Today, the leaders of the most powerful alliance the world has ever known gather at the Beştepe Presidential Complex in Ankara. This is the second NATO summit Turkey has hosted and the first since members of the Alliance committed themselves to spending five percent of national income on defence. The agenda sets out the obvious ambition: more investment, more industrial production, and continued support for Ukraine. But beneath the bravado sits a harder question, and it is the one Europe has spent months avoiding: What happens next?

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Europe today is living in a more uncertain age than at any time since the end of the Second World War and one that allies on all sides of the Atlantic have failed to face clearly. Has the American guarantee that has underwritten our security for 80 years become conditional? If it has, will those who partnered with Washington from D-Day to the fall of the Berlin Wall step up? Most starkly perhaps, will the two pillars of European defence: France and the UK, finally convince their people that the holiday from history is over?

Each demands an answer. The Trump administration’s National Defence Strategy states plainly that the war in Ukraine is Europe’s responsibility. A planned drawdown of American forces from Germany has sharpened the burden-shifting argument that will dominate the coffee stops and marginal conversations in Ankara. And the realisation in Whitehall that Britain’s so-called Defence Investment Plan has fooled no one, the document has been read accurately in capitals across the continent, and amongst our enemies: the UK will be spending nowhere near what was promised.

The United States may not be leaving the Alliance (yet), but it is leaving Europe in no doubt that the defence of the continent is now up to us. Washington’s stockpiles, its attention, and most importantly, its patience are committed elsewhere. Yesterday, for the first time in two years, China fired a submarine launched intercontinental ballistic missile into the South Pacific. That alone will draw US eyes away from allies gathered in Turkey.

For Europe, the more immediate threat is closer to home.

Russia has turned itself into a war economy producing more weapons at lower cost than it has for a generation, despite losing more than a million men killed and wounded in the chaos of Ukraine. That’s destroying the state but a regime organised around conflict won’t demobilise quietly, it’s politics, industry and propaganda can’t spin that fast. So if the conflict in Ukraine winds down, if the war ends or is frozen, where will the Kremlin redirect the energies of a nation? That will be a dangerous moment for Europe. A cornered regime like Putin’s could choose escalation abroad as a means of distraction at home.

Have the rehearsals for this theatre-shift already begun? In September, 19 Russian drones crossed into Polish airspace, forcing a NATO unit to fire directly at Russian targets for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. Perhaps even that was not the first act.

Russian ships and submarines of the GUGI (Russia’s Deep Sea Research, meaning espionage, Unit) have been mapping cables and pipelines that connect our economy, prompting the UK Defence Secretary to tell Moscow publicly, “we see you, we see your activity over our cables and pipelines”. With more than 99 percent of our international data crossing the seabed we don’t need an invasion to cause a catastrophe. An anchor dragged over the seabed on a moonless night could do it. They may already have started.

In March the leaders of Europe’s Joint Expeditionary Force, a deployable grouping of ten countries, warned of the growing presence of unidentified drones over airfields, ports, and infrastructure, and of the need to detect and intercept them.

We all know what could happen next: a drone strike on Poland’s logistics hubs; a cable cut in the Western Approaches; a vessel in the North Sea launching drones against electricity targets in East Anglia, or even a fuel depot in Normandy. None of these would be irrational for a Russian president needing a distraction and organising a crisis.

Some are deniable, all are cheap, and all could fall below the threshold that would force NATO leaders to invoke Article 5, the part of the deal that recognises that an attack on one is an attack on all, and that alone would be a test of our commitment to each other. What is clear is that Russia is preparing the ground by building new bases and expanding old ones along its northern frontier with NATO even while its army bleeds into the fields of Ukraine.

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So the question for the allies in Ankara is not whether Europe faces a threat but whether we have the will or even the means to confront one and, in the confrontation, deter any ambitions to use us as a target of his political hopes. Here the truth hurts. Credibility is what hard power buys you, and our choice, as demonstrated in every election since the 1990s has been to spend on welfare, and that has cost us as a credible warfare power.

Moscow will have seen what happened on 2 March when an Iranian-designed Shahed drone struck a hangar at RAF Akrotiri, our sovereign base on Cyprus. That’s a drone costing tens of thousands of dollars penetrating the defences of a G7 nuclear power with ease and almost no response.

It wasn’t the only incident, and the lesson from the Persian Gulf is not just about capability but economics. In the opening stages of Operation Epic Fury, Patriot interceptors costing around $4 million each, and THAAD interceptors costing roughly four times as much, were fired at drones costing less than a family car.

While the systems worked and the crews behaved with the skill and discipline that those of us who have served recognise from a long way off, the equation behind their effort was an unsustainable trade.

The data bears that out. In the 39 days before the first ceasefire, the US expended nearly half its entire Patriot interceptor inventory and more than half its THAAD interceptors, maybe even 80 percent of the THAAD stockpile. Roughly a third of the Tomahawk arsenal was fired, and analysts believe it may take four to five years to replace what was used in just seven weeks.

Compared with the roughly 700 Patriot interceptors Ukraine fired defending itself across an entire four-month winter, the US and its partners used more than 800 similar weapons in the Middle East in just three days, according to President Zelenskyy. That’s putting pressure on the same factories and in the same global queue that saw Lockheed Martin make 600 in 2025.

That’s the truth of what we face in Ankara. American munitions no longer stretch to cover the Gulf, the Pacific, Ukraine and Europe all at once, and Washington has been clear, in its strategy documents and its budget requests which it will prioritise and what burdens it expects us to bear. The UK, France, and others are talking as though they’re listening but acting as though we can just keep plodding on.

Look at l’Armée de l’Air. French law requires the air force to maintain a fleet of 185 Rafales to meet its operational contracts, but sales to Greece and Croatia mean the planned fleet is cut to around 117, and the Sénat concluded the target had become unreachable on existing plans. The Assemblée Nationale’s own rapporteurs, Matthieu Bloch and Jean-Louis Thiériot, found French long-range strike hollowed out, with SCALP missile stocks depleted by transfers to Ukraine. They were right to focus on today’s war but wrong to forget tomorrow’s. The equipment has not been replaced, and their artillery force is reported to be able to sustain a high-intensity war for roughly six weeks.

Britain’s in no position to boast. The Royal Navy planned twelve Type 45 destroyers and built six. At the start of this year, three of the six were operational. As the Iran war began, MPs asked whether a Type 45 could even be deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean; the Ministry of Defence was silent but no ship sailed for more than a week. And in testimony to the House of Commons Defence Committee that no minister has disputed, the UK’s Chief of Defence said we could only sustain major combat operations for approximately eight days.

Eight days. That is it.

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These are not accidents. They are the consequence of decisions, made and remade every year, to protect budgets designed for peace not those needed to defend us in war.

Britain now spends around £110 billion a year on debt interest, against a defence budget that will not reach £74 billion until the end of the decade. France spends roughly 14 percent of GDP on pensions, the third highest share in the OECD, 25 and around 2 percent on defence. A ratio of 7:1, renewed annually, in favour of the past. We’re not alone, but we’re barely working together.

Five weeks before this summit, Europe demonstrated the problem in a single decision.

On 8 June, Germany’s Chancellor Merz and France’s President Macron abandoned the fighter at the heart of the Future Combat Air System, the Franco-German-Spanish programme that was to be Europe’s flagship, valued at up to €100 billion. The proximate cause was the inability of Airbus and Dassault to cooperate on equal terms, a corporate dispute that had run for years over workshare and intellectual property.

The reality was that the two nations wanted different aircraft. France needs a jet to carry its nuclear deterrent and land on a carrier. Merz questioned whether Germany needed a manned sixth-generation fighter at all, and certainly not one for nuclear or maritime operations. After nearly a decade, and against every political effort to save it, the end had the feeling of a mercy killing.

None of us should take pleasure in the failure of a European defence programme, but FCAS is a demonstration, delivered at the worst possible moment, that Europeans find it hard to work together on the systems that matter most. Different industrial policies mask a more fundamental challenge: different strategies. The Elysée’s global, maritime and African interests have no equivalent in the Kanzleramt’s continental focus.

The surviving flagship programme, the Global Combat Air Programme involves Britain, Italy and Japan and saw us sign a £4.6 billion development contract days before the NATO summit with the plan to field a fighter by 2035. The structure is different: a single joint company, Edgewing, holding design authority across three nations, rather than national champions stapled together and left to fight amongst themselves, but it goes further than that. China and Russia have focussed the minds of our respective strategic interests. None of us are frontline states and we each have a strong interest in similar stand-off weapons.

This logic also imposes discipline. Every additional partner dilutes the pooled interest that makes the programme focussed on those already in it, which is why the partners are rightly cautious about expansion, and why bolting half of Europe onto GCAP is no answer to the FCAS wreckage.

Nor is the answer a simple integration with the existing structures, too often designed to play politics not support our defence needs, as this weekend’s Financial Times explained.

France fought to keep the UK out of SAFE, the EU’s €150 billion rearmament loan fund, championing rules that require 65 percent of the value of funded equipment to originate in the single market, (including Norway, Iceland and Ukraine), with outsiders capped at 35 percent unless their government signs a defence pact with Brussels and pays a fee. Talks with London collapsed when the price of entry demanded reached into the billions leaving only Canada clearing both hurdles.

This isn’t just costing Britain. Even France has requested €16.2 billion from the fund but was left €1.1 billion short, because projects involving MBDA, the missile company jointly owned by Airbus, BAE Systems and Leonardo, failed the very eligibility rules France had written. Among the casualties: Storm Shadow and SCALP, the deep-strike missiles Ukraine has used to such effect, built on a 50:50 cross-Channel split. France’s protectionist rules have made a victim of itself.

This is l’Europe d’abord, rather than America First but the effect is the same. President Trump has been criticised, rightly, in Paris and London, for putting more focus on economic policy than defence interests. If that criticism is correct, it applies double to SAFE, after all, at least the US has the scale to deliver, no European nation could do the same.

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That leaves two-thirds of the EU’s arms contracts already going to American manufacturers, and the Washington’s ambassador to NATO criticising the protectionist language that cuts out allies, not just the US, but others including this summit’s host. Demanding that European rearmament be reserved for an industrial base that cannot yet produce what European armies need, at the speed they need it, is not strategic autonomy, it’s strategic vanity. Worse, up to €18 billion of the fund’s lending capacity now sits unused while Ukraine burns through interceptors with the US order books already full.

The shift needs to come from the recognition that the European Union does not speak for Europe, and certainly not every European NATO state. The system we build must be the one the whole of Europe actually needs, because our survival over the next ten years matters more than precedence within the EU over the next ten months.

What would that mean? Where would it start? It begins with resilience.

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In 1363, Edward III enacted the Archery Law. He required every able-bodied Englishman to practise with the longbow on Sundays and holidays with forbidding football and other games so there was time for it. The decree did not conjure the skill from nothing. England’s archers had already broken the flower of French chivalry at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers in 1356. What Edward did was turn a habit into a system, with the result that two generations later the population he had ordered to train every week were ready for the battles that were to come. When they met the French again at Agincourt, against an army that was, on every measure of premium and prestige, many times its strength, the archers carried the day.

