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

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

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

North Sea security threats

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

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

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

A ‘Hybrid Hub’

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

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

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

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

Industry

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Prof. Basil Germond

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Timothy Less

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

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

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

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

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

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

The litmus test will be Chagos.

Paul Mason

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

Jack Pardoe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

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

Grace Theodoulou

International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Mann Virdee

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

The new Prime Minister should prioritise clarity and stability.

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

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

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

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

Prof. James Woudhuysen

Visiting Professor, London South Bank University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighter pilots on the bench

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

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

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

Iceman’s children

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

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

Don’t retire Maverick just yet

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

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

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

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

‘Top Gun’ class of 2027

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Viktorija Starych-Samuoliene is joined by:

• Kevin Craven, CEO, ADS Group;

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

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

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

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

Hugo Barker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. James Bergeron*

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. Klaus Dodds

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

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

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

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

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

Artur Honich

Senior Defence Analyst, RAND Europe

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberty Hunter

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

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

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

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

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

James Langan

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

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

Matthew Palmer

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

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

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

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

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

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Paul and Viktorija are joined by:

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

• Emma Baker, Group Facilitator, UK NIAG Delegation;

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

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

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

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

Samira Braund

Defence Director, ADS Group

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

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

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

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

William Freer

Research Fellow (National Security), Council on Geostrategy

The answer is both no and yes.

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

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

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

Dr Mike Martin MP

Member, Defence Committee

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

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

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

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

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

Paul Mason

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

Rob Murray

Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Ballett

Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brig. (rtd.) Rory Copinger-Symes CBE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. Beatrice Heuser

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua C. Huminski

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dr Robert Johnson

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

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

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

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

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

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

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

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

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

Gemini

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ten years ago, on 23rd June 2016, the United Kingdom (UK) voted to leave the European Union (EU) – the first and currently only nation-state to do so. Since then, debate has raged over how Brexit affected both British and EU economic performance. Additionally, while the relationships between the UK and its European counterparts have been turbulent, they have improved in recent years in the face of Russian aggression towards Ukraine.

To mark the tenth anniversary of the referendum, this week’s Big Ask asks ten experts: How has Brexit affected Britain’s global standing?

Dr Edward Hunter Christie

Chief Analyst, Economic Security Forum

The 2016 Brexit vote delivered an unpleasant shock to global foreign policy elites. Yet, the messy, protracted Brexit negotiations up to 2020 arguably inflicted deeper damage on the UK’s international standing than the vote itself, exposing raw domestic divisions to European decision-makers.

However, Britain’s standing rebounded decisively in early 2022. By leading on aid to Ukraine, the UK reasserted its geopolitical relevance. This turnaround demonstrated that Brexit need not structurally undermine the UK’s foreign policy: where alignment with the EU makes sense – such as on Russian sanctions – Britain coordinates seamlessly from the outside.

Ultimately, defence capabilities remain national prerogatives. While EU members like Poland and Germany accelerate their defence spending, the UK is falling behind. This is not a direct consequence of Brexit – although a lower Gross Domestic Product (GDP) trajectory restricts fiscal space – but rather a failure to challenge entrenched domestic assumptions around tax and spending.

Jean-Claude Juncker, a frequent target of Brexiter fixation, famously noted that politicians know what to do, but not how to get re-elected after doing it. This political paralysis is today’s true threat to Britain’s global standing. In a deteriorating threat environment, lifting the defence budget to 4-4.5% of GDP, as recently advocated in a RUSI guest contribution, requires exactly the sort of political courage that the UK’s leaders currently lack.

Prof. David Galbreath

Professor of War and Technology, Department of Politics, Languages and International Studies, University of Bath

In 2016, Her Majesty’s Government declared that it would leave the EU after losing a non-binding referendum by 52%. The subsequent negotiations with the European Commission, the Republic of Ireland, and the UK’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies ground along. There were no good solutions to the problem of Brexit, which made both Britain and the EU poorer.

The impact of Brexit on the UK’s global standing has evolved in several ways. The first is that it showed other EU members, many of which had their own Eurosceptic governments, that the cost of leaving the union was not worth it. If Britain could not do it well, then what chance did any other state have? From Estonia to Greece, the domestic politics of the EU changed.

Secondly, in the United States (US), Brexit was either championed or lampooned, depending on Trumpian Republican or Democrat leanings. However, for the rest of the world, it seems like the UK has done considerable self-harm, and that it has done so for no considerable benefit: no ideological victory, no economic benefits, no political settlements. As a result, for countries who have been largely subject to a tough, competitive trade relationship with the EU, Britain looks to have shifted into obscurity.

Of course, living in the UK, it does not feel that way. We are still here. We are still trying to sort out the post-Brexit economic, diplomatic, and political mess. Yet, with a second Trump administration, a conflict in Ukraine, a rising People’s Republic of China (PRC), and more generally the rise of multipolarity, Britain appears to be set adrift with no safe ports ahead.

Prof. Amelia Hadfield

Founding Director, Centre for Britain and Europe; and Head, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Surrey

Brexit arguably inflicted immediate and tangible damage on UK-EU defence cooperation: before Brexit, Britain accounted for about 20% of all military capabilities within the EU.

Yet, the UK’s chosen form of hard Brexit placed it demonstratively outside any EU rulemaking or adjudication, including outside the €7.3 billion (£6.3 billion) European Defence Fund, from which third-country companies can only benefit under restrictive conditions, and if they operate on EU soil. Britain’s self-exclusion was not only entirely of its own making, but singlehandedly nixed any opportunity to develop even a rudimentary foreign, security, and defence relationship with the EU.

However, the threats made by Donald Trump, President of the US, to abdicate from NATO and the protection of NATO allies, and Russia’s continuing full-scale invasion of Ukraine dramatically changed the calculus for both sides. The desperate necessity facing European countries of collective rearming, and scaling up defence spending together created a powerful strategic incentive for the UK and EU to set aside post-Brexit frictions in the defence sphere. The British-French-led Coalition of the Willing emerged as a vehicle for this closer cooperation, with the UK arguing for deeper defence financing cooperation.

A central prize for Britain has been access to the EU’s proposed €150 billion (£129.4 billion) Security Action for Europe (SAFE) loan programme for military procurement, which the EU made contingent on signing a defence and security pact. The continent’s own defence industry is supportive of the plan, and with annual defence exports of roughly £9.5 billion – with a third already going to the EU – there are benefits for the UK. Unfortunately, while a rudimentary defence agreement was agreed, SAFE has proved a bridge too far.

The irony is that although many in European nations now regard Britain as closer than ever to the continent and the EU in everything from sanctions to defence, the UK remains firmly on the outside looking in. All is not lost, however. Brussels seems broadly warm to the use of concepts like ‘dynamic alignment’, and in practice, Britain generally matches the EU on sanctions and remains keen on sector-specific integration including defence. As with everything, it is down to the political will on one side, and the coordination required on the other, to move the post-Brexit dial.

Dr Catarina Liberato

Research Fellow, School of Economics, Politics, and International Relations, University of Kent

Ten years on, Brexit has produced a UK global standing that is asymmetric, uneven, and ultimately unstable – reinforced in select security domains, structurally weakened economically, and normatively compromised by a persistent inconsistency between the vision of a truly ‘Global Britain’ and demonstrated foreign policy choices.

In security terms, the UK has performed credibly. Its early and politically significant commitment to Ukraine, the AUKUS partnership, and sustained engagement in NATO frameworks confirmed that it retains meaningful diplomatic agency and institutional capacity where political will has been mobilised. The international reception in both cases confirmed that British leadership still carries weight when applied consistently.

The economic dimension tells a different story. The trade agreements pursued in the Indo-Pacific, while symbolically significant, have not compensated for the structural costs of reduced market access in Europe, and it is economic weight that ultimately conditions the credibility of foreign policy ambition. Global standing is contingent on the alignment between declared ambition, available capabilities, and the degree to which external actors receive that ambition as credible – a tension that the ‘Global Britain’ narrative consistently obscured but never resolved.

