper stockpile is not a line in a spreadsheet. It is metal on shelves and shifts in factories.

The third priority is people. Official personnel statistics show the services remain below required strength in key areas and that retention and recruitment pressures persist.22 Equipment can be purchased. Experience cannot.

Industry faces its own cliff edge. Just one example comes from Yeovil where about 10% of working-age adults are employed by the defence contractor Leonardo. Without a firm commitment on helicopter procurement Leonardo has warned that those jobs are at risk and unions highlight the potential loss of specialist skills that cannot be replaced.23 Capability is not just platforms. It is the people who know how to design, build, maintain, and fight with them.

Eight days is not a theoretical metric. It is the consequence of choices made over decades and choices still being deferred. If Britain wants to deter war rather than fight one unprepared, those choices must now be confronted honestly. Deterrence is not built on aspiration. It is built on stockpiles, factories, people, and plans.

Eight days should be enough to focus minds.

23

Financial Times reporting on the Yeovil risk and industrial warnings (paywalled): https://www.ft.com/content/209b4023-e6c0-408b-b2c6-821fc360212c

Where we are now

On Christmas Day 2024, while most of Britain was absorbed by family rituals and repeats on television, a Russian linked tanker dragged its anchor across the seabed between Finland and Estonia. It tore through a major cross-border electricity interconnector and four communications cables. Power was disrupted and data traffic was severed. Within weeks, investigators had established that this was no accident. Sabotage, not poor seamanship, had been carried out in a region already experiencing a surge in similar incidents.

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In November and December 2025 alone, seven undersea cables were cut in the Baltic Sea.1 The pattern was unmistakable. Commercial vessels with opaque ownership structures lingered over sensitive infrastructure, slowed unexpectedly, or altered course in ways that defied normal maritime practice. European navies and coast guards began to respond, but only after the damage had already been done.

This activity offshore mirrors a broader escalation on land and online. Russian hostile actions across Europe almost tripled between 2023 and 2024.2 In the United Kingdom, the National Cyber Security Centre handled 430 cyber security incidents in the most recent reporting year, up from 371 the year before.3 More striking still was the sharp rise in attacks classified as nationally significant, meaning incidents capable of disrupting essential services, the economy, or the functioning of government.

These numbers do not capture the human consequences. In June 2024, a Russian linked criminal group carried out a ransomware attack on major London hospitals. Operations were cancelled, blood transfusions were delayed, and diagnostic services were suspended. Large volumes of sensitive patient data were stolen and later released online.4 This was not espionage in the shadows but sabotage carried out in full view.

Senior figures in Britain’s security establishment have been unusually blunt about what this means. General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, the First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, has warned publicly that Russia’s deep-sea sabotage capability now includes specialised assets designed to interfere with seabed infrastructure. Russian intelligence vessels have been repeatedly observed loitering above cables linking the United Kingdom and Ireland. As he has noted, the difficulty lies in distinguishing provocation from preparation until it is too late and damage has already occurred.5

The intelligence services are equally clear. The Chief of MI6, Blaise Metreweli, has accused Moscow of deliberately testing Britain through what are known as grey zone activities, including cyber-attacks, sabotage, and the harassment of airports and military sites using drones. The Defence Secretary has described the current threat environment as less predictable and more dangerous than at any point since the Cold War.

This threat is not confined to the maritime or digital space. British police have arrested individuals suspected of acting on behalf of Russian military intelligence in connection with plots involving incendiary devices at logistics facilities. German authorities have warned that similar devices, had they detonated aboard aircraft, could have caused catastrophic loss of life.6 These incidents were not occurring in Ukraine or on NATO’s eastern flank. They were unfolding in the heart of Europe.

Still, for most people, they barely register.

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How did we get here?

Should we be surprised? We live busy lives, and surely defence and security professionals are trained and resourced to anticipate and mitigate these risks?

The problem is that a dangerous gap has opened between elite understanding and public perception, and it has widened steadily over recent decades.

When the Cold War ended, Britain and its allies made a series of assumptions that felt reasonable at the time. Defence spending fell sharply across Europe. In the UK, it declined from over 4 percent of GDP in the late 1980s to around 2 percent by the early 2000s.7 Industrial capacity was allowed to atrophy. Stockpiles were run down. Intelligence agencies and armed forces were reoriented towards counter-terrorism and expeditionary operations in distant theatres.

This was hailed as the Peace Dividend. Russia was expected to integrate into the international system. China was expected to liberalise as it prospered. Globalisation was assumed to be both economically efficient and strategically stabilising.