France’s knights were the most expensive military asset in Europe with decades of training behind them and the finest arms and armour on the most carefully bred warhorses. The longbow was something any village workshop could bend into life. This was the medieval equivalent of a multi-million-dollar tank falling to a thousand-dollar drone. That’s the lesson others are learning, not just in Ukraine.

Today, a charity in Estonia is training anyone who wants to how to fly a drone and drop a grenade. The idea is not to have them all in uniform but to ensure that if Russia thinks about attacking the Baltic state again, Tallinn will have a ready-made insurgency.

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Russia itself is preparing along similar lines. Every child over the age of eight from St Petersburg to Vladivostok is being taught to fly drones and prepare for war. The lesson then and now was the same: wars are won by the countries that build the system, not just the weapon. Training, manufacturing and motivation are all essential to victory.

Too much of our procurement is politics not preparation.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Far from Mérignac and Barrow, in the workshops of Kyiv and Dnipro, Ukraine made and bought some four million drones last year and has set itself a target of seven million this year. Russia has also stepped up. Working from an Iranian version of a South African design, and with a supply chain that runs through China, Moscow is turning out 2,700 Shahed-type drones a month from the Alabuga complex alone.

The war in Ukraine has now produced a race between bowmen.

Instead of bidding for Patriot missiles it would find difficult to get, the Ukrainians are building a new class of weapon. Interceptor drones costing between $1,000 and $5,000, produced at rates reaching a thousand a day,35 from more than 150 local companies have again rebalanced the economics of war. A Shahed costs the Kremlin many times what the interceptor that destroys it costs Ukraine. By February the interceptors were destroying more than 70 percent of the Shaheds aimed at Kyiv, freeing the scarce Patriots for the ballistic missiles only they could stop.

This isn’t just defence; it’s a tax on the attacker. Every salvo launched imposes another burden that no sanctions lawyer in Moscow can route around, forcing ever more desperate alternatives.

It’s working. Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Syrskyi, confirmed in March that Russian battlefield losses had exceeded Russian recruitment for three consecutive months. In May, he confirmed something else: Ukrainian forces now conduct more offensive operations than Russia, for the first time since the invasion began. That is what a multi-node, cheap, fast-iterating industrial base delivers. It doesn’t just hold the line, it shapes the war.

Our own industrial map points to the same lesson, if only we would read it. After the Pentagon’s notorious “Last Supper” in 1993, the American defence industry contracted from fifty-one prime contractors to five. Europe was urged to do the same, merging champions across borders until a handful of firms carried the continent’s capacity. The plan was to compete with American scale in an industrial war that was assumed to follow the victory against the Soviet Union.

The effect was to create titans, but they alone are not the problem. The problem is the tier we failed to build around them: hundreds of smaller suppliers on outcome-linked contracts, multi-year orders paid on delivery, and certification cycles matched to a €3,000 drone rebuilt every six months rather than a $100 million aircraft flown for 30 years.

So the centre of gravity in Europe’s defence innovation has already moved to the people who understand it: those closest to Russia.

Estonia’s volunteer Defence League has stood up a dedicated drone unit, Kullisilm, Hawk’s Eye, built directly on Ukrainian experience. The country opened its first drone training centre at Nurmsi in April 2025, and this year’s Spring Storm exercise put around 500 drone operators into the field alongside 12,000 troops, with civilian manufacturers sent into the forest to test their designs in near-combat conditions. Most telling of all, in April, Tallinn cancelled a €500 million programme to replace its infantry fighting vehicles and redirected the money to drones, counter-drone systems and air defence. They looked at Ukraine and drew the obvious conclusion. Today, a nation of 1.3 million people is making choices that larger militaries in London, Paris and Berlin struggle to nail.

That’s not just because we’re slow, like FCAS, it’s because, between us we’ve got different strategic interests.

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Which brings me to what Europe should actually build, and to the community that should build it.

We’re lucky, that the heart of our new structure already exists. The Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), the UK-led coalition of ten northern European nations spanning the Nordics and Baltics, and including the Netherlands, has quietly become the workhorse of security from the High North to the Baltic Sea, watching the seas and seabed Russia is mapping and tracking the shadow fleet that funds their war.

Last November, the defence ministers of JEF member states signed an Enhanced Partnership with Ukraine, covering drones, undersea infrastructure, battlefield medicine and counter-disinformation, and agreed that Ukrainian units will take part in the JEF’s flagship exercises this year. Here, in embryo, is the thing Europe needs: not another institution with a flag and a building in Brussels, but a working community of the northern seas, bound by production and practice rather than by treaty theology.

Call it a new hansa, the old German word for a gang, call it a new Viking alliance, or just a northern league, the key is to learn to work together again without the constraints of bureaucracy. The Hanseatic League was never an empire and its success came through its openness. It was a network of trading cities that relied on each other to guarantee trust, shared security and prosperity as a common project. They were right.

Its modern equivalent is a defence-industrial league running from Reykjavik to Kyiv: common certification for drones and interceptors, so a system proven over Kherson can be fielded over Kent within weeks; joint procurement using Ukrainian speed of innovation, Ukrainian price points, and the scalability of major manufacturers encouraging capital and orders flowing to hundreds of firms. Ukraine would have to be a full member, not as the apprentice in this guild but the master.

The peoples of the northern seas have never been confined by them. A thousand years ago they traded and fought their way down the rivers of Europe to the greatest city they knew, and they gave it their own name: Miklagard, the Great City, the place we now call Istanbul. They did not besiege it into submission. They took service in it, and the Varangian Guard of northern warriors became the most trusted force of the empire whose capital it was. One of them, Halvdan, carved his name into the marble of Hagia Sophia, where it can still be read today.

The delegations flying into Turkey today travel a route the north has travelled before, and the lesson of the older journey is ready for this summit.

So here is what NATO’s leaders in Ankara should do:

First, be honest about the US commitment today, the uncertainty about tomorrow, and the pressures on Washington to look East. Now balance that with the reality of Europe’s capabilities right now. Neither France nor the UK are spending more than Spain in terms of conventional defence budgets, and it shows, but others, like Poland and Estonia are stepping up while Finland never stepped down.

Second, build fewer cathedrals and more chapels. We need to treat the collapse of projects like the Future Combat Air System not as an embarrassment but an opportunity. Defending workshare with national champions won’t work if we think we’ve got the scale of the US. Each country can encourage the innovation of the start-up creating a vast new tier of smaller producers building the cheap mass-produced equipment the Ukraine and Iran wars have shown are so decisive in combat, and for larger projects, companies with single design authority can take a lead so long as the strategic aim is negotiated clearly in advance.

Third, fix SAFE. Open the fund to the allies whose equipment European armies actually want to buy, starting with the British, Norwegian, Canadian and Korean industries, and stop penalising the Franco-British missiles Ukraine needs to protect itself tonight.

Fourth, build the Viking pillar inside the Alliance, with the Joint Expeditionary Force as its foundation and Ukraine as a founding member, tasked with creating a new shield wall. Drone innovation, the seabed security, and industrial acceleration can create a template from the committed core that the rest of NATO can adopt. It is the only version of burden-shifting that Washington will believe.

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There is a moment in the forge when the iron is red and malleable. For us, the chance is now. If we wait, remaining paralysed by process and determined to dither we will find that the iron goes cold missing the chance to restructure procurement, deploy capital, and grow a new generation of firms alongside the titans we already have.

That would leave us flatfooted and hesitant just when our enemies are nimble and looking for the chance to punish us for their defeats in Ukraine.

The cost of not acting, and of trusting that a cornered Russia will politely confine its war to Ukraine, is one no generation of Europeans has had to pay in generations. But voting for welfare, choosing the luxuries of peace over the necessities of war have left us looking emaciated and vulnerable. And weakness is provocative, and expensive. The bill, the cost of failing to deter aggression, always comes due with interest.

This week, we have the chance to build a new defence community that runs the route of the rowers and the dragon ships, along the northern seas and down the rivers from the fjords through Kyiv to Miklagard. We can rebuild a new Viking alliance made up of those who are willing to step up. That at least would support those Europeans who were serious, create depth and partnership, not dependency, and show Washington that Europe is serious. We need the Americans in, the Russians out and most importantly, Europe strong. It’s about time Britain and others did just that.

I gave this speech on the 13 May 2026. It is the third of four posts I am publishing as a series in which I set out why Britain, and Europe, have still not woken up to the danger we face after thirty years spent believing the Cold War was won and that peace would last for ever.

In this speech I reveal…

Why people — not platforms or hardware — are the true front line and therefore trust is the currency on which our survival depends

Why we are, in many ways, already at war, fought through the lies that divide our societies and corrupt our politics

Why Britain should stop lecturing the front-line states of the Baltics and start learning from them, helping to build a new Northern Alliance by sharing intelligence that this moment demands.

Thank you very much indeed Marko, it’s a great pleasure to be with you again and to be back in Tallinn. Thank you for welcoming me, and as you mentioned our common service in Afghanistan, you remind me of one day standing on the flight line waiting for the helicopter that never comes, which is an experience most soldiers will share, and I was standing next to an Estonian Sergeant, this was in 2006 or 2007, and I said “First tour?” and he said “No, been here before”, I said “when was that?”, “eighty-eight” he said, “ok, well what was the difference?’, after a few moments of silence he said “well, we had more helicopters”.

But look, it is a huge pleasure to be here and I’m very grateful for the welcome that you’ve given me. I’m very proud to be supporting the International Centre for Defence and Security, this week, not just for the Lennart Meri Conference, but for all the other different events that you organise. You have in this city organised conversations to face the tough choices that confront us today and you’ve set out various ways of meeting them, so it’s a pleasure to be asked, and to be invited to speak today.

Now, I wanted to start by saying this is the third in a series of speeches that I have been giving in recent weeks because I believe that Britain, and indeed the whole of Europe, has not really woken up to the dangers that we face.

That is why I started at home, setting out the British military situation honestly, because Chinese intelligence gathering in the United Kingdom, Russian attacks on our connections in the seas and on land, and most importantly, the consequences of 30 years spent believing that we had won the Cold War and that peace now reigned eternal have finally come home and we must face the reality.

I listed Britain’s failures to invest, and I also looked at where the lessons apply more widely.

Last week at Stanford, I began to address how we respond. From San Francisco, you can imagine, the answer is always tech, of course it is. But it’s actually much more than that. It’s about the whole industrial might that must be brought to bear to resist aggression. It’s about the whole of society preparations needed to build up resilience, so that we can endure, and not just strike.

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As I put it in California, it’s not just about armies, armies go on operations, it’s nations that go to war. Nations prepare, nations endure. That means industry, academia, in fact the whole of society, not just the military must prepare.

That brings me here tonight in Tallinn, and what I wanted to talk to you about – about people – because when we talk about society, that’s what we really mean, we mean people.

It is the area of our greatest vulnerability. The division between us and the lies that separate us. We are seeing our freedoms exploited every day to destroy the trust that holds us together, but too few of us are facing the reality of the challenge that our enemies are massing against us.

But here in Estonia you have faced that reality earlier and more actively than most.