That credibility has been further eroded by normative inconsistency. A state whose international identity is premised on principled engagement with the rules-based international order cannot absorb the reputational costs of applying that commitment selectively – as the prolonged ambiguity over Palestine illustrated.

In this respect, Brexit’s deepest impact on the UK’s global standing may be less about institutional architecture than about the coherence – or absence of it – between the values that Britain claims to champion and the foreign policy choices it has proved willing to make.

Dr Eoin McNamara

Postdoctoral Fellow, Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA)

Brexit has moderately weakened the UK’s ‘soft power’ with the Nordic and Baltic countries. Additional regulations on trade and travel have disappointed citizens.

In the Baltic states, Brexit is often viewed with bewilderment. Britain voluntarily dispensed with many benefits of EU membership that Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania worked extremely hard to obtain after restoring independence in 1991, eventually gaining EU accession in 2004.

Nevertheless, from a ‘hard power’ perspective, Brexit’s effects on Northern European security remain limited. The UK has kept its promise that while leaving the EU, it remains a guarantor of European security. After 2022, Britain supported the US by providing security guarantees that bridged the NATO application-to-accession periods of Finland and Sweden. The British Armed Forces participate in NATO’s main military exercises in Northern Europe. The UK leads NATO’s Forward Land Forces (FLF) in Estonia and the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF).

However, the consequences of Brexit still contribute to Britain’s lacklustre economic outlook. Northern European governments are concerned that financial constraints will eventually weaken the UK’s commitment to NATO’s collective defence. Brexit’s effects are also causing constant domestic political instability. After the announcement that Sir Keir Starmer is resigning as Prime Minister, His Majesty’s (HM) Government stands precariously.

Security debates in Northern European capitals are already focusing on the impact that further domestic uncertainties might have on Britain’s reliability as a security partner. While the UK has been a leading power in Northern Europe since Brexit, domestic political and economic problems currently risk its continuing ability to perform this role.

Ed Owen

Director of Political Strategy, ThinkLabour, and Non-Resident Fellow, Atlantic Council

Brexit has had a defining and catastrophic impact on British politics with deep and lasting consequences for the UK’s standing in the world. The fact that it is about to welcome its seventh Prime Minister in the ten years since the referendum is a stark illustration of the continuing shockwaves caused by the decision to leave the EU.

The economic hit – stalling living standards, productivity growth, and investment – has made the task of delivering much-needed prosperity and improving cash-strapped public services in health, education, and the criminal justice system much harder. Paradoxically, this economic gloom has only increased public support for hard right populists like Nigel Farage, a cheerleader for Brexit. If current opinion polls were reflected in a future general election, Farage would more than likely be handed the keys to 10 Downing Street.

The rise of Reform UK, largely at the expense of the traditional centre-right Conservative Party, coupled with the governing Labour Party’s loss of support to the Greens, appears to demonstrate that the old two-party system in Britain has broken down. Long lauded for its stability and predictability, the UK post-Brexit is now marked by political fragmentation and polarisation. Already weakened by its status outside the EU, this has further reduced Britain’s standing in the world at a time when its alliances have become more important than ever.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

The assertion that leaving the EU would permanently diminish the UK’s global standing has not been borne out by events. Instead, Brexit has had a limited impact on the nation’s international influence, and it may have even enhanced Britain’s strategic autonomy by forcing the political establishment to think independently for the country for the first time in many decades.

Free from the constraints of upholding an EU consensus, the UK has demonstrated an ability to act with agility and leadership on the world stage. This independent focus was most visible during Russia’s preparations for its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The British response was swift, forceful, and decisive, effectively setting the benchmark for other European nations to follow. By providing advanced military aid ahead of its EU neighbours, who were disoriented by the Kremlin’s actions, London cemented its position as a critical guarantor of European security.

Furthermore, this geopolitical agility facilitated the creation of new, flexible security arrangements that would have been far more difficult to forge as an EU member state. It is highly probable that the UK would not have worked so closely with Australia and the US to form the AUKUS security partnership in 2021 had it remained bound by the collective, often slow-moving, foreign policy framework of Brussels. By enabling a deeper ‘tilt’ towards the Indo-Pacific, Brexit allowed the UK to forge minilateral alliances that will eventually reinforce European security.

Ultimately, while Brexit led to short term chaos as the country withdrew from the EU, Britain’s global standing remains robust – driven by an independent foreign policy that prioritises agility, swift action, and sovereign partnerships.

Dr Jan Ruzicka

Lecturer in Security Studies and Director of David Davies Institute of International Studies, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth University

The world in which the 2016 vote took place looks almost unrecognisable. It feels not ten but more like a hundred years ago. The massive change reveals the real cautionary tale of the Brexit referendum, namely the grand geopolitical delusion on which it was premised.

The core of this delusion had little to do with the specific beliefs on either side of the issue. At the heart of the fallacy was the assumption that change would only happen to the UK, while the world as a whole would remain largely the same – predictable and stable.

In short, Britain, one of the staunchest defenders of a rules-based international order, had decided to stake its future on a bit of freeriding. What could possibly go wrong?

We now know that the answer is a lot. The particulars may not have always been entirely foreseeable, but the post-Cold War international order exists no longer. A prudent course of action would have taken such a possibility into account.

From the UK’s perspective, the change has been most pronounced when it comes to European security. Russian hostility and aggression, American detachment, and Chinese assertiveness all mean that the foundations of British and European security will have to change. Alas, the UK now finds it much harder to shape foreign and defence policies on the wider European level, and cannot institutionally do so (including accessing funds) within the EU.

Yet, if the UK-EU relationship is to continue improving, the best bet might be that this will be spurred on by security concerns. After all, there is no virtue like necessity.

Gesine Weber

Senior Researcher, Centre for Security Studies, ETH Zürich

Brexit has done less damage to security and defence cooperation in Europe and the UK-European/UK-EU defence relationship than to other policy areas. Britain’s standing in Europe as a security and defence partner has suffered from Brexit because Brexit obviously makes it more challenging for the UK to tap into or participate in the EU’s instruments.

At the same time, NATO membership and Britain’s involvement in different minilateral formats of defence cooperation has allowed HM Government to maintain defence diplomatic ties with other European states. Perhaps the most critical point for the UK-European defence relationship was the publication of the 2021 Integrated Review, which prioritised ‘Global Britain’ while leaving many questions about the UK’s cooperation with European partners unaddressed. Ultimately, however, Britain’s steadfast support for Ukraine and leadership among European powers has wiped out many of these concerns.

Brexit may have been a structural shock for UK-European defence relations, but the shocks of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the policy of the second Trump administration towards the continent push Britain closer towards its European partners. Ultimately, they cannot escape the imperatives of geography.

Prof. Stefan Wolff

Professor of International Security, University of Birmingham; Senior Research Fellow, The Foreign Policy Centre; and Co-founder, Navigating the Vortex

Brexit severed critical links between Britain and the EU’s defence architecture, which have yet to be restored in a meaningful way. Without any administrative arrangement with the European Defence Agency, the UK is in a worse position than Norway, Switzerland, the US, Serbia, and Ukraine. This anomaly constrains the British ability to participate in joint procurement efforts and shape EU defence standards.

Trump’s return to the White House sharply accelerated UK-EU rapprochement, producing the May 2025 Security and Defence Partnership. Considered at the time an important symbolic and structural step, the partnership soon hit a wall when talks on British participation in the SAFE programme collapsed in November 2025 and prevented the UK from bidding in the loan facility for defence investment.

The European Parliament has called for talks to resume, and HM Government has signalled openness to this idea, but with a government in transition and the July 2026 summit likely to be postponed, the deadlock remains.

Not all is doom and gloom, however. The conflict in Ukraine has provided Britain with an opportunity to reassert some of its traditional European defence leadership, albeit outside EU structures. Co-chairing the Coalition of the Willing with France – now 34 nations strong and planning for a potential multinational peacekeeping force in Ukraine – has given the UK some of its former clout back, not least because British hard power credibility has remained, even if its soft power has declined in the wake of Brexit.