That worldview shaped our infrastructure. Energy systems were designed for efficiency rather than resilience. Telecommunications networks prioritised speed and cost over redundancy. Undersea cables, which now carry more than 95 percent of intercontinental data traffic and underpin trillions of pounds in daily financial transactions,8 were treated as commercial assets rather than strategic ones.

The same logic applied to cyberspace. Digital systems were adopted at pace, often without serious consideration of how they might be exploited by hostile states. Responsibility for defence was fragmented across departments and agencies. Warning signs were noted, but rarely translated into sustained investment, because the threat felt abstract and distant.

Russia, by contrast, drew very different lessons from the end of the Cold War. It studied Western dependence on complex, interconnected systems and concluded that direct military confrontation was neither necessary nor desirable. Instead, it developed a doctrine of continuous competition below the threshold of war. Cyber operations, sabotage, disinformation, and deniable proxies became tools for shaping the strategic environment without triggering a unified response.

After the cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 and the invasion of Georgia in 2008, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 should have shattered any remaining illusions. Instead, much of Europe treated it as an aberration. Defence spending ticked up slowly and unevenly. Procurement systems remained ponderous. Industrial output stayed optimised for peacetime efficiency rather than wartime scale.

The result is an uncomfortable paradox. Britain remains one of the world’s leading military powers, with highly capable forces and world-class intelligence services, but it is increasingly vulnerable at home. The foundations of national life were never designed to withstand sustained hostile pressure, nor to compensate for deep dependencies on hostile powers, particularly China, for critical components and supply chains.

When senior military leaders warn privately about this, they often encounter the same response. Russia is not really going to invade, is it? China will not really stop selling us the components we need, will it?

The answer is that they do not need to. Many of the objectives they seek can be achieved by disruption alone. Undermining confidence, raising costs, and forcing democratic governments into constant crisis management does not require war. It requires confusion and worry.

That is the reality of modern conflict. It is not announced. It is experienced.

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What can be done

Responding to this challenge requires urgency, realism, and honesty. There are no silver bullets, but there are clear priorities.

The first is to harden nationally vital assets. Undersea data cables, power interconnectors, ports, and data centres must be treated as critical national infrastructure. That requires persistent monitoring, better intelligence sharing with allies, and clear lines of responsibility for protection and response. The North Sea and the approaches to the British Isles are among the most densely wired regions on earth. They should also be among the most closely watched.

The government has committed funding to homeland defence, but the scale of the task is far larger than headline figures suggest. Protecting a single major interconnector or offshore energy installation can cost tens of millions of pounds once surveillance, redundancy, and rapid repair capability are factored in. Prioritisation is essential, and so is speed. At present there is no single department or minister responsible. Energy, Transport, Defence, the Home Office, and the Environment all have a stake. That has left a chorus of voices with no conductor.

There are encouraging examples to build on. Northern European states are increasingly pooling maritime surveillance and patrols. Industrial cooperation is expanding, including joint shipbuilding programmes that allow multiple yards across allied countries to produce and maintain the same classes of vessels. This increases resilience, reduces costs, and ensures that no single nation becomes a bottleneck.

The second priority is cyber defence. Britain needs a genuinely unified cyber command, capable of coordinating defensive operations across government, critical national infrastructure, and where necessary the private sector. The planned Cyber and Electromagnetic Command is a step in the right direction, but it must be empowered from the outset with clear authority and adequate resources.

The lesson from Ukraine is that cyber conflict is fast, adaptive, and relentless. Fragmentation is a liability. Speed matters as much as sophistication. Defensive resilience across health, transport, energy, and finance is as vital as offensive capability.

The third and most difficult task is public understanding. Defence spending does not compete with public services. It underpins them. Hospitals cannot function without power and data. Banks and businesses cannot operate without the cables that keep networks connected. Everyday life depends on infrastructure that is now threatened.

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That reality needs to be explained honestly. Not to alarm, but to inform. Democratic societies cannot sustain the level of investment and institutional reform required for defence without public consent. That consent rests on trust, and trust depends on transparency.

Russia, China, and even nations we are not confronting directly understand this dynamic well. Their actions are designed not just to disrupt systems, but to test political will. Every unanswered provocation is a data point. Every delayed response is an encouragement.

Britain still has choices. We have allies and capabilities. What we cannot afford is complacency. This hidden war is already under way. The question is whether we acknowledge it in time to shape its outcome, or continue to notice it only when the lights go out.

Endnotes

8

International Telecommunication Union, Submarine cable resilence. https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/backgrounders/Pages/submarine-cable-resilience.aspx.