Many of us, sadly, have chosen not to believe in the devil, but as we see every day in Ukraine, and particularly in the massacres of Irpin and Bucha, the devil is alive and walks among us. Evil exists and we need to be ready to fight. Something you have never forgotten.

About a decade ago I was talking to an Estonian friend about e-citizenship and the whole e-society that you have built. He said, “It means we will be ready for when the Russians next attack,” he said, “it will allow us to be a people without a country. They won’t be able to destroy us.”

Now, at the time I thought he was paranoid. Today, I think he was prepared.

What we have seen consistently not just under Vladimir Putin but under Russian rulers for centuries is the violent ambition of the tyrant. They have murdered millions and tortured more. Again and again we have seen a corrupt princeling in Moscow look with envy on the successes of the free nations of Europe and suffered the violence that has followed.

That’s the reality that you have always known, and in London and other capitals, we have grown far too comfortable and complacent in a way that you never did.

So I understand why so many here are exercised over the question of America’s pledge to NATO. Watching the current administration question their commitment to our shared defence is indeed very worrying. But are we truly focussed in the right place?

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I ask that question because over the last 30 years, while the Americans have maintained their military, others have cut the cloth and hidden the gaps in their promises.

Britain, and others, have not paid their table stakes for decades but seen their promises be turned from weapons into words.

I wonder, is it the United States that is walking away? Or are they forcing us to face the reality of decades of self-deception? If it’s the latter, let’s face it, that is welcome.

Of course, that’s not true of you, and indeed it’s not true of many of your partners and allies. You have been carrying your share of the burden this whole time spending some 3.4 percent of GDP on defence today and committed to 5.4 percent from 2026 to 2029.

And your neighbours many of them have done the same:

Poland is at 4.5 percent already, rising to 4.8 percent next year.

Latvia is at 3.7 percent, and Lithuania is at 4, and they’ve committed to between 5 and 6 percent from 2026.

Then of course there is Finland. Outside the alliance until recently, Helsinki has never forgotten what it took to stop the Red Army and has never dropped its guard.

When they joined NATO, they didn’t just add to our security, they brought an attitude and approach we in Britain need to learn from. And along with Sweden, they shifted the alliance north, reminding me of the bonds we shared in the past under the Viking kings or the Hanseatic treaties.

Then we were expanding and trading. Today, we are protecting what we have built together.

So let’s look at it, let’s look at what is threatened.

Because for years now, Russia has been conducting warlike acts against us, trying to undermine our democracy and our freedom.

We have hidden behind diplomatic dances and weasel words because honesty would have forced us to make choices we wanted to avoid. Now personally, I’ve had enough of the obfuscation and evasion. It’s time to say it clearly: the Kremlin is at war with Europe and their allies in Beijing are helping.

Just look at their crimes:

In 2006, the FSB murdered Alexander Litvinenko in London using a chemical so toxic traces from it were later found at more than 40 sites across the city, including on the British Airways flight his killers flew in on.

In 2016, Russian military intelligence plotted to seize the Montenegrin parliament on election night, assassinate the Prime Minister, and install a pro-Russian government to halt the country’s accession to NATO.

In 2018, the GRU poisoned the Skripals with a nerve agent in Salisbury. The perfume bottle they left behind still contained enough to kill a mother of three. In fact, if it had been raining that night and the bottle had tipped into the sewer, it would have gotten into the water supply and killed thousands.

And in 2024, the Kremlin spent more than $200 million, the equivalent to around 1 percent of Moldova’s GDP, on interfering in the country’s presidential election and EU referendum. President Sandu has said her government has evidence that 150,000 votes were bought, with the target having been twice that number.

Now that’s not all. The same year, the GRU sent incendiary devices disguised as pillows through the DHL network. One caught fire in a warehouse in Birmingham, another at a hub in Leipzig. German intelligence told the Bundestag the only reason a cargo plane did not go down over Europe was because the flight was delayed.

That year, Germany faced more state-terrorism. United States and German intelligence operations disrupted a Russian plot to assassinate Armin Papperger, the chief executive of Rheinmetall, Europe’s largest producer of artillery shells. He was one of several European defence industry executives on a Russian target list.

The record here of course is just as serious.

In 2007, Estonia was the first NATO member subjected to a coordinated, state-directed cyber-attacks when three weeks of denial-of-service operations targeted your ministries, your banks, and your broadcasters.

And of course in 2014, we must not forget that Eston Kohver, an Estonian Internal Security Service officer, was dragged across the Russian border by FSB agents, and paraded on their state television, before being sentenced in a vastly unfair trial to 15 years in a penal colony.

Time and again we have seen how Russia violates our sovereignty and threatens our peace. Their imperial ambitions are not dead. Let’s face it, they’re not even sleeping.

But many have barely responded. Time and again, the alliance has barely moved. We expelled a few more diplomats. We imposed a few more sanctions. We issued a few more statements. Usually, Moscow barely even noticed and saw us as easy to push around.

They weren’t wrong. Too many of us have not been serious and worse, too many have been complicit.

In 2014, France’s Rassemblement Nationale took a loan from a small bank in Moscow, after European banks declined to lend to them. When the bank collapsed, the debt was passed to a Russian aviation company that the German Marshall Fund’s analysts have now linked to Russian intelligence. A French parliamentary committee subsequently found that the party had operated as a relay for Russia in French politics.

In 2024, Moscow so corrupted the Romanian elections that the first round of the presidential polls had to be annulled when their agents got an unknown candidate within touching distance of the presidency. Russia didn’t do that alone. It was a coordinated TikTok and Telegram operation with China’s hands all over this new online army.

They have been helped by useful idiots and corrupt co-conspirators. Former leaders of our nations who have betrayed us all, bowing, or in fact in Austria’s case curtsying, to our enemies and their money.

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Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder joined the boards of companies used by Putin not only to rob his people but to bribe ours. Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl, abased herself before Putin at her wedding and now degrades herself propagandising for Russia.

In Britain too, sadly I have to confess, we have our own traitors. Shamefully, a British Member of the European Parliament and the former leader of the Reform party in Wales got 10 years in prison for spouting the Kremlin’s rubbish for cash.

They have taken their 30 pieces of silver. Dirty money has corrupted our politics and now sadly cryptocurrencies are making it harder to trace.

It would be easy to laugh these incidents off. To claim these failed politicians are simply echoes of a rather tawdry 1960s spy story. But the truth is actually much darker.

At the heart of each of these attacks is people, and the currency of people is trust. That’s exactly what Putin is targeting because that’s the centre of gravity for all of us, so the centre of gravity for all the operations prosecuted by Moscow. This is a sustained campaign across every avenue against the political integrity of our European democracies.

Millions to a party or to a politician here. Another denied, but let’s face it obvious, attack over there.

The spreading of division online and use of obvious lies, not because anyone is expected to believe them, but so that people believe there is nothing that is true and everything is to be doubted.

It is, let’s face it, unrelenting and it is conducted below the threshold at which we have so far displayed a willingness to respond. That’s our mistake, and we’re paying for it with more violence, more disorder, and more distrust.

We’ve answered the hard currency of force with the soft currency of words. We’ve pretended that international law binds us. The truth is, it doesn’t bind us all, it only binds we who obey.

Vladimir Putin hopes to convince our fellow citizens that we can’t trust each other, that our democracies can’t protect us, and that we’re all the same. You have to admit, he’s doing better than any of us would have liked.

But that’s why the truth matters. It sets us apart from Moscow.

It’s not just their rampant corruption, their brutality, and their hatred – of us and of course of each other; it’s that we know that cooperation, democracy, enterprise, and opportunity, are true and our freedoms are the values that we share from Vancouver to Tallinn and that we have built on them.

That’s what our alliance depends on.

So why don’t some pay their dues? Why are some slow in realising the threat?

To be honest, everything feels more pressing with proximity, but the cyber and information operations don’t care about distance. What matters is honesty and unity. When we stand together, we understand what matters, then we are ready to face them.

Talking of honesty, it brings me to a statement that I heard in the House of Lords by a British minister and to an apology I think needs to be made.

Last year, while witnessing the brutality of Russian troops raining down on Ukrainian civilians, Lithuania made a statement to protect its own children from that future. They announced that they would withdraw from the Ottawa treaty that prohibits the use of land mines. Now that can’t have been an easy decision because we all know that mines stay in the soil for decades and the risk to your own civilians’ lives, not just to the enemy soldiers’, is real. But when you see the pattern of rape, and murder, and torture, that has been rampant in Ukraine who can blame them, who can really blame them, for taking that risk?

Well, Baroness Chapman chose to do just that. And she was wrong. Britain should stand with our allies and understand the difficult compromises that frontline states must make to defend their homes and families. We are in absolutely no position to lecture them from the luxury of distance.

Instead, we must learn.

The war we see being fought in Ukraine is still not the war that we are preparing for. Not just in our defence ministries, but in our wider society. We are integrating the lessons too slowly and not alerting our people to the realities of modern conflict.

What Ukraine has achieved is not just a procurement story, or a military success but a lesson in national mobilisation.

Producing drones cheaply and at scale, redesigning them in weeks not years, with software updated by civilian programmers and factories in homes and barns across the country. Kyiv has shortened the feedback loop so the link between a frontline platoon commander and the start-up founder equipping him now runs in hours, and not in months.

And as with so many other things, the Baltic states, Sweden, Finland, and Poland have been applying these lessons faster than anyone else in NATO.

The Estonian defence industry indeed has expanded beyond recognition in three years. Companies like Milrem Robotics, Frankenburg Technologies and Threod Systems are now exporting capability to allies that a decade ago would, let’s face it, not even have been able to find Tallinn on a map.

And you are upgrading how you think about war.

Only last month, the Estonian government cancelled a €500 million programme to replace its infantry fighting vehicles and redirected that money to drones and air defence. You looked at Ukraine and drew the obvious conclusion.

Meanwhile, in London, it’s reported that the Ministry of Defence has pushed through an order for more helicopters when the Army wanted drones.

Now that’s simply not good enough. We need to be like Poland, and break old supply chains building newer, faster and getting what we need.

Poland went to Seoul for tanks because Berlin and Paris could not match Korean delivery times. The K2 line builds 180 tanks in 3 years. While the Leopard 2 line takes 5 years to build 50.

Mass at speed has always beaten the exquisite and slow. Re-engaging our homegrown industries is vital for resilience, but what matters most is people.

Again, we have lessons to draw.

And here I look at Sweden’s pamphlet titled ‘If Crisis or War Comes’ that was sent to every household – in fact it was sent twice. Like Taiwan’s version, it includes an important warning: don’t believe enemy rumours, and don’t repeat them. Again, they understand the power of lies. So does Putin and so does Xi.

Finland trains up its civilians through structured courses they can fit around their working lives. And you, in Estonia I know, have built the digital infrastructure to keep the basic functions of citizenship running even under occupation.

If your citizens don’t know where to go and what to do should the worst happen, then you’re not preparing for a crisis, you’re ensuring chaos.

That’s why honesty matters. If, as politicians, we hide the difficult choices we’re not being kind, we’re being cowards. Worse, we’re risking our children’s future, trading that for a quiet life for ourselves. And that’s wrong.