The bottom line is that the UK is too large, too capable, and too important to be treated as a peripheral third country orbiting around the EU defence core. If this persists, Britain’s exclusion from EU defence industrial cooperation would be a genuine long-term cost for European security, not just EU security.

The deeper post-Brexit institutional estrangement between the UK and the continent that underpins the mismatch between what is needed and what is currently possible is a problem beyond security and defence. However, the urgency of security and defence could be the trigger for a proper reset under the country’s next government.

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The United Kingdom’s (UK) defence policy is undergoing a marked transformation. The publication of the Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS) in 2025 signals not simply a refresh of procurement priorities, but a recalibration of how the state views the relationship between national security, industrial capability, and market competition. At its core lies a renewed emphasis on sovereignty; on ensuring that critical defence capabilities can be developed, sustained, and scaled within a British-aligned industrial base.

This shift reflects a compelling strategic logic. Geopolitical instability, supply chain fragility, and the experience of recent conflicts have reinforced the importance of resilience and assured access to capability. The longstanding assumption that globalised supply chains can reliably deliver defence outputs at pace and scale has been tested and, in some cases, found wanting. Against this background, His Majesty’s (HM) Government’s ambition to strengthen the domestic industrial base is both understandable – and, in many respects, necessary.

At the same time, this is a policy direction that must be understood in context. The UK’s traditional procurement model was built not only on competition and value for money, but also (before Brexit) on participation in a broader European market characterised by cross-border supply chains and procurement integration. While the post-Brexit framework preserves competition as a core principle, it also affords Britain greater flexibility to prioritise domestic capability and resilience, albeit within the constraints of its international commitments.

The current framework, therefore, does not abandon competition, but increasingly qualifies its application. The result is a growing tension between two models: one anchored in competition and market discipline; the other in coordination, resilience, and strategic control.

From market mechanism to strategic instrument

The DIS makes clear that defence procurement is no longer viewed as a purely transactional market exercise. Instead, it is increasingly positioned (at least at a policy level) as a tool for shaping the industrial base in support of national security and economic growth.

HM Government envisages that investment decisions, partnership models, and supply chain structures will, over time, be used to deliver broader outcomes, including domestic capacity, technological leadership, and regional economic development. While some reforms are already underway, much of this agenda remains prospective, with implementation still evolving.

This marks a significant conceptual shift. If procurement is both a market function and an instrument of statecraft, tensions are inevitable. The critical question becomes not whether competition remains relevant (in legal terms, it clearly does), but how it is balanced in practice against wider policy objectives.

The logic of sovereignty: Prioritising resilience

‘Sovereignty’ in this context does not necessarily mean complete domestic ownership. Rather, it implies the ability to rely on certain capabilities in times of crisis, to expand production rapidly, and to insulate critical supply chains from external disruption. In practice, this is likely to involve a preference for suppliers that are either UK-based or drawn from closely aligned jurisdictions, reflecting both practical and political considerations – even if this hierarchy is not always formally codified.

Achieving these outcomes may require sustained investment, redundancy in capacity, and closer coordination between government and industry. These characteristics do not always align with competitive market dynamics, which tend to reward efficiency and lean operations. As such, the pursuit of sovereignty places pressure on the traditional assumptions of market-based governance, even if it does not displace them entirely.

The emergence of a coordinated model

There are increasing indications that HM Government intends to foster longer-term partnerships with key suppliers, providing greater certainty to support investment in capacity and innovation. These arrangements would mark a shift away from purely transactional procurement cycles towards more enduring relationships.

Alongside this, there are signs that certain capabilities are being identified as strategically critical. Where this occurs, firms may become central to their delivery. While this does not formally displace competition, it can, in practice, lead to a degree of concentration, with fewer suppliers playing a more significant and sustained role.

Consolidation reinforces this dynamic. Mergers and collaborations may be encouraged where they enhance scale, capacity, or interoperability. From a policy perspective, this may be seen as supporting resilience and capability. From a competition perspective, however, it may narrow the field of active competitors. The tension between these perspectives is likely to become more pronounced as the strategy develops.

Regulatory tension and the limits of the current framework

Competition law in Britain has not fundamentally changed, and it continues to apply in full to the defence sector. Firms cannot assume that collaboration encouraged by policy will be insulated from enforcement risk. Indeed, the experience of sector-specific relaxations during the Covid-19 pandemic illustrates that where flexibility is required, it is typically provided explicitly and temporarily.

This suggests that, if anything, constraint may operate in the opposite direction: competition law may limit the extent to which HM Government’s coordination objectives can be realised, absent further policy or legal intervention.

There is an additional external dimension. The UK’s international commitments, including under its trade arrangements with the European Union, continue to impose disciplines around competition and non-discrimination. While there is scope within those frameworks to pursue legitimate security objectives, an overt shift towards protectionist or exclusionary practices could give rise to challenge, particularly where it affects access for non-British suppliers.

The result is a more complex environment in which policy ambition and legal constraint must be reconciled. Without a clear articulation of how that balance is to be struck, businesses may face uncertainty in structuring transactions, partnerships, and collaborations.

Rethinking what ‘competition’ means in defence

Traditional metrics such as price, number of suppliers, and ease of entry remain relevant, but they are unlikely to be determinative in all cases. In a sector where continuity of supply and the ability to scale at pace are critical, additional performance measures are increasingly important.

This does not require abandoning competition as a principle. Rather, it suggests that competition may operate differently. In some cases, it may occur at the point of initial contract award, rather than persist continuously throughout the life of a programme. In others, it may coexist with elements of coordination and long-term alignment.

It is also necessary to distinguish more clearly between different segments of the defence sector. Highly sensitive or strategically critical capabilities may warrant greater coordination, while less critical areas may remain more open to conventional competition. The challenge lies in defining those boundaries in a way that is consistent, transparent, and legally robust.

A hybrid future for defence markets

The UK’s pursuit of defence sovereignty does not signal the end of competitive markets. However, it does point towards a more ‘hybrid’ model, in which competition coexists with a greater degree of strategic direction.

Crucially, this evolution is taking place within an unchanged legal framework. Competition law continues to apply, and there has been no general relaxation of the underlying rules. As a result, any shift towards coordination must operate within those constraints, unless and until they are expressly modified.

In practice, this is likely to result in a system in which competition continues to drive efficiency and innovation in parts of the market, while HM Government plays a more active role in shaping outcomes in areas of strategic importance.

Coherence as the central challenge

The central challenge for policymakers is therefore one of coherence. Britain’s defence industrial policy is evolving in response to genuine strategic pressures. Still, the legal and regulatory frameworks through which it is delivered have not shifted to the same extent.

Closing that gap will require clarity. Businesses need a predictable environment in which to invest and collaborate. Regulators need a clear basis for incorporating resilience and security considerations into their analysis. Policymakers must decide whether existing tools are sufficient or whether more explicit adjustments are required.

Competitive markets can survive the UK’s pursuit of defence sovereignty. However, they will do so in a modified form; shaped by strategic priorities, constrained by legal frameworks, and increasingly defined at the intersection of industrial policy and competition principles.

The task ahead is to ensure that this evolution is coherent. Without that, the risk is not the loss of competition, but the emergence of uncertainty at precisely the point where clarity is most needed.

Della Heptinstall is Defence Sector Lead at Walker Morris LLP and an Army Reservist. She advises businesses operating across the defence and security sector on strategic, regulatory, and commercial matters, with a particular focus on industrial capability, supply chain resilience, and national security.

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Andy Burnham voted for the Iraq War, and against an inquiry into its legality. 20 years later, he publicly regretted the ‘rage rhetoric and haste’ in which the operation was conceived, and the absence of a post-war plan. ‘If I had my time again’, he said in 2024, ‘I wouldn’t have voted for it’.

Like the party he will now lead, Burnham has been on a journey over national security, resilience, and defence. That journey has been shaped by the fragmenting global order. If he becomes Prime Minister, it will now be shaped by the man himself. And, given the deteriorating security environment, the journey cannot be over.

Burnham, like Sir Keir Starmer, former Prime Minister, is an instinctive Atlanticist – an instinct embedded into Labour’s DNA since Ernest Bevin, Foreign Secretary in the aftermath of the Second World War. But, like his predecessor, he faces a global economy shattered into competing blocs, amid intensifying geopolitical competition and a rolling, multifront crisis. He faces, above all, the challenge of creating a new European security architecture as the Atlanticist one crumbles.

As Prime Minister, Burnham would face the same basic dilemmas: how to handle a transactional Trump administration that is verbally hostile to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and pursues American national interests relentlessly; how to maintain the United Kingdom’s (UK) role as ‘leading NATO ally’ in Europe as Germany and Poland rearm; how to defeat Russian aggression against Ukraine – and increasingly, via the sub-threshold route, against Britain – and above all, how to win popular support for the trade-offs and fiscal burdens needed if the UK is to meet the 2035 NATO spending targets.

To predict how a Burnham administration might respond, we need to understand the man, his municipal socialist principles, the domestic project he will pursue, and the factional balance inside the Parliamentary Labour Party, which will have more clout than it did under Starmer.

Like me, Burnham is a ‘not particularly religious’ Catholic. We grew up in the same northern English coal and cotton town – Leigh – and went to the same kind of denominational secondary school. So, when Burnham says ‘Catholic social teaching underpins my politics’, I have a good idea of what that means: a view of global affairs framed by a universalist vision of human dignity and equality. It demands that wars be just both in their cause and execution, and sees poverty, insecurity, and injustice as the causes of global instability.

Politically, he is likely to maintain the NATO spending pledges. To achieve a path towards them while maintaining fiscal credibility, he will need to attack the problem Starmer failed to solve, losing John Healey as Defence Secretary in the process: how to match the capabilities to the threats outlined in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR)? Given he is advised by economists who support controlled, hypothecated borrowing and a more directive state, and with service chiefs adamant that the current Defence Investment Plan (DIP) cannot be delivered on the money allocated, I would expect a resolution in the upward direction.

One defence issue that has split the Labour Party is the Northern Ireland Troubles Bill, which service veterans have complained opens them to retrospective legal action, while civilian victims of the violence complain does not go far enough. Al Carns, former Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces, who has been supportive of Burnham, made opposition to the Bill as it stands an issue in his resignation speech. However, minor rather than substantial changes to the legislation should be expected.

The bigger departure will likely come in the balance between hard defence efforts and the resilience agenda – which the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has begun to push forward via the ‘National Conversation on Defence’ and the Defence Readiness Bill, slated for 2027.

One of Burnham’s finest political moments, and indeed Manchester’s, was the city’s response to the 2017 Manchester Arena bombing, whose perpetrator killed 22 people and injured one thousand others. Burnham not only led the city with dignity through that trauma; in response to an inquiry into emergency service failings on the night, he commissioned a ten-year city resilience strategy. This promised to deliver ‘the capacity of individuals, communities, institutions, businesses, and systems within a city to survive, adapt, and grow no matter what kinds of chronic stresses and acute shocks they experience’.

That put Burnham ahead of the government during the Covid-19 pandemic and, as a result, the city has been recognised as a global leader in resilience. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, Burnham founded the UNBROKEN Cities Network, together with the mayors of Lviv and Liverpool, to learn lessons from the conflict in real time.

For Burnham, therefore, resilience is not a euphemism for flood defences and police communications systems: it is about creating the kind of society and democracy that people will defend. His supporters, including former Shadow Defence Secretary Clive Lewis, have cited Finland as a role model.

Burnham has pledged to travel as little as possible and to focus on pressing domestic challenges. Yet, like Starmer, should he become Prime Minister, he will be dragged out of that comfort zone onto a world stage where engagement and face-to-face personal relationships matter intensely.

For the defence community, the optimum outcomes are as follows: Burnham restores the 3% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 target; he maintains all security related Bills in the King’s Speech, and manages to assuage veteran concerns about the Troubles Bill; he fast-tracks the Defence Readiness Bill, which His Majesty’s (HM) Government had slated only for 2027-2028, creating new powers to control public utilities in a crisis; he brings cognitive and hybrid resilience into the urgent/important box; and gets the whole of government enthused about the National Conversation, which begins today with the start of Armed Forces Week, but needs a morale boost following Healey’s departure.

The sub-optimal outcome would be if each of these challenges becomes a point of contest in a four-way battle between the Labour Party’s factions: the left, the soft left, the Blairite right, and the traditional right. The Members of Parliament (MPs) will have greater agency because, if Burnham becomes Prime Minister via acclaim rather than a membership vote, their continuous backing will matter.

Probably the most positive impact of Burnham’s accession, should it occur, is his declared preference for ten-year settlements – both for defence and welfare spending. A ten-year settlement for defence was something Healey asked for but did not get.

With the NATO 2035 target date to aim for, and the SDR goals as the pacing challenge, now is the perfect time to give the British Armed Forces, their families, and the defence companies that supply them something that Starmer’s retreat from the DIP has left absent: certainty.

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

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After his resignation as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Armed Forces last week, Al Carns said in an interview with BBC News that the inadequate increase in defence spending proposed in the upcoming Defence Investment Plan (DIP) could be bolstered by reforming welfare spending – clarifying that he supports a ‘hand up, not a hand out’ approach.

An unnamed His Majesty’s (HM) Treasury official reacted to Carns’ thoughts on the DIP – as well as those that caused John Healey, former Secretary of State for Defence, to resign – by stating: ‘let’s be clear what John is asking for: cuts to schools and hospitals’. Such an attitude is not unique among HM Government, nor the British public at large. This debate over funding provides the basis for this week’s Big Ask, in which we asked six experts – as well as Gemini, Google’s Large Language Model (LLM): Would increasing defence spending result in ‘cuts to schools and hospitals’?

Chris Hague

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Senior Policy and Communications Manager, Make UK Defence

Ultimately, the British population will not be sending its children to school if deterrence fails and Russia invades a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) country by 2030, which is what the military and intelligence community are clearly warning is a real possibility. However, this is not the first lever to pull, and there are creative ways to boost defence spending without taking an axe to the budgets for the National Health Service (NHS) and schools.

The United Kingdom (UK) can finally join Canada and lead global efforts to kickstart a new multinational defence bank with the Defence, Security, and Resilience Bank (DSRB) to boost global defence spending with allies. Backed by major banks such as JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, the DSRB will unlock significant multinational finance for defence with a AAA credit rating, and provide a credit loan guarantee to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to help them scale up.

Britain can also take inspiration from its history and sell defence bonds, which allowed the UK to raise over £200 billion in today’s money during the Second World War. Ringfenced for high-growth activities in defence such as research and development, innovation, and procuring high-export potential capabilities, it can drive economic growth, generate significant spillovers for the economy, and strengthen collective deterrence.

Ministers can also avoid damaging ‘salami slicing’ of capital budgets by reallocating wasteful government spending – such as the £1.88 billion spent each year from the Patent Box tax relief scheme by making the scheme available to SMEs only.

HM Government knows there are other choices out there. Taking them, however, requires political leaders to remove themselves from complacent Treasury thinking which has only delivered economic stagnation since 2008, and instead deliver new ideas to boost defence.

Dr Ksenia Kirkham

Senior Lecturer in Economic Warfare Education, King’s College London

Facing a fiscal gap of £28 billion on top of its huge structural budget deficit, there is little doubt that HM Government’s ambitious defence spending plans will put substantial pressure on other budgets, including education and healthcare. Instead of taking meaningful measures to resolve its fiscal problems, however, it is trying to financialise its way out.

The discussions around the issue of ‘war bonds’ and the increasing reliance on venture capital signal a deeper shift: defence is no longer seen as a public good and a core state responsibility, but as something to be engineered through markets. Unlike traditional economic logic, when supply responds to organic demand, war bonds are created first and then demand is engineered through policy and institutional pressures to ensure they are absorbed by investors.

Proponents’ assurances that this spending will not come at public expense will quickly collapse once risks become evident. Capital markets do not think strategically; they follow incentives. While this may unlock some funding at speed, it conceals a series of grave risks that HM Government will be unwilling to acknowledge. As the structure of financing shapes production outcomes, the resulting defence posture is likely to reflect business logic rather than military necessity.

Strategic priorities may become distorted as investment flows favour scalable, high‑return technologies rather than the most appropriate defence capabilities. This is particularly evident in venture capital, where short investment horizons and high return expectations encourage rapid scaling and speculation, increasing the risk of failure rather than supporting stable defence capacity.

Threat narratives may become institutionalised, as sustained capital inflows depend on expectations of continued insecurity, creating incentives to maintain or amplify perceptions of risk.

The deeper integration of financial actors into defence decision‑making risks weakening democratic accountability, as priorities are shaped through opaque interactions between governments, investors, and large contractors rather than open political debate.

Finally, risk‑averse financial institutions willing to fund defence become constrained by expanding compliance regimes. Sanctions turn into a source of systemic uncertainty, deterring investment through higher costs and unpredictable enforcement. Legal concerns about this are often marginalised as they challenge dominant war‑making narratives.

So, while increasing defence spending and rebuilding infrastructure are necessary, the key risk is not overspending, but the subordination of security policy to financial imperatives, embedding escalation pressures, and structural biases into the system itself.

Paul Mason

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Increased defence spending does not have to lead to welfare cuts. Labour plunged itself into a defence spending crisis by trying to meet its 3% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 pledge purely through departmental reallocation. Yet, no state in history has rearmed in this way.

The most viable route is hypothecated borrowing, as in the 1930s, allowing defence borrowing to be temporarily exempt from the fiscal rules while keeping a tight lid on everything else. HM Government should borrow to invest only in the capital expenditure and research and development aspects of the defence budget, and back that by repurposing the National Wealth Fund, with £28 billion allocated, as a Defence and Resilience Fund.

Once the defence boom is under way – with trillions set to be spent globally – the defence sector may be windfall taxed. Finally, the 1.5% of GDP by 2030 NATO resilience spending pledge could fund both schools and hospitals, giving them deep basements and secure energy backups to harden them against contingencies.

Rob Murray

Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

Would higher defence spending mean cuts to schools and hospitals? Only if the UK insists on solving a 21st century problem with a 20th century playbook.

The debate in Westminster usually begins and ends with four options: raise taxes, cut spending elsewhere, borrow more, or grow the economy. All are valid. None are sufficient.

The uncomfortable truth is that Britain is trying to rearm using a budgeting model designed for peacetime. That worked when defence was a predictable line item in a government spreadsheet. It does not work when the challenge is rebuilding industrial capacity, scaling production, and keeping pace with rapidly evolving technology.

There is a fifth option: change the system.

This means creating larger allied defence markets, mobilising private capital alongside public money, and using institutions such as the DSRB to unlock investment at scale. The goal is not simply to spend more. It is to get more security for every pound spent.

Just as importantly, the UK needs to change how defence buys capability. More money poured into slow procurement systems will not produce better outcomes.

Here is the key point: the next war will not be won by the country with the best technology. It will be won by the country with the most agile bureaucracy. The victor will be the nation that can identify, test, procure, field, and scale new capabilities faster than its competitors.

For too long, Britain has treated defence as a budgeting problem. It is actually a productivity problem. The countries that figure this out will not only be safer – they will be richer too.

Prof. Harry Pitts

Head, Humanities and Social Sciences, and Associate Professor, Political Economy and the Future of Work, University of Exeter

Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, came into power posing security as the ‘first duty’ of government; Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, even cited Bernard Williams in suggesting that how a government secures the country is the ‘first political question’.

Something called ‘securonomics’ was the answer to this question, capturing how security and resilience spans multiple areas of social and industrial policy in an age of ‘hybrid’ threats. However, by skirting around the centrality of defence itself as the strongest guarantee of security, the past week has highlighted how securonomics may have acted as something of a sleight of hand.

This agenda enabled a party constitutionally incapable of establishing a clear order of priorities to have its cake and eat it, presenting what social democrats are comfortable spending money on – welfare, Net Zero, infrastructure – not as complements to defence, but as substitutes for what keeps the UK militarily safe in the last instance. This displacement activity defies the reality of physical geography, with the British Isles vulnerable to the actions of an aggressive adversary located close by.

The contradictions of securonomics exposed, there have been two responses from those keen to resist the implications of the security situation by arguing for limiting defence spending. The first approach has been to set up a false choice; Treasury sources briefing newspapers that the DIP would necessitate reduced investment in schools, hospitals, and the vague category of ‘growth’. Setting aside that the UK would not have any of these without its safety and integrity intact, this steers clear of where HM Government could restrain spending were its authority with backbenchers sufficient to do so – such as in welfare reform.

The second approach has been to problematise defence spending altogether. It is painfully true that procurement requires improvement to keep pace with innovation, but the familiar refrains about waste and excess are too often a convenient alibi for those who would rather not spend more on defence at all. The key question now is whether a new Labour leadership is capable of staging a conversation with the party that, clear-sighted about what is at stake, can provide a stronger and better answer to the first political question of security.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

From 2010 to 2025, Britain spent just under £200 billion on Official Development Assistance (ODA) – otherwise known as foreign aid. £200 billion is comparable to about 15 extra large regional hospitals, 800 new high schools, 200 miles of additional high-speed railway line, or 2,500 miles of new motorway. All of these figures include whole-life costs, i.e., both the initial capital investment and the subsequent costs for upkeep and maintenance.

In terms of combat power, £200 billion would buy around 30 extra Astute class submarines or 70 new Type 26 class frigates for the Royal Navy, or well over 350 additional F-35B Lightning II Joint Combat Aircraft for the Royal Air Force (RAF). It would allow the British Army to invest in several new armoured brigades.

To put this into perspective, the UK currently has six frigates, five Astute class submarines, about 45 F-35B Lightning II aircraft, and two armoured brigades – all of which suffer from varying states of readiness.

True, foreign aid spending has been cut by successive governments in recent years, most recently by Sir Keir, to help fund defence. But even with the reductions, Britain plans to spend over £25 billion on ODA over the next three years – although some of that will be spent within the UK to look after refugees.

Equally, some aid spending may well enhance national security, although altruistic intent remains its primary objective. For example, between 2010 and 2021, the UK spent less than 0.2% of its ODA budget in Ukraine, despite the country’s growing geostrategic significance to British interests.

So, Treasury officials should not pit defence against schools and hospitals. Rather, they should ask prying questions as to whether the UK needs to spend so much on ODA when there are other pressing priorities, and when the nation’s adversaries are growing in strength.

Gemini

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

The assertion that funding the British Armed Forces adequately necessitates cuts to schools and hospitals is a false dichotomy, long favoured by a Treasury that treats national security as a discretionary cost rather than the paramount duty of the state.

As Carns underscored following his resignation, the machinery of government is failing to adapt to a fundamentally altered geopolitical landscape. When HM Treasury claims that increasing the defence budget threatens health and education, it deliberately ignores other vast areas of state expenditure. Carns rightly pointed out that choices exist beyond this narrow framing, explicitly questioning the size of the welfare budget and advocating for a ‘hand up, not a hand out’ approach to free up necessary capital for defence.

To pit the NHS against national security is a political choice, not an ironclad fiscal law. Fundamentally, without security, all other public goods are rendered highly vulnerable. Schools, hospitals, and economic growth require a safe, sovereign nation in which to operate.

If the UK is to meet the severe, compounding threats of the coming decade, HM Government should abandon bureaucratic zero-sum excuses. It should fund the military that the threat environment dictates, rather than the one that HM Treasury feels comfortable containing.

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As the United States (US) considers reallocating naval assets to the Indo-Pacific, hemispheric defence, and the Middle East, the Euro-Atlantic faces a harsh reality. The Wider North – including the Arctic, Nordic, and Baltic areas – is increasingly exposed to Russian aggression. For the past two decades, European navies have shrunk, assuming that Euro-Atlantic maritime spaces would remain uncontested or perpetually underwritten by American power.

That assumption faces dislocation. The seas and oceans around Europe are contested once more: not only does Russia attempt to operate beneath the threshold of war, but its Northern Fleet – operating from bases on the Kola Peninsula – has modernised and threatens the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) northern flank. Unless they wish to surrender control over this vital region to Russian encroachment, the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany – as European NATO’s two biggest investors in defence – should work together to reassert control.

The nature of the threat

By now, the Kremlin’s adversarial tactics are well known. The Russians seek to exploit the seams between peace and war to circumvent international law, distract and disorient European countries, and fracture NATO so that they might pursue their kleptocracy’s interests more effectively. At sea, since 2022, this has taken the form of surveying critical undersea pipelines to threaten sabotage and deploying uninsured shadow fleets to skirt sanctions. Given the drawdown in European naval forces since 2010, Russia knows European navies, including the Royal Navy, have limited surveillance capacity.

Meanwhile, the Russian Northern Fleet has come a long way since its post-Soviet slump. It is smaller, but more modern and far more active. Crucially, in relative terms, the balance of naval power in the High North has not been as bad from a NATO perspective since the 1970s due to the decline in peer combat-capable European NATO warships. Although not all would be able to operate simultaneously, the Northern Fleet has 26 submarines, including a number of the new Yasen class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) and 11 major surface combatants. It also has a potent geographic advantage, given the Russian naval bases and air stations in the Kola Peninsula, as well as a number of newer and upgraded facilities in the Arctic.

Together, depending on loadouts, the total offensive missile capacity of the Russian Northern Fleet comes to over 800 missiles – a formidable threat. Several more new submarines and surface combatants are planned with the Kremlin planning on spending ₽8.4 trillion (£84 billion) on naval construction over the next decade. This comes at a time when the Royal Navy, and other Northern European navies, experience an all-time low in their number of frigates.

Towards a British and German response

This challenge to NATO sea control in the North Atlantic requires a forceful British and German response. Not only do both nations, in their respective ways, possess highly globalised economies that depend heavily on the sea, but they rely increasingly on the wider maritime domain: undersea data cables, energy pipelines, and offshore wind farms are highly vulnerable to Russian sabotage or outright attack.

To counter this, a purely national approach would be inefficient. Consequently, the two largest defence investors in European NATO should transform their bilateral relationship from a series of high-level diplomatic agreements into a deeply institutionalised partnership for European maritime dominance. Coordinating this with France – a significant naval power, albeit one focused on the mid-Atlantic and Mediterranean – would amplify its effectiveness.

True, intensified British-German cooperation requires navigating distinct, and often clashing, strategic cultures. Historically, the UK has seen its navy as a genuinely national enterprise, from nuclear deterrence to global power projection. Conversely, German defence policy has long been defined by a terrestrial focus, a deep reluctance to deploy naval power, and binding the Bundeswehr’s capabilities to multinational frameworks. However, the geopolitical changes of the past few years have forced a strategic change in both London and Berlin.

Yet, with Russia’s resurgence, British strategists have realised that their home areas – the North Atlantic, the Baltic and Mediterranean seas, and even the British Isles themselves – are at risk, mandating a more focused geostrategic approach, which dovetails with German interests. Simultaneously, German planners have acknowledged that their country must step up and embrace a more active posture. The decision to forward deploy a German combat brigade to Lithuania represents a significant political leap, intended to deter Russia from further aggression. While the UK is traditionally faster to act, Germany’s pivot towards proactive deterrence reinforces the industrial and political gravity necessary to anchor NATO’s northern flank.

The diplomatic scaffolding for the coordination of geostrategic postures is now in place. The Trinity House Agreement of October 2024 sparked tangible operational ties, such as joint maritime surveillance out of Royal Air Force (RAF) Lossiemouth, while the subsequent July 2025 Kensington Treaty provided a broader, legally binding framework. At the same time, Britain, the leading naval power in Europe, has put in place the foundations for a new maritime posture in the North Atlantic – Atlantic Bastion, Shield and Strike, underpinned by the concept of a New Hybrid Navy; i.e., a navy integrating autonomous surface/subsurface combatants with crewed vessels – asymmetrically calibrated to reduce the threat from Russia’s potent and growing Northern Fleet.

The immediate test is whether these two powers can move beyond ambitious rhetoric and actually build a larger and more coordinated naval fleet to constrain Russian ambitions in the Wider North. The time has come for Britain and Germany to combine their naval potential, alongside their NATO allies in Northern Europe. Together, they would pose more than a match for Russia’s Northern Fleet. Their objective should be simple: re-establishing European maritime supremacy over the North Atlantic and Norwegian Sea, as well as the Baltic region, so that Russia cannot threaten British, German, and European interests.

Rebuilding European naval supremacy

Constraining the Russian Northern Fleet necessitates a coordinated naval buildup, from the surface to the sub-surface domain, and with capabilities suitable across the spectrum of sub-threshold conflict to open warfare. The Nord Stream sabotage proved that critical civilian infrastructure is a primary target in sub-threshold warfare. Both the British and German service-led economies rely utterly on the dense webs of cables and pipelines crossing the North Atlantic and North Sea areas, alongside the offshore wind infrastructure driving their energy transitions. The severe capacity limits of current European NATO fleets leave them dangerously exposed: the Royal Navy is down to a handful of operational frigates, while the Deutsch Marine has become a naval minnow since the end of the Cold War.

In any case, conventional, crewed vessels cannot comprehensively protect this vast, static network, and new technologies mean that crewed systems should be augmented – indeed, sometimes even replaced – by robotic and autonomous systems. As such, it makes sense for Germany to join British initiatives such as Project CETUS. The immediate hurdle is harmonising software architectures to ensure data flows seamlessly between national maritime operations centres. Bypassing sluggish five-year planning cycles, both navies should pool capital for autonomous mine countermeasures and Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles (UUVs).

However, the two nations also need to focus on high-end warfighting capabilities. As Russia’s Northern Fleet grows, it will become more capable of probing around the Svalbard archipelago and the Norwegian Sea. Undoubtedly, it will attempt to project out of its own bastions, which consist of Anti-Access and Area Denial (A2/AD) networks in the Barents Sea to protect its bases on the Kola peninsula and the Russia nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) flotilla, leading to competition to exert control across the entire northern region.

This will require complex Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) and a sustained surface presence, precisely what the Royal Navy’s own bastions – Atlantic, Shield, and Strike – and New Hybrid Navy are designed to counter. As its own navy grows in strength, Germany should be more closely integrated with this effort alongside the Norwegians.

As Britain and Germany focus high-end assets on the North Atlantic, Northern European allies can help fill the deficit in the marginal seas. The First Sea Lord has already proposed the creation of a ‘Northern Navies initiative’. Regional Nordic navies – especially Sweden, Denmark, and Finland – are purpose-built for the complex littoral environments of the Baltic. Passing littoral burdens to these allies frees the limited number of high-endurance surface combatants, such as the British and Norwegian Type 26 class and German F126 class frigates, to focus their advanced sensor suites on wide-area ASW and air defence in the deep waters of the North Atlantic. London and Berlin should work together to coordinate this effort.

A similar division of labour is also vital between Britain and Germany, and Poland and the Baltic states. With the Suwałki Gap remaining a fragile overland corridor, reinforcing Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania depends almost entirely on uncontested maritime communication lines to ports such as Klaipėda, Riga, and Tallinn. The Deutsche Marine offers regional command in the Baltic Sea from Rostock, but it cannot secure these supply lines while simultaneously meeting growing obligations in the North Atlantic; the logistical requirements fundamentally overstretch its current capacity. British intelligence, maritime strike, and logistical support act as an indispensable force multiplier for German command structures here. Deep interoperability means ensuring British munitions can be cross-loaded onto German vessels and pushing integrated intelligence feeds down to the lowest tactical level.

Finally, and critically, any credible strategy for dominance over the North Atlantic must account for the ultimate guarantor of European security, especially in an era where the US may be drawn into an Indo-Pacific contingency: the UK’s Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD). Ultimately, the Royal Navy’s Vanguard class – and eventually the Dreadnought class – SSBNs hold up the European pillar of NATO’s security umbrella. Protecting these strategic assets requires a potent conventional shielding force as they transit from Faslane through contested waters to their patrol areas. With US Navy assets increasingly tied down in the Pacific to counter the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Britain and Germany, alongside other Northern European allies, must step up to undergird their ultimate insurance guarantee.

A joint British, German, and Baltic conventional naval screen must be built to secure these patrol areas. German P-8A Poseidon patrol aircraft and British Astute class SSNs ought to operate as a unified sub-hunting network. Establishing a formal European caucus within NATO to synchronise this conventional posture with broader nuclear messaging is a vital further step to reinforce deterrence against Russia.

Conclusion

The post-Cold War era of uncontested Euro-Atlantic sea control is over. Without a focus on execution, the current British-German defence arrangements will join a crowded list of well-intentioned but operationally hollow initiatives. If London and Berlin fail to forge a cohesive naval posture, NATO’s maritime flanks, especially to the north, will become more and more vulnerable to an adversary highly skilled at exploiting the ‘grey zone’ between peace and war, and pushing its luck when it senses weakness.

It falls to European NATO’s two largest defence spenders to reduce Russia’s ability to assert dominance; failure to do so would merely encourage the Kremlin’s aggressiveness. It is therefore time for the UK and Germany to coordinate and regenerate their naval forces, align their northern European allies into a northern powerbloc in support of NATO, and reassert European naval control over the North Atlantic.

James Rogers is Co-President (Research) of the Council on Geostrategy.

This article is the result of a half-day conference held on 21st April 2026 in partnership with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) UK and Ireland. This was the second in a series of events in 2026 that the Council on Geostrategy is organising with KAS to encourage closer defence cooperation between Britain and Germany.

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Since 2015, His Majesty’s (HM) Government has released several national security and defence strategies, most recently the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) and the 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR). Both state that the United Kingdom (UK) must pursue its national security and defence in service of the national interest. Yet, neither document identifies what those specific interests actually are. The NSS, for example, mentions the ‘national interest’ 11 times, but asserts only that these interests will be defined as ‘the long-term security and social and economic wellbeing of the British people’ – a laudable goal, but one that lacks the specificity required for strategic planning.

Meanwhile, the SDR identifies three key roles for British defence policy: firstly, defending the British homeland, the Overseas Territories, and the Crown Dependencies from attack; secondly, deterring and defending in the Euro-Atlantic; and, finally, shaping the global environment. While these are vital operational tasks, they describe how Britain will act, rather than what fundamental interests it is acting to protect.

Ultimately, of course, HM Government’s fundamental duty is to maximise the security, prosperity, and wellbeing of the British people, as the NSS rightly notes. Translating this ambition into practice, however, requires the development of a series of nested national interests. These must look inward before they look outward. Strategic objectives cannot be achieved overseas if the domestic powerbase – comprising civic identity, institutional structures, and the economy – is hollowed out at home. Therefore, Britain’s fundamental interests must be understood as an interconnected chain – building from the human and economic foundations of the country up to the ultimate guarantees of sovereign power.

The following five national interests have been selected because they form an integrated whole, based on the geographic predilection of the British Isles, the scale of the national powerbase, and the prevailing character of the contemporary international order.

Five national interests

1. National cohesion and civic unity

A fractured society is an acute national security vulnerability. In an era of ideological conflict and political warfare, adversaries do not just target military infrastructure; they exploit domestic social, cultural, and political fault lines to paralyse a state’s decision-making apparatus. While pluralism of thought is a democratic norm, a fundamental lack of national cohesion erodes the shared civic identity required to withstand protracted crises. If a population believes it shares no common destiny, its collective will to resist foreign coercion may decline. Cultivating national self-confidence and civic unity is therefore a strategic necessity; without it, the British public remains highly susceptible to cognitive manipulation and subversion by hostile foreign states.

2. A dynamic and resilient national powerbase

Building upon this internal solidarity, the UK must cultivate a dynamic and resilient national powerbase. In the 21st century, relying on strategic competitors for energy supplies, key commodities, advanced manufacturing capabilities, and critical infrastructure is a severe vulnerability. Britain must also refuse to be dependent on hostile powers for its technological and research base. A core national interest is securing domestic or tightly allied control over next-generation technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), fusion power, quantum computing, and advanced maritime and aerospace manufacturing. Additionally, the UK must protect and promote the City of London’s position as a global command centre while also building capacity to engage in economic statecraft, including economic sanctions, capital controls, and access to British financial markets as coercive weapons to punish adversaries and to reward compliance.

3. A zone of denial

As an archipelagic nation dependent on open seas, undersea infrastructure, and orbital spaces for the transit of food, energy, manufactured goods, and information, the UK must do everything in its power to secure the communication lines that supply its national powerbase. Without the continental scale of a superpower, Britain lacks the mass required for absolute global sea or space control, so British strategy must focus on a strategy of denial. Geographically, this requires securing not just immediate Euro-Atlantic approaches – such as the Northern Gap and the Strait of Gibraltar – but also the critical maritime arteries and strategic chokepoints connecting the Euro-Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific, including the Persian Gulf, the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, and the Strait of Malacca. It must also focus on space to protect British orbital assets and deny space-based advantages to adversaries. Ultimately, this global reach is essential to counter Russian revisionism, disrupt a consolidating Chinese-Russian axis in Eurasia, and help protect Britain’s most vital allies and partners – including those in Europe, but also the United States (US), Australia, Canada, and Japan.

4. Strategic indispensability to key alliances

Alliances are not friendships or communities of values. Rather, they hold three functions: firstly, to deter adversaries from attacking countries or regions that the UK deems essential to its own wellbeing; secondly, to dissuade allies from taking actions that are detrimental to British interests; and thirdly, to act as force multipliers for the UK’s own powerbase. This is why the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), above all else, is central to the defence of the British Isles. Part of Ernest Bevin’s rationale for forging NATO was to keep the Soviets out of Western Europe, smother geopolitical competition in Western Europe, and draw in US power so as to reduce the cost of the endeavour to the British people. Likewise, AUKUS is also increasingly central to Britain’s defence: it deters the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Russia; it spreads the cost of developing expensive next-generation nuclear and conventional technologies; and it amplifies British power by combining forces with Australia and the US.

5. Sovereign control of the nuclear escalatory ladder

While alliances multiply British power, they cannot replace the ultimate link in the chain: sovereign control over nuclear escalation. With the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, a country had to possess nuclear capability to be taken seriously as a great power. Without it, a state lacks the ultimate sovereign guarantor of its continued freedom. That is why HM Government has maintained a Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD) with a guaranteed second strike delivery system since 1969. However, possession of such awesome destructive power is not enough: in an era where several adversaries are nuclear-armed, the UK needs sovereign control over its escalatory response. It is no longer enough to possess a single strategic weapons system; if Britain is to do more to underwrite NATO, it needs to be able to meet potential nuclear-armed rivals symmetrically, and provide a flexible response – an imperative that now demands the acquisition of sub-strategic nuclear weapons.

Conclusion

As the UK starts to look towards a new cycle of strategic assessment, it should begin to think harder about its fundamental interests. Over the past few decades, British strategic reviews have too often been budget-led or threat-led. This has resulted in reactive policies that primarily respond to the crises of the day, rather than shaping the world surrounding the UK to the advantage of the nation. By structuring future defence and security strategies through fundamental national interests, policymakers can ensure that resources are allocated proactively, capabilities are developed purposefully, and that Britain remains secure and prosperous in an increasingly confrontational world.

What do you think? What is Britain’s most fundamental national interest? Vote in our poll!

James Rogers is Co-President (Research) of the Council on Geostrategy.

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On 30th May, the defence secretaries of the three AUKUS partner countries – the United Kingdom (UK), United States (US), and Australia – released a joint statement announcing the first Signature Project of AUKUS Pillar II. In keeping with the overall focus of providing advanced capabilities, this maiden project aims to provide cutting-edge Uncrewed Undersea Vessels (UUVs), with delivery commencing in 2027.

AUKUS Pillar I is centred around the provision of the SSN-AUKUS class of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), while Pillar II has a broader scope, with the UUVs being only the first of its Signature Projects. This wide lens forms the basis of this week’s Big Ask, in which we asked three experts – as well as Gemini, Google’s Large Language Model (LLM): What should be the next priority for AUKUS Pillar II?

William Freer

Research Fellow (National Security), Council on Geostrategy

AUKUS Pillar II has for a long time now been associated with a ‘say-do’ gap. Much was promised on the potential of the many strands of collaboration. Several years on from its inception, very little has been programmed.

Part of this is due to uncertainty over what Pillar II was meant to do. To some, it was about regulatory changes to ensure Britain, America, and Australia could work together on these defence technologies more seamlessly; to others, it was about co-developing the technologies which would go on the submarines to be delivered as part of Pillar I; and perhaps to most, it was something grander – a set of bold programmes which would require plenty of funding but which could accelerate the technological dominance of the AUKUS partners in several fields. Given how challenging it has been to get to the point of a first Signature Project, the time is right for a moment of reflection and rationalisation.

In terms of regulatory changes, Pillar II has so far been remarkably successful. Many barriers which had previously existed are no longer there. The continued review and revision of defence industrial policy and laws should continue to fall under the remit of Pillar II, but it is perhaps time for the project strands to be consolidated.

Given the importance of getting Pillar I right, and of the – at times intense – debate over AUKUS (mostly in Australia), Pillar II should be consolidated into focusing on capabilities which will either go in or work with SSN-AUKUS and the next generation of US Navy SSNs. This will include software, sensors, weapons, and collaborative platforms. That is not to say that the three partners cannot work together on projects which fall under what the strands identified, nor that these will not make use of the regulatory element of Pillar II.

Ultimately, some less ‘say’ and some more ‘do’ will go a long way.

Gemini

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

The next priority for AUKUS Pillar II should be the rapid transition from regulatory alignment to the delivery of tangible capability outcomes. Since its inception, Pillar II has been rightly focused on setting the conditions for streamlined cooperation across the British, Australian, and American defence industrial bases. While harmonising export controls and dismantling bureaucratic barriers are essential prerequisites, they are not an end state. The geopolitical environment in the Indo-Pacific, characterised by the largest military buildup in 80 years by the People’s Republic of China, demands urgency that administrative reforms alone cannot provide.

To prevent Pillar II from losing credibility, the three participating governments should establish a dedicated funding structure and a formalised acquisition framework to transition collaborative research into operational mass. Currently, the initiative lacks the specific financial mechanisms required to incentivise industry and move advanced technologies – such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), UUVs, and attritable autonomous systems from the laboratory to the battlespace. Furthermore, narrowing the immediate focus from the expansive eight workstreams to a select number of vital projects would galvanise visible progress.

Procuring interoperable, autonomous systems at scale, akin to the American Replicator Initiative, offers a prime opportunity to demonstrate that the trilateral partnership can generate genuine military advantage. By pooling resources and establishing combined production lines, AUKUS can build supply chain redundancy and buy back essential mass. Ultimately, the success of Pillar II hinges on demonstrating that collaborative defence innovation can translate into deployable hard power capabilities before the strategic balance shifts irreparably.

Dr Euan Graham

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and non-resident Senior Fellow, Australian Foreign Policy Institute

It is difficult to make informed judgments about where the AUKUS partners should concentrate their Pillar II efforts, because much less is known about Pillar II than Pillar I, other than what emerges from occasional joint statements. This void of information has encouraged outside observers to treat it as a sounding board for their pet projects.

What is clear is that Pillar II has struggled to establish momentum, and it is disappointing that it has taken almost five years to agree upon a Signature Project. The choice of payloads and enabling systems for UUVs for the first such project suggests an emphasis among AUKUS partners on supporting Pillar I via the undersea capabilities workstream, although ‘enabling systems’ leaves open the possibility that it could substantially cut across other Pillar II technologies like quantum, AI, and autonomous systems.

It is also noticeable that recent AUKUS joint statements do not mention expanding Pillar II project work to include Asian or other ‘Five Eyes’ partners. That is not to say expansion is definitively off the table, but for now the AUKUS partners appear intent on maintaining a small-yard, high-fence approach to collaboration, and towards supporting and protecting Pillar I as their priority.

While conservative, this approach makes sense given that underwater autonomy is a force multiplier for crewed submarines, potentially forestalling near-term undersea warfare capability gaps from emerging among the AUKUS partners. The UK is having particular problems keeping its Astute class boats seaworthy, while the universal vulnerability of seabed infrastructure is glaring.

Jennifer Parker

International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy; Founder and Principal, Barrier Strategic Advisory; Adjunct Fellow in Naval Studies, UNSW Canberra; and Expert Associate, ANU National Security College

The announcement at the AUKUS defence secretaries’ meeting that the trilateral partnership would focus on payloads for UUVs as a signature AUKUS Pillar II project was welcomed. Almost five years after the AUKUS announcement, the status and achievements of Pillar II had remained unclear, with commentators consistently arguing that it needed a narrower focus.

With its Signature Project now confirmed, the next priority should be to build on the undersea focus and identify the technological advances that can enhance it. This should include undersea capabilities, communications, and Command and Control (C2) of UUVs. Doing so would build on the first Signature Project, while also leveraging existing initiatives across the AUKUS partners and the work already undertaken through the AUKUS Maritime Innovation Challenge 2025 on this topic.

While AUKUS Pillar II may have many threads, and will continue to branch out as trilateral collaboration develops, keeping its goals and Signature Projects clear will be pivotal to success. Developing world-leading undersea capabilities enhances the success of AUKUS Pillar I, while building on the newly announced Signature Project and previous work. Expanding trilateral UUV capability and leveraging initiatives such as the Maritime Innovation Challenge is a positive way to focus cooperation and maximise impact.

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On 27th May, the United Kingdom (UK) and Poland signed the bilateral ‘Northolt Treaty’ on a ‘Security and Defence Partnership’. Recognising the increasingly volatile state of geopolitics – particularly in Eastern Europe, where the systemic threat of Russia looms large – the treaty reaffirmed the centrality of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) to both countries’ security and collective defence in the Euro-Atlantic, and the importance of advancing European security and prosperity.

This is the third such treaty Britain has signed with its major European allies in the past year, following the Northwood Declaration with France and the Kensington Treaty with Germany, both signed in July 2025. Being an important step taken in the development of the UK-Poland relationship, for this week’s Big Ask, we asked four experts, as well as Gemini, Google’s Large Language Model (LLM): What is the significance of the new treaty between Britain and Poland?

Dr Przemysław Biskup

Senior Lecturer, SGH Warsaw School of Economics, and Senior Research Fellow, EU Programme, Polish Institute of Foreign Affairs (PISM)

The significance of the Northolt Treaty lies less in specific military provisions than in broader political and strategic spheres. Signed in the context of Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine and a rapidly shifting European security environment, it signals the consolidation of a bilateral partnership that is becoming central to Europe’s defence architecture.

Building on the 2017 Treaty on Defence and Security Cooperation, and UK-Poland 2030 Strategic Partnership Joint Declaration, the new treaty’s importance lies in further deepening of convergence of threat perceptions and strategic cultures. Both states explicitly identify Russia as the principal long-term threat and reaffirm NATO as the foundation of collective defence. However, the treaty also reflects an understanding that NATO frameworks alone may be too slow or insufficiently agile, hence the growing role of bilateral mechanisms for faster coordination and response.

Crucially, the agreement highlights Poland’s rising strategic weight. As NATO’s key eastern flank state and a rapidly expanding land power, Poland is an increasingly indispensable provider of regional deterrence. The treaty acknowledