The Iron Is Red Hot

Leaders from around the world are gathering for NATO, there is a lot of the agenda, not least talk on its own demise. This is what a revitalised defence alliance should look like.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.