We need to make the case and find the resources, as you have done. Estonia is prioritising funding for defence over schools and hospitals, and I’m sure that’s a hard sell. There is not a single person in any country who wants anything other than a better outcome for their kids and care for their families. But pretending troubles will pass us by is simply not being honest.

As Kyiv shows, the price of conflict is so much higher than the cost of deterrence. Ukraine didn’t have the choice, but we do.

And the obstacle isn’t the British public, it’s our government.

Last year more than 170,000 young Britons applied to join the Army. Fewer than 10,000 made it through. We had space for more. We did not lack for interested, motivated young people. What we lacked for was the ability to get them through the system.

As Major General Nick Cowley, who is the Commandant to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, said: the claim that there’s a snowflake generation is absolute rubbish.

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Well, he is right, except in Westminster where there are snowflake politicians. Not willing to tell the truth. Not willing to pay the political price and so pushing the cost onto our fellow citizens.

But perhaps even there, even there, we’re finally beginning to wake up.

The Armed Forces Bill currently before Parliament proposes to raise the recall age of service personnel to 65 and lower the threshold under which Reservists can be called up. Both are very welcome. But of course we need to go further.

Around 95,000 people are on a contingency list, ready to be called back to duty if needed, but you can bet it’s not up to date. The practice of staying in touch with our people, of knowing where they are and what they can still do, fell away after the Cold War ended.

The challenge we face, again, comes back to people.

How do you bring a nation together?

How do you prepare for a future we know is already more dangerous than our recent past?

That’s where I come back to the simple truth: it’s not armies that go to war, it’s nations. And as a nation, what can we do to be ready?

In Britain, national service is something of a dirty word. We have only forced men into uniform during a war, but what if we looked at the problem differently? What if we asked young people what they could do to help their families, their communities, their country?

Military service may not work, but public service is one way to bring the country together and ensure that we are ready. And the nature of modern warfare demands it.

With youth unemployment rising, AI taking jobs, or at least that is what is said, and many asking for work experience to show a future employer, a year or two of structured service in which a young person could choose the army, the health service, fire and rescue, agriculture, the local council or civil defence could make a huge difference.

The military would get the share that it needs, and the other services would get what they wanted. And in return the young person would come out with service-related perks, with skills, with a story, and most importantly with a clear role that they would be ready to step into should ever the crisis come, and of course they would have an understanding of their place in society.

It reminds me, I’m always struck when you meet Swedes who have done national service, they’ll always tell you about the night they spent guarding the Royal Palace and they all have a story for what happened, very often nothing, somehow they make it into a story. It’s moments like that that really unite a country, they are if you like the soft silk of shared stories.

Those connections don’t end at our borders, which brings me back to NATO.

Today, Britain leads the Joint Expeditionary Force, but that leadership has been let’s face it more in name than in fact. There are roughly a thousand British troops here in Estonia today, rising over the next five years to about 2,000.

But given the threat that we face, and the lesson in drones and mass that the Russians are sadly learning in Ukraine, these numbers aren’t enough of a deterrence.

A serious contribution would mean a continuous rotation of British troops, in greater numbers, through Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, backed by a Reserve worthy of the name, conducting joint exercises, preparing for conflict and deterring that conflict where its fate hinges. It would mean being trained by teams from Ukraine, not sending training teams to Ukraine. And a revolution in the production of armaments at home.

After Bucha, we can never tolerate the price that the old NATO doctrine would put on our people. The old trip-wire concept, where we accept, or at least we did accept, that the Russian forces would overrun the Baltic states and we had a plan to liberate them in 180 days, that’s simply unacceptable today.

We must defend every inch of alliance territory from the first metre. That means our forces must be in place now, not promised for tomorrow.

To achieve that, we need to get better at predicting the future. That’s hard.

It’s much easier to steal it.

Defence demands intelligence and the networks to collect and share it. That once meant secrets and spies, today it actually often means open data and open minds.

Just take one example. In 2018, volunteers working from laptops at home, with no government help, identified the GRU officers responsible for the Salisbury poisonings. The information they used wasn’t classified. It was scattered across logs and telephone metadata, pulled from commercial services or bought on the dark web and sold by corrupt bureaucrats.

This is the democratisation of data accelerating the intelligence cycle as surely as the drone cycle is accelerated in Ukraine. What once required intelligence stations and moles is now within the reach of anyone with the imagination and the patience to use it.

The Buk launcher that shot down flight MH17 was matched to a photograph posted to social media. Its crews were tracked through fitness apps. The route the convoy travelled was reconstructed from dashcam footage uploaded by strangers who had no idea what their devices were recording information pointing to a Russia war crime.

Citizen journalism isn’t replacing intelligence services, but it is augmenting it. It’s a different skill and we need to catch up. Britain needs a new intelligence agency, not to replace the old but to build a new line of knowledge. A new eye on the future.

That brings me back to the core role of information. The need to keep it honest and the need to understand what is true.

Like Sweden’s crisis handbook, we need to know that information and lies are part of the battle. We see it online and we know that TikTok and other sites are created by and exploited by our enemies.

Since the attacks in 2007, Estonia is already ahead. The Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence here in Tallinn is formidable and NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Riga does fantastic work. But we can build on that. We can support startups like Bellingcat and encourage citizen investigators to expose corruption and complicity.

That’s why I would like to see a new agency in the United Kingdom: MI7, if you like. While MI5 focuses on protecting our home, and MI6 on understanding what’s going on abroad. MI7 would exploit the sinews that connect and integrate those plots helping to expose what is hidden often in plain sight.

In intelligence work, you’re always looking for a needle in a haystack. In the past, you had to rake up the straw. Today, frankly it’s all around us, the question is how do you sift it faster and better.

Britain should establish, urgently, this new intelligence agency dedicated to open-source intelligence collection and analysis. Because it needs a new culture, for a new era, and it demands a new institution to succeed.

The strength of the agency would be, again, in its allies, but by building on open source, we would be able to extend that alliance network much further.

The methods of Bellingcat have countered Russian lies. But working with Estonians and Ukrainians, and many other friends around the world, we would be able to build a new network integrated from day one with civilian researchers, journalists and academics.

While Five Eyes remains the core of our secret state, the new agency can open the agencies and build a Northern Network. A new Hansa, if you like, sharing the information that would once have kept the kings of Kyiv and London safe from the princes of Novgorod but now would keep us free. All fused into a single architecture, where the picture each of us has amounts to something sharper than what any of us could muster alone. Now I know that here, I’m building on very firm foundations.

Sadly while some of our partners in Europe have struggled to clean house from the history of Soviet occupation or indeed those who sympathised with them, you have always been very clear: there will be no spies in your house.

Which brings me to what I am asking of you, and demanding of us.

The Hansa worked because we all saw clearly that trade and security were connected. It worked because it secured the commons of the northern seas first, and conducted trade in goods second. It worked, for as long as it did work, because we all played our part.

So, to you, my friends, I ask that you keep speaking up. I am pleased when I hear you make the case in our capitals, not just yours. I’m pleased when I read op-eds that are written by people in your parliament, not just ours. I would like you to be omnipresent and irrepressible because your experience on the frontline is the lesson that we need to hear. We need to be woken from the long slumber that has captured us for far too long.

The United States is right that many of us don’t pay the share that we need to keep peace for us all. It is easy for some in London to dismiss that as bullying, or in some way to claim that President Trump is behaving unusually. It is much harder to wave away when it comes from our nearest allies bearing the brunt of the threat. So you have the moral authority, and I ask you, please, use it.

As you look across the river at Narva and stare into the darkness, please ask yourself: who do you want beside you? Then ask them to step up.

And now I turn to Britain. You will have heard woven through my words the actions that I’d like us to take. But let me just be very clear, first I would like us to be honest: we have tough choices today but they will only get harder tomorrow.

If we want to lead, if we want to deter, if we want to stand with our allies and defend the border NATO has given us the luxury of pushing more than a thousand miles away from our own shores, we need to pay the bill and think again.

We need to secure our home, by planning for the worst.

We need to see further into the future, by looking through the information that is all around us.

And we need to prepare our people, so that we can invest in the technology, the people and the skills to stand beside you watching across the Narva River and making sure the enemy doesn’t try to cross.

I said at the beginning: too many of us don’t believe in the devil, it’s easier to pretend that he’s not there. But none of us can afford the comforts of childhood any longer.

We are being attacked online and off. People are being murdered, our politics is being corrupted. This is the new battleground – our people. We are fighting the narratives that divide us and the lies that corrupt us.

This is war by other means.

We need a new Northern Alliance, a new intelligence agency and greater cooperation. Only if we get that new understanding of the threats that we face and the urgency that we need to deter them, will we wake up and see what is clear before us. Our allies are threatened, our lives are at risk and we need to rebuild the trust at home and abroad to protect ourselves.

It’s time to be serious again.

Thank you.

I gave this speech on the 7 May 2026. This is the second in a series of short posts in which I set out why Britain, and Europe, have still not woken up to the danger we face, after thirty years spent believing the Cold War was won and that peace would last for ever.

In this speech I reveal…

Why wars are won not by the single breakthrough, but by the side that can mass-produce the ‘good-enough’. That is lesson of a black metal box carried to Washington in 1940, and of Ukraine’s world-leading, home-grown drone industry which didn’t even exist a few years ago.

Why our most sophisticated weapons have quietly become our greatest weakness

Why resilience now matters more than sheer size; no country, however global or brilliant, can opt out of geography.

It’s a real pleasure to be on campus, and thank you very much Rob, it’s a joy to spend more time with you and to be shown this amazing place. It’s a cathedral of knowledge in so many ways and an extraordinary heart of a world that’s changed and changing incredibly fast.

I wanted to come because only a short drive from where we sit here we’re seeing ideas that have forged and connected the world, and a few that have threatened it, being executed in buildings that now have the corporate logos that only a few months, a few years ago were on the notebooks of undergraduates at this very place before they became made real.

But it’s worth remembering that none of these technical empires, none of these corporate empires, were built by the founders alone. And none of them, however global the brand, however weightless the product, was actually built in a vacuum. The companies whose names ring around this valley were built within a Pacific patrolled by a United States Navy fleet, on land shielded by alliances signed before their founders were born, using chips manufactured hundreds of miles away on the coast of a Chinese mainland.

No company can truly opt out of geography, and no company does. The truth has been easy to forget for 30 years, but I’m afraid it is a reality and it’s one that is going to get harder to ignore over the next 30.

That’s why I’m so pleased to see the focus here turning back to the technology that keeps us safe.

The pattern that built Silicon Valley is in fact the pattern that built every empire before it. Business and government driving each other forward. The state takes the long

-term risk, creating the environment that the market then exploits to create production and scale. And that the lesson, half lost in our age of frictionless software, is that the production at scale is fundamentally what wins. It’s not just the breakthrough, it’s the breakthrough multiplied. The genius, if you like, mass-produced. The exceptional, made cheap.

That’s a pattern that has actually had a long history, but, if you’ll forgive me, being English coming back to one moment that really made it real and made it real here in Stanford.

In August 1940, in the dark days when Britain stood alone, a chemist named Sir Henry Tizard sailed for Washington and then crossed all the way here to the West Coast with a small black metal box. Inside lay some of the most sensitive secrets that the British Empire held. The cavity magnetron that made centimetric radar possible. Early designs for the proximity fuse. Frank Whittle’s notes on jet propulsion. And, almost as a footnote, were there the British atomic calculations that then led to the Manhattan Project and of course the nuclear detonations in Japan.

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Now, Churchill personally authorised the handover before any agreement was given as to what the United States might give in return. Because he understood something then that so many did not. And that’s that war is not the clash of arms, what it is, is the clash of production. And Britain alone did not have the factories to win. That box, that steel box that Tizard carried was a seed. And of course it could only grow in soil that was deeper than ours. Th

The genius of the magnetron was almost less important than the speed at which the United States could turn it into kit. Because of a factory in Boston the cost of radar dropped so that by 1944, sets that had once filled a room, not dissimilar to this, were small enough to fit into the nose of a fighter, and they were rolling off of the production line in their thousands. The

idea was British. The scale was American. And of course the victory belonged to both. But it required not just the army but the whole of society to turn against that threat.

And that’s why I say it’s not armies that go to war; armies go on operations. It’s nations who go to war. Nations turn their might against each other and decide to act.

To beat tyranny, the whole of American society: its scientists, its industrialists, its capital and its courage, had to be mobilised in the cause of freedom. No company could opt out of that geography. No university either. Tizard’s mission here was the first step for government and business, the public and the private, the capital and the commitment, Americans and Brits to weld together into a single system. Only then could freedom win.

That is fundamentally the argument I want to put to you today. And it leads to two propositions for two different audiences.

The first, is that nations and companies that build systems, win wars and win markets. Heroes matter of course but resilience demands much more than just heroics.

The second, in a world that punishes brittleness, resilience comes from scale and speed, that can’t be done by always making the most exquisite and the most expensive kit.

These matter as much to Britain’s Ministry of Defence, struggling to re-equip after decades of underinvestment, as to boardrooms in a time of turmoil. They matter because the partnership between business and government is not a sentimental preference. It is a recognition that the citizen and the company stand on the same land, depend on the same space, and live or fall in the same world.

And they matter because our competition has changed.

Unlike the enemy we fought in 1940, China is not an energy-starved, encircled dictatorship. It is in fact at the cutting edge of technology and leads in industrial output. We depend on it for raw materials and we helped to build its manufacturing capacity. And it is now shaping our future not with speeches from Beijing but with production lines across the whole country.

In the past year, China has launched more maritime tonnage than the United States has built since the Second World War. Vessels are coming off the slipways at a cost, and at a speed that no one else can match. The markets that America built in Europe and Japan after 1945, China is now trying to replicate but with a global ambition. It dominates, as we know, rare earths. It is making the cars and computers on which every advanced economy depends. It controls roughly 90 percent of the global drone market, and the supply chains for every critical component within it. It now spends more on importing silicon chips than on importing oil. That single line tells you what kind of future Beijing is anticipating.

At the same time, it is a centralising power around the Communist Party, arresting generals and punishing entrepreneurs who challenge the centre. Beijing is right that the public and the private must work together. But it is wrong that one is the slave of the other. Centralised systems do not compound innovation. Free, plural, and competitive ones do. Their system is brittle. Ours need not be.

We should remember a different model, because it is one that we have tried before.

The Royal Navy’s success at sea is celebrated in history. What is forgotten is that it wasn’t the ships alone, it was the industrial base behind it. The investment came from the navy, came from the state. The breakthroughs came from the industrialists building it. One example came in the decades just after 1760. Industrial innovation produced copper in such quantities that it allowed hulls to be launched from Portsmouth plated in this metal, protecting the vessels and keeping them at sea for months longer. The cladding shifted naval power decisively in Britain’s favour. The navy’s geography, our coastline and our trade routes, set the demand and the industrialists’ workshops met it.

A few years later, the next innovation came from the same partnership. This time executed by two engineers, Brunel and Maudslay, who built for the first time the true mass-production line. Ten unskilled men were able to turn out pulley blocks that previously 110 craftsmen had had to make by hand. That was the system that effectively multiplied the fleet and the Royal Navy for a fraction of the cost.

So while we remember Admiral Nelson’s heroic victories at Trafalgar and the Nile, one leader and one battle didn’t win a war. Britain resisted Napoleon’s threat of invasion because we built the system that kept ships at sea and the trade flowing to pay for it.

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Today we are seeing the same principles expressed in companies around here and on battlefields across the world.

On 1 June 2025, the Ukrainian Security Service smuggled more than a hundred drones deep into Russia. They struck five airbases at the same time, across three time zones, hundreds of miles behind the lines. Forty-one aircraft were destroyed, including several

strategic bombers worth around $7 billion. The weapons that destroyed them cost about $2,000 each. A cost ratio of 30,000:1.

Behind that strike sat a market the Ukrainian government had initiated. Programmes like Brave1 connect investors directly to start-ups and to the front-line units using their weapons, with feedback running back in days. That is how a country at war fields 2,300 defence companies and runs cycles from sketch to combat in six months. Ukraine plans to produce seven million drones this year, up from about 800,000 three years ago. The body of a Ukrainian drone is redesigned every six months. The engine, every four weeks. The guidance software, to defeat the jammers, is effectively re-done every week. That’s the rapid iteration of simple technology, at scale, delivering a devastating effect.

And look at where the Gulf states, who are now facing a similar threat, are buying their drones. Not from Lockheed Martin, but from Ukraine. Cheaper, more current, and still in active development on the Donbas front.

That is what scale and iteration looks like together.

Now, eight months after all that, in the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, the United States and Israel struck more than a thousand targets inside Iran. When I first went to war, in 2003, the analytical cell required to generate that volume of targeting would have needed hundreds of officers, and taken weeks. Today, Palantir’s Maven Smart System produces prioritised target packages, complete with coordinates, weapons recommendations and automated legal assessments, at a pace that no human cell could possibly match.

All this is possible because companies have turned ideas into processes and processes into products, and government has supported the innovation at moments of risk.

And yet, in the days that followed, the same operation laid bare a different lesson.

The United States has fired more than 1,200 Patriot interceptors against Iranian missiles and drones since February. At Lockheed Martin’s current production rate, replacing them will take more than two years.

Now what’s more, each Patriot interceptor costs around $4 million. Many of the Iranian drones that were shot down cost between $20,000 and $50,000.

That frankly, is the economics of defeat and our enemies know it.

And it gets worse. Because the copper on which every Patriot motor depends is now competing against demand from electric vehicles and AI data centres, and the guidance chips, though made in the US, need helium to produce them, and we know that global supplies of the gas have been badly disrupted by the war in Iran.

So we are running short of the raw material for our exquisite weapons, while our adversaries are able to flood the battlefield with cheap drones. The metal is in someone’s ground, and sadly not ours. That is geography again.

So in fact for us sophistication has become a vulnerability. The quest for the exquisite has left us vulnerable to the everyday.

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This is not a new lesson. For those of you who are more English in mind, you will remember that in 1415 at the Battle of Agincourt, the French knights were felled by simple longbowmen

with arrows. Again an example of the cheap and the plentiful beating the expensive and the irreplaceable. It is after all one of the oldest patterns in war.

That should not, of course, be a cause for despair. In Ukraine more than a thousand interceptor drones are now produced every day, at between $1,000 and $3,000 apiece. They have neutralised Russia’s advantages in heavier armour and latest-generation aircraft.

As Kyiv has shown again: armies conduct operations. Nations go to war. And the nation that has turned every part of its society to innovating and producing cheap weapons, networked through software, built in volumes that exquisite systems simply cannot match, is the nation that wins.

That partnership, between state and society, is not only true of battle.

The smartphone is the basic computer most of us use to access information. It was designed in Cupertino. But it didn’t become global on the strength of Apple alone. The gyroscope, the touchscreen, even Siri, are products of US government research. Steve Jobs had the genius to combine technologies the Pentagon and DARPA had spent decades developing. But it did not stop there. It wasn’t just a US project. Tim Cook understood that to turn the idea into a billion devices, he needed a system of iterative design and enormous output, acting at scale and speed. So while Jobs supplied the genius, and Cook built the system, it was the Chinese government that enabled the scale.

This is the part of the story that shows the cost of forgetting geography. Because by materially empowering Apple’s manufacturing in Shenzhen and Henan, Beijing did for the world what Brunel and Maudslay had done for the British fleet two centuries earlier. Apple trained an army of unskilled workers and let the disciplined production line drive output up and costs down. Apple did not transcend geography. It chose China. And that choice has consequences that we are still living with.

Apple wasn’t alone of course. Tesla taught China how to build electric cars at scale. Volkswagen taught them how to engineer. Across 30 years of joint ventures, Western firms have transferred a wealth of manufacturing knowledge that no single government on its own could possibly have bestowed.

So China dominates the drone market, the rare-earth supply chain and shipbuilding tonnage not because Beijing cracked a code we had not, but because they learnt. And they are now applying what they learnt to weapons.

Government and industry together, whether American or Chinese, produce strategic advantage by creating more than a machine. They make a whole system of knowledge and action. That speeds output, improves quality, and allows adaptations.

Now in the military we call this the OODA loop. Observe, orient, decide, act. For business I suppose the equivalent would be something like design, build, scale, improve. Whichever one you chose, they are both cycles and the fastest cycle wins.

Apple in peace and Palantir in war have both shrunk the time between idea and action. And neither company, among the most successful businesses of our time, would exist without the state having played its part first. Because no company, however brilliant, however global, can or will opt out of geography.

Which leads me to my second proposition. Resilience now matters much more than mass. When we talk about competition with China, too many people talk about platforms. We talk about whose carriers are bigger.

Whose missiles fly further.

Whose fighters are more capable.

Those are not the only questions for today because wars aren’t won by the exquisite but by endurance. And endurance demands scale and spread.

What kind of effort can be sustained over time? What are the systems behind the platforms? Those are the questions about the industrial base, the technological depth, the capital architecture and the political culture that make replacing platforms possible, and determine whether indeed they can even be deployed in war.

Over the past decades, the exquisite cost, in both prestige and people, of capital ships has made battle at sea almost impossible to imagine. Even when the enemy’s ships are sunk, as they were in the Falkland Islands in 1982, the shock of seeing a major ship go down can turn victory into the feeling of defeat. Technology is making mass without men possible. We need a new kind of resilience and, with it, a willingness to understand the risk of the concentration of force.

Let me explain.

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When I was a boy in Kent, a few years ago, the two ways to hear music were either you went to hear a band in a pub or you listened to a record at home. The singers didn’t have to be very good for them to have a business, they could make a living, there were plenty of pubs and the records weren’t great, they were scratchy, all you needed to be was the best available.

Now today that’s not true, because the reality is the ability to listen to very high quality copies of music at almost zero cost means that you can distribute music and song for extraordinarily low prices and therefore you can concentrate ears around a single voice, of course that means that one single singer gets infinitely more wealthy. But it’s also worth recognising that other forms of technology do exactly the same. Whether it’s to accountants or lawyers, or programmers and, as Clause now demonstrates, AI producers is accelerating the concentration of action into fewer hands, and many of them not so far from here.

But while that concentration creates wealth and in many ways creates opportunity for all of us to share in the best, it also creates a fragility and it’s one that we really should focus on.

Why do we think that we are any more immune from an unforeseen failure in technology if we put all our eggs into the Claude or Chat basket, than we would be if we had grown all our food from a single crop, or we’d put our entire battle plan into the capability of a single carrier? We’re injecting vulnerability into our very system.

A single failure, a single disruption, a single regulatory misstep, and the entire structure could tremble.

That is a lesson for navies and economies, and one we used to understand.

It is easy to forget why the West won the Cold War. Too much credit goes to the military balance, or to the bankruptcy of the Soviet system, when the truth is simpler. The victory came from diversification.

What we created from 1945 was a system that worked together but built resilience from alliance and cooperation within a network. We decentralised power away from any single producer or centre but standardised allowing interoperability.

In war, we call that NATO. We shared risk by standardising requirements, allowing a plurality of suppliers but a standardisation of output. Any soldier today can draw any ammunition from any NATO store; your rifle is either 5.56 or 7.62, they’re all the same. Tanks and trucks can fill up from any base; every country uses the same grades of fuel.

And in trade, what we did was we set up something similar. We called it GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, and it allowed competition by spreading risk across geography and technology.

The Soviets centralised and controlled, we allowed openness between countries without losing the alignment that is essential to making alliances work. So even in the 1970s, when American and Soviet economies briefly looked similar, that parity was actually an illusion.

Centralised, dictated, stagnated economies cannot compound innovation. Free, plural, competitive economies can.

We are watching the same lesson re-learned in Ukraine. Russia’s army, far larger on paper than Kyiv’s, is being held off and bled by a force a fraction of its size. As one Ukrainian defence-tech founder has put it, this is a clash between a closed system better at standardisation and an open one that rewards fast and frequent innovation. Russia produced more drones at one time. But Ukraine quickly took over, and has been winning on price, quality, pace, and innovation ever since.

That is the lesson that should be hanging on the wall of every defence ministry, and every boardroom.

Instead, some companies, like some countries, aspire to monopoly and they call it efficiency. But as we have seen, dependence on one is a risk for all. Resilience, the ability of a society or a company or a fleet to roll with the punches and adapt to events that none had predicted, is built on distributed power and held together by shared purpose.

That’s the system we designed 80 years ago. It is the system that has won our wars and protected our freedoms. But it is also the system that so much of the Valley, from Apple’s manufacturing to the platforms that we see spreading around here, the FANGs as they are called, has been quietly forgetting over the last 20 years.

So the question is: what now?

Now forgive me for speaking as an old soldier, but let me focus on another context. Not strictly business, but the military.

Over the last decade, a lack of investment has allowed too much concentration and exacerbated the risk profile of our defence. Instead of being able to dispatch over 100 ships to respond to crises, as we did when the Falkland Islands were invaded forty years ago, we have been limited to sending one ship at a time.

Effectively we’ve created in our navy the concept of too big to fail, but we’ve done it by having too few to succeed.

Multiplying a fleet simply cannot be done, as the Royal Navy did before, by just adding copper hulls to the ships. But the use of copper is not over. It’s now of course the metal that connects a mother ship to naval drones. That is the next stage of maritime power. The system that lets one captain command not one hull but 100. As Ukraine has shown, you don’t need a navy to sink a navy. You need the connective tissue linking hulls, crews, and the swarms that allow the commander to act as one.

It is also why AUKUS, the alliance between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, matters so much.

Because China is launching ships at a pace that means half the world’s merchant ships originate in Chinese dockyards, compared with under five percent when it joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001. We need to encourage allies and friends to play a greater role in defending what we share.

No nation can go it alone. Chinese factories draw on a labour pool of some 300 million industrial workers who travel wherever the work goes. They don’t care if their toil is for Apple, Tesla or Volkswagen. The pace of Beijing’s expansion is distorting its own economy, and even the United States is now falling behind this curve. As every entrepreneur knows, inertia is actually a reverse gear.

Partnership is therefore not a soft option. It is the only option.

For all the talk of AUKUS, the relationship must run much deeper than just submarines. Pillar One, on which the nuclear powered boats is based, needs Pillar Two to share the load not

only of maritime deterrence but of work on quantum computing, cyber, undersea systems, hypersonics, electronic warfare, and AI for the front line.

The point of AUKUS is not the boats. It is the architecture.

For Britain, the answer at sea is deepening the cooperation of the fleets, and rebuilding a partnership akin to having a single Royal Navy again. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom share a remarkable advantage. A common past means that our various royal navies emerge from the same tradition. Because of a quirk of history and a single commissioning document under one King, our officers and sailors can not only serve on each other’s ships but can legally give each other orders. We can achieve scale and spread through partnership at a fraction of the cost that it would take others.

Along with the United States Navy, perhaps not quite ready yet to be the Royal United States Navy despite the King’s best efforts, those five fleets are backed by every input we need. We have the talent, the energy, the reach, and most importantly the scale, to put a hard ceiling on the ambitions of Beijing, Moscow or Tehran.

If we don’t, just look at what we face. China claims a population of 1.4 billion. The Communist Party will throw all its weight behind the designs it chooses to scale. No Western country can match that combination of mass and technology alone.

So what we need to do is give ourselves the advantage again.

And the secret to that is distribution. A trusted network of like-minded countries that can act in concert without waiting for orders, bound not by central command but by overlapping interests. That was the reality Churchill understood when he sent Tizard to America. It is the world we can invest in today.

Which brings me directly to what I am actually asking of you.

I have come to Stanford with two requests. One is for this room and one for my own country.

From this room, I am not asking for the next exquisite system. I am not asking for the next sixth or seventh or eighth-generation fighter or the next $5 million interceptor. I am asking you to make the best you can for a price that means we can buy it in volume. The quantity will have a quality that we need today.

The companies that can take a Pentagon contract or a DARPA grant and turn it into a 100,000 drones a month. The entrepreneurs and venture firms that can do for defence what they have already done for software and consumer goods. Mass production at the speed of current innovation. That is the type of manufacturer the West really needs. That is the market the world is waiting for. And here in this valley is where it is most likely to be built.

From Britain, I am not asking for another aircraft carrier or for another F-35 squadron. I am asking for the ability to create a resilient defence force at scale. That means making sure we have what we need not just at sea but in the factories to replace them.

In 1940 we were able to convert car factories like Morris, Austin and Vauxhall into Spitfire production lines in a matter of months. The technological equivalent today is what the next decade will demand of us. An industrial base that can take an idea from Cambridge and turn it into a million drones in a year. Civilian production lines that can pivot to defence in a matter of weeks. Capital channelled out of government bonds and into our own world-class firms.

Now both asks rest on the same principle. Anyone who has built a company in this room already knows it . Build the best tool you can. Then build it again, 90 percent as good, at 80 percent of the cost, in 50 percent of the time. Then do it again, and again, and again and again.

The first tool is the breakthrough. The system that produces the next thousand is how you win.

That of course is the new Manhattan project. Not the bomb, but the architecture. A metal box carried by a British scientist, containing the secrets of a kingdom and the seeds of the atomic age, but also the recognition that no nation could win alone, and that no company can win without a nation behind it, or a nation without its industrial base.

Out of the collaboration that followed came the Rad Lab at MIT, the codebreaking partnership that became Five Eyes, the atomic project itself, and the return to Stanford of wartime researchers who would seed Silicon Valley.

The chips that train every frontier AI model are downstream of the choices made in 1940. The companies in this valley that now define the global economy are downstream of choices made in 1945. None of it was an accident. All of it was systematic. And it was all built on resilience.

Eighty years on, that is the seed that needs replanting.

Because armies don’t go to war. Navies don’t go to war. Nations do. And nations are made up of citizens and companies who share a coastline, and a future.

Today the order is clear.

Build the fleet that acts as one, but is made of many.

Build the partnership of the state, industry and entrepreneur that lends mass to ideas. Build the system in which the hero is the last piece, not the first choice.

The capabilities we need are being made in the laboratories and start-ups a short drive from this room. We know the technology will be cutting edge, the question for us is whether we can afford it and replicate it at speed.

If we get that equation right, we will avoid the sophistication trap and create the capability to keep ourselves safe. That’s the job of this generation’s leaders in business and government. It’s a duty we share on both sides of the Atlantic because neither of us can escape geography.

I gave this speech on the 29 April 2026. This is the first in a short series of posts in which I set out why Britain, and Europe, have still not woken up to the danger we face, after thirty years spent believing the Cold War was won and that peace would last for ever.

In this speech I reveal…

Why a country that once assembled a Falklands task force in a single weekend can no longer keep one warship on station when it matters

Why the deeper rot in our defence is not the missing hardware but a legal culture that has come to punish the very people we ask to protect us

Why the spending figures ministers now boast about are an accounting trick — closer to Spain’s than to Poland’s — that none of our allies believe

I have adapted the text slightly for an easier read, and if you would prefer to watch the speech, you can do so here

Well, thank you very much indeed Dean, it’s a pleasure to be back at Policy Exchange, indeed, this is where I started my political career with the ‘Fog of Law’ paper as you quite rightly reminded me.

And in the years since I’ve left the Army, you’ve given me, kindly, a platform. And I’m grateful that today you are giving me a chance to share some thoughts on the dangers that we face, too many of our own choosing and exposed by a war we should have predicted that will have a much more fundamental impact on our lives than many that we choose to remember.

The Iran War has revealed in many ways the reality of the British way.

It has shown us to be legalistic, ill-equipped and unprepared. It has revealed our dependencies, not our partnerships, the risks that we’ve hidden, not the resilience that we’ve built, and, perhaps most gravely of all, our casual confidence of a return to a normal when the disrupted alliances and energy flows will do anything but.

We have come, in many ways, to a moment like William Stead’s in 1884, when he had to ask: What is the truth about the Navy? What followed was the realisation that the maritime power that sustained empire had rotted in port. What followed that was the Naval Defence Act of 1889.

We are at a similar moment as, if you will allow me, I hope to demonstrate this morning. In the past two months, let’s just look at what has happened.

Allies for the past century have wondered if our own legal constraints mean that we can be relied on, not just to plan operations from our bases, but to fly defensive sorties from theirs.

Our sovereign bases have come under attack and been defended not by British forces, but by French.

And the Defence Secretary has confirmed that Russian submarines spent much of March and April mapping our undersea cables, while the best that we could say was that we had watched them do it.

We have ceased to be a serious military nation, and if we fail to use the moment that this gives us to realise the challenges that we face, the next wake up call may cost us very dear indeed.

That’s why I wanted to talk to you today.

Now, many of us have known the truth about our defences for some time. The facts are not hidden and many of the gaps have been visible for decades, not just years. But today, with the threats to our allies in the Gulf, and to the communication cables around our coast, the risks are not theoretical.

They have already arrived.

We are no longer planning for an uncertain future, but a clear and dangerous present.

Without changing our approach we won’t be stocking up on self-built security, we’ll be panic buying whatever we can at the highest prices when the urgency demands immediate action. If there is one lesson from the Covid pandemic, it’s that behaving like that will cost us for generations to come.

And that is the reality of where we are now.

British defence, under governments of every political stripe over three decades, has deteriorated steadily, in plain sight, and as the end-product of a series of democratic choices whose cumulative effect was not so much concealed from the public, as simply unquestioned within it.

When the Iran campaign began, there were no Royal Navy vessels in the Gulf after the admirals were forced to choose between protecting our home waters or our vital interests.

And as the drones struck cities now home to thousands of Brits, the Royal Air Force was limited in its ability to defend our interests and our allies despite the United Kingdom maintaining four airbases in the Gulf.

Set that against 1982, when a Royal Navy task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands at the other end of the earth was assembled in a weekend. That Britain and this Britain can hardly be called the same country.

The purpose of speaking to you this morning is not to diagnose any single failure of policy, because one attributable failure doesn’t exist.

I want to offer a rather fuller audit. A reckoning of where British defence actually stands and to argue that the accumulated evidence compels a diagnosis, and that that diagnosis, however unwelcome it will be, is the necessary precondition of any serious prescription.

That cure, a grand strategy backed by a clear-eyed understanding of how things really are, is what we have failed to achieve because the defence and security reviews – including the last one drafted by my friend John Bew and others – have lacked the resources they required.

For three decades we have been projecting an image of a Britain that no longer exists. Before it can decide what to do next, we must be prepared to look honestly in the mirror and realise the truth about ourselves.

I’m not just talking about kit.

Over the last few days we’ve seen stories that bring home the true erosion of the fighting capability of our forces that I first described in a report for this very organisation some years ago entitled ‘the Fog of Law’.

Over a generation, the legal expansion has enshrined a pharisaic approach, building fence upon fence around the law in the belief that this constitutes moral seriousness, mistaking the mechanism of legal process for justice itself.

The revelations published in the Telegraph in recent days confirm what many of us had long feared: the legal culture that grew up around operations in Iraq and Afghanistan was not, in its most aggressive expressions, a neutral application of principle.

It was instead the instrumentalisation of law, the deliberate use of legal process not to defend justice but to pursue a narrow political agenda, at the direct expense of the men and women ordered into battle by the British state.

The choice to fetter our forces with reams of red tape, and to help our enemies continue the fight when the guns go silent, has done more to weaken our country and endanger our future than any number of lost battles in foreign lands.

Let’s be clear what we have seen:

Soldiers fighting hand-to-hand against Iranian-backed militias in Iraq, being hounded by those same militias under a legal mandate carved out by solicitors paid by the very taxpayers who looked to these soldiers for protection from Iranian aggression, only to see that aggression empowered by the courts while their protectors are persecuted.

And that’s not just a one off.

Ever-higher fences of prohibition around every possible action, and then accountability for decisions made in the most confused and conflicting of circumstances has created a straitjacket leaving British forces constrained in ways that have no parallel in our own history and no equivalent among our closest allies.

This isn’t abstract or theoretical, it has direct operational consequences.

Soldiers are paralysed as both action and inaction leaves them liable to prosecution and danger.

Commanders are unable to react, changing tangibly what a force can accomplish and what it cannot.

And who pays for that? Not just the millions in legal fees, but what are the consequences? Well we know, don’t we, it’s the British people.

By treating our soldiers as scapegoats we have torn down our walls and punished our guards. Now we’re surprised that too often our friends ignore us and our enemies mock us. We shouldn’t be.

We have done more to undermine morale than any failure of accommodation or pay.

I will turn to the hardware audit but this is never discussed enough in procurement debates and it should be.

As Napoleon said, morale is three times more important than kit.

Two former SAS commanding officers and a former Chief of the General Staff have already exposed how corrosive this has been to unit morale as this inversion of responsibility has seen those who order an action washed of consequences as the burden falls on those ordered to act.

Those who order wars know what will follow. It is absurd that those who take the greatest physical risks are also those left most personally exposed to legal jeopardy for decisions made from necessity in the confusion of battle. It is no surprise so many are choosing to leave.

Just to be clear, none of this is an argument for immunity. Crimes happen in war and they must be prosecuted.

But the civilian law is pointless in battle. Actions essential to victory in war are absolutely intolerable in peace, and confusing the two simply leaves the vulnerable weak, and the tyrant strong.

We can all see it. That’s what makes the events following the Battle of Danny Boy in 2004 so offensive to us all.

British soldiers fought and survived one of the most intense engagements of the Iraq war and then spent years, in some cases the better part of a decade, under investigation for alleged unlawful killings.

The Iraq Historic Allegations Team pursued them and the Al-Sweady Inquiry consumed millions of pounds and caused immeasurable personal suffering to those soldiers who were caught up in it.

Its conclusion, when it finally came, was that the gravest allegations were not merely unproven but had been entirely false and based on “deliberate lies.” In effect, the Iranian IRGC had exploited our own system to punish soldiers for their courage and deter others from following them.

Can we honestly say, seeing the failure of recruiting today and the gaps in our defensive support to our allies in the Gulf, that their strategy failed? Can we honestly say that Russia and others having witnessed the example as an effective way to undermine morale of every soldier who may be sent against them won’t try and do the same?

And all this comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding. A soldier is by definition the state’s instrument of violence in pursuit of national policy.

They do not act alone or on their own behalf and their actions should be weighed as part of a whole. It is the nation that bears the responsibility for the use to which they are put.

Instead we have seen moral cowardice from politicians who asked soldiers to step up, and then left them to hang alone.

What is worse is the complicity shown in those who seek to poison the reputation of our forces by some of our most senior lawyers. What they have done is not just immoral, it is a betrayal.

Knowingly spreading lies about our forces, or recruiting others to do the same, or praising others who have done the same, leaves our soldiers more likely to face attack from those misled into hating them; and puts our country at greater risk.

You may have thought that praising the recruiting sergeant of His Majesty’s enemies would make you ineligible to serve in His Majesty’s Government. Well, apparently not.

The government asks why they can’t hit recruitment targets for our Armed Forces. They ask why half of our young people say they would never fight for their country. Well, they should start by looking at their Attorney General.

His position is completely untenable. He has prioritised – by choice, if also by ignorance – the interests of agents of the IRGC, a terror organisation.

Even if his action was unwitting, his belief that those who pursued prosecution of those we ask to protect us are more worthy of praise than the soldiers who risk their lives demonstrates a failure of judgement and raises real questions about the advice he offers this government.

Those who lie about our troops encourage others to kill them. That’s treason. No minister, no citizen, should praise that.

This new legal dominion is putting creed over need and doing more than just eroding our fighting power, it’s leaving our allies and friends wondering what we have become.

Just look at the words of our ministers.

In recent debates on European security and rearmament, Baroness Chapman, responding to contributions from Lords Godson and Verdirame, saw fit to criticise Lithuania for wishing to withdraw from the Ottawa treaty so that their small army could use landmines to protect their children from the Russian troops who we have seen raping and murdering civilians in Ukraine.

It is, frankly, extraordinary that a British minister should criticise a NATO ally for putting the safety of their children over a treaty which others – including, of course, Russia – have not signed.

To some it seems their aim is to be the most righteous soul in the graveyard. Those words come from those who do not understand war and do not believe in the devil.

Our government should support our friends, not lecture them with pompous piety about legal compliance.

Poland, Estonia, Finland – countries that have made admirable investments in their own defence, that have looked at the world as it is and responded with seriousness – do not need lectures from us, they need our commitment.

They need to know that if the moment comes, the British state will act with them, not judge them for the violence that has been brought to their homes by the enemies we all see.

In the United States, the lesson has been heard even more starkly. Senators who oppose the war in Iran, who judge the action unwise and the strategy unsound are appalled at the absurdity of Britain refusing to allow bases to be used against a nation that has spread death across the region and tried to murder even our own citizens.

There is a strong political argument against the war in Iran.

There is a powerful strategic argument against the war in Iran.

But the idea that there is no respectable legal argument for striking the missiles and bases of a regime that has killed British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and murdered thousands, hundreds of thousands, across the region is ridiculous, as Professor Ekins and others have made clear and as the government itself has now conceded.

We need to choose – are we here to patronise or to partner? Unless you believe in miracles, only one of those will keep us safe.

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Now I will turn to hardware.

Threats that the United States may consider leaving the NATO alliance have left many on this side of the Atlantic nervous, but it’s worth asking: who is really pulling us apart?

If we’re not capable of carrying our share of the burden, why are we surprised when others consider going it alone?

Let’s start with the Royal Navy.

Despite months of warning and the biggest military build-up since the Iraq operations, not one of Britain’s six purpose-built vessels capable of air defence was in position and ready at the start of the Iran War.

Three were stuck in Portsmouth for engineering work. One had spent more time in refit than at sea, and another was in maintenance.

The last one remaining was dragged from her dry dock to be dispatched leaving the region without a British naval presence for 17 days as the war began.

Now, that’s not a huge surprise. We commissioned 12, we built 6, we got missiles for 5 and parts for 4. Frankly, this is a Dutch auction of capability that is coming home to roost.

The same is true across the rest of the fleet. HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales are extraordinary ships built for a combined cost of approximately £7 billion, but that doesn’t include the planes.

Without the US Marine Corps’ F-35Bs and the Dutch and US escort ships, the Royal Navy’s flagships would have never been operational.

This is in stark contrast to our history. In 1982, Admiral Leach was able to assemble a task force capable of retaking the Falkland Islands in a weekend. 127 ships set sail to reassert Britain’s commitment to global order, and to defend our people.

Today the Royal Navy has 13 frigates and destroyers, not 17 Mr Healey, down from 59 back then.

The standing tasks – the work we must do just to play our part in NATO and keep ourselves safe, requires more hulls than actually exist.

Now, every First Sea Lord has known this for decades but it has taken the actions of this February to make it clear to the world.

After needing the army to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, of course surely that must be different? Right?

Wrong.

The British Army is down to approximately 74,000, from 109,000 in the year 2000. That’s the smallest force since Bonaparte threatened invasion. That’s regiments gone and battalions disbanded, eroding capability and cohesion.

Some have been replaced with tech, and the advances that have been made by the Army are impressive, but people still matter.

Poland is building a standing army of 300,000 and Germany has announced 460,000 trained personnel as its target. We’re not even close.

Worse, we’re not even close to what we promised.

NATO’s Force Model expects Britain to contribute a corps headquarters and two divisions. That’s simply not credible. We’d be hard pressed to deploy a brigade and as a General who commanded a brigade in the 1990s told me, the entire fire power of the British Army is less than he had in his brigade then.

The Falklands, Cyprus, Brunei, Gibraltar, Diego Garcia, the Ukraine training mission, and the enhanced Forward Presence in Estonia each demands troops and is only possible if every other operation remains quiet.

That’s a strong bet in this world.

At least the Air Force, the home of innovation for a century, will have what it needs? No.

Royal Air Force fast-jet numbers couldn’t sustain a campaign at the scale of recent operations. F-35 deliveries remain below the programme’s own ambitions and the RAF has gone from 54,600 personnel in 2000 to 31,940 today, the steepest cut of any of the three services and not all of this is down to automation.

Amongst that is an ambition for an air-launched nuclear weapon, adding cost when we can’t even resource what we have today.

Even our allies are wondering what comes next. The Global Combat Air Programme, a strategic partnership with Italy and Japan and an initiative that this country should support, is years from delivery, underfunded by the Treasury, not by Tokyo or Rome, and dependent on them for its continued progression.

Alliance brings strength, dependency breeds resentment.

Across all three services we are seeing budgets of billions delivering outputs that leave us short of personnel and power.

This isn’t about housing or pay, it’s about mission and purpose, and neither are possible without the vision we’re lacking.

The Strategic Defence Review of 2025 tried to fix this with a reset in ambition. But since it was published, each of its authors has pointed out that without corresponding spending commitments the review is just a wish list, not a strategy.

That’s not good enough. Since the end of the Cold War, we have slashed the defence budget and failed to re-equip for the world as it is, not as we wished it was.

For all our talk of hitting 2.5 percent, and now boasting of the largest increase in the defence budget, let’s face it we’re just not being honest.

Ever since the nuclear deterrent was included in the defence budget in 2010 and pensions added in 2016, we have really been spending about 1.7 percent, now that’s much closer to the derided Spaniards than the prepared Poles.

From 2027, the Single Intelligence Account, £4.6 billion this year rising to £5.4 billion by 2029, will be reclassified as NATO-qualifying defence expenditure, to push the defence budget, in name only, to 2.6 percent.

In other words, we are busy playing accounting tricks in the purser’s office of the Titanic. Do you really think that anyone believes that Treasury tricks make us safer?

It’s a con and we can all see it. And worse, when the Prime Minister goes to the States, or sees our NATO allies, they see it too. He’s selling them a lie.

But that’s not all.

There is another number that every officer and analyst in this room I’m sure already knows, but must be repeated constantly to burn the shame of it into the hearts of those who can change it - that number is Eight.

The United Kingdom can sustain major combat operations for approximately eight days. That’s it.

Eight days.

The Chief of the Defence Staff didn’t contest this figure when pressed on it in the Defence Committee. Others have reported it clearly. We now have, according to some, the thinnest munitions stockpile of any first-tier NATO state.

In Ukraine, Russia is firing up to 10,000 shells a day and has learned to use drones at scale. Ukraine is said to be building as many as 9 million drones this year.

We’re losing credibility and as history shows, not least when we last left the Falkland Islands unguarded, weakness is provocative and costs many many times more than deterrence.

Let’s just look at what’s happening at home.

We have no integrated short-range air defence protecting critical national infrastructure.

We have no contracts or budgets allocated to repair our airfields if they’re damaged or destroyed.

The seas that carry the vast majority of intercontinental data that powers our economy through undersea cables are being systematically surveyed and mapped by Russian naval vessels, and may already be being sabotaged.

As the Russian tankers breaking sanctions through the English Channel show – we’re not really deterring that much.

Just imagine, if you will, the frustration of those who are capable of intercepting our enemies, but are forced to watch – restricted not just by kit but by the quiet suffocation of overcautious legal interpretations.

That doesn’t stop our enemies or encourage our forces, and our civilian resilience sadly is no better.

The National Health Service has no mass-casualty plan designed for industrial-scale warfare. The Cold War infrastructure that provided such a plan was dismantled in the late 1990s on the assumption that it would never be needed.

Indeed, when 9/11 happened, Number 10 couldn’t even find the key to the Prime Minister’s bunker.

We have made choices and saved pennies until the gap between what we say and who we are has become a chasm.

That’s not bad luck. That is the bill for 30 years of choices, arriving all at once.

Now, the hardware can be fixed with cash. What’s harder to change is the understanding that we need to make tough choices – now.

So let’s be honest – this isn’t just about politicians, we have our own share of the guilt. It’s about all of us and the kind of country we want to be.

In 1990, as the Berlin Wall came down, most people wanted to cut defence. Of course they did. Peace allowed us to spend more on our wants not our needs.

And that switch in focus – the so-called peace dividend – has left us disarmed but it wasn’t imposed on an unwilling electorate; it was demanded.

Successive governments delivered what was consistently asked of them.

In forced-choice polling even today, defence ranks eighth out of 13 priorities, behind the NHS, pensions, disability benefits, education and policing.

The question is not whether Britain can afford to do better than this. We can. The question is will we choose to change our priorities to make sure we stay safe.

While we’re spending just over £63 billion on defence, we spend more than five times that on welfare – more than 10 percent of our GDP.

The state pension costs taxpayers £146 billion and other pensioner-related benefits bring the total to about £180 billion.

Health and disability benefits cost £76 billion, more than we spend on deterring war, and that’s likely to rise to £100 billion by the end of the decade because the demographics are just so unforgiving.

Now today, there are three and a half working people supporting each pensioner. By 2050 there will be only two.

I don’t believe our economy can shoulder more taxes than today’s peacetime high. That’s why I argue we need to look again at where money is going.

By 2030, the Triple Lock will cost £15.5 billion more a year than if it were linked to earnings – that is three times the original forecast.

In cash terms, that’s the equivalent of a 20 percent increase in the entire defence budget.

A pensioner-protecting alternative which still tracks earnings but smooths out the volatility would save £6 billion a year by the end of this decade.

That’s five frigates, or 70 F-35s. Every single year.

That’s not all. As Fraser Nelson has shown, the number being moved on to sickness benefit has surged to a scarcely-believable 5,000 a day against 2,000 a day when Labour took office.

Around 90 percent of those granted sickness benefit were still on the benefit, and not working, two years later pushing the annual sickness and disability bill higher by £20 billion since 2019 alone.

That’s how much we spend on every soldier currently serving in the British Army, nearly four times over.

Let’s be clear, those bills are not being paid through taxation but debt. The costs are falling on our children.

What we owed cost us approximately £49 billion in 2019, today it’s £110 billion. Quantitative easing, Covid and welfare all racked up the bill. And it keeps rising.

That’s why this can’t go on. We can’t promise pension rises or sickness benefits that leave us so exposed.

We won’t be able to pay for anything if our cables are cut and energy is severed. The Triple Lock and health demands of a generation that should be at work, not off work, have left us living on a prayer.

These choices haven’t been foisted secretly upon an unknowing electorate. They’re the cumulative product of government policy, the legal culture, and our public discourse – and now we’re here living with the consequences of those choices.

We can blame others and play politics but that will change nothing.

This is our watch and the seas have turned rough.

It’s time that we were honest with ourselves.

At one time, we were.

When Britain helped write the rules of the post-war world we knew we had to help enforce them.

Along with other free nations, we invested in the Bretton Woods framework, the Atlantic alliance, the United Nations, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the Commonwealth, and so much more.

British diplomats drafted the language that British ships, garrisons and planes made count. We knew that soft power was the velvet on the mace – softening the ask, veiling the threat.

Rule-writers and rule-enforcers were the same countries, because the architects of the post-war settlement understood that words without weapons are just wishes.

After the end of the Cold War, we forgot that we still had to pay the bill.

The speeches from Number 10, the Foreign Office and the MoD have barely changed, but the ships, planes, people and bases; the factories and stockpiles, have all dwindled.

We told ourselves fairy tales, we remembered the glorious past that was written in our history and pretended that that would automatically lead to a gentle future forgetting the price of peace.

Our diplomats, the BBC, the British Council, the City of London, the English language itself are all soft power. They can, we are told, carry a load that, until 1990, had needed steel and strength.

We’ve forgotten the truth:

Soft power is not just weaker than hard power, it depends on it.

The institutions through which soft power operates – the alliances, the multilateral frameworks, the treaty bodies – derive their authority from the order that hard power maintains.

Britain didn’t trade hard power for soft power, we sold it, just as a banker has sold the gold that underpins a currency and is now surprised when there is a run on his trust.

The consequence, as every senior civil servant involved in multilateral diplomacy privately acknowledges, is that Britain has fewer seats at the tables where the rules are made.

Because power is not hereditary. It’s bought with ships, aircraft, battalions and the industrial capacity to make them and the willingness to act.

As I warned when I took over the Foreign Affairs Committee 8 years ago, you can’t hide behind treaties and pretend peace is eternal. You will be found wanting.

Now, with the world in flux and the tide going out, I’m reminded of the words of Warren Buffett: we’re finding out who has been swimming naked.

For a trading nation that depends on the sea, there’s a threat, not just to our influence but to our economy. For a rules-based state that needs to shape the words that constrain us, our voice is quieter than it has been for generations.

We’re spending our children’s inheritance and we’re not securing their tomorrow but comforting our today.

The evidence is now too great to be ignored.

France defends British sovereign territory.

The United States takes decisions that determine our future without consulting us. And the reason is clear.

We have too few ships, too few soldiers and too few planes.

We have factories receiving too few orders and the armouries holding too few stocks. And worst, we have a government too keen to punish those who try to protect us. Those are not opinions. They’re facts.

But I’m not going to end on that.

I think there are three tests for us to turn around where we are:

The first, is a short term test: the ‘Falklands test’ if you will. Britain must be able to assemble a credible task force within 72 hours and deploy it to any sovereign British territory within the time window required to prevent its loss.

Second, is the medium term test: the ‘Technology test’, if you will. Britain must be able to match and defeat a modern, fully equipped peer adversary in the air, on land, at sea, and in the electromagnetic and cyber domains, with the drones, integrated air defence, long-range fires, and the resilient command-and-control that contemporary warfare actually requires.

And the third, in the long term: the ‘North Atlantic test’. Britain must be the most capable European power in the most important domains for our national life: the North Sea, the Baltic approaches, the North Atlantic, and the GIUK Gap securing our energy and communications connections.

Over the coming weeks I’m going to be setting out the choices we must make beyond the tax changes and legal reforms that have been demanding our attention for so many years. What must be built is the work of the speeches that I will draft in coming days.

We face an industrial question: can we restore the sovereign capacity to produce the ships, the steel, and the munitions on which hard power depends?

A technological question: can we keep up and overtake the advances in drone warfare, artificial intelligence, and open-source intelligence being demanded by today’s battlefields?

A diplomatic question: can we reawaken the partnerships that will endure for another generation or more and remember the ties that bind?

And lastly we have a legal question: can we rebuild a framework of laws allowing British forces to operate in the world as it is, not as we wish it had become?

I will be addressing each in turn.

Now this has been pretty bleak, but let me be clear, it’s not too late.

Poland has tripled its defence spending in a decade because successive Polish governments made the case and argued the need.

Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia all spend more than we do as a proportion not because they want to, but because their leaders said the hard things clearly, and their citizens, who want peace as much as ours do, chose to be serious when presented with the reality of the choice before them.

What we need now is not just the money or the mass; most importantly, we need politicians willing to say, clearly and repeatedly, things that for thirty years have been thought unsayable.

The diagnosis has not been comfortable and the remedy won’t be simple or cheap. The evidence, however, is clear. And the choice, for the moment at least, remains ours to make.

The last remaining question is whether the national conversation that reinforced our predicament is capable, in the years immediately ahead, of producing that cure. Now that question, well that’s really for all of us to answer in our own way.

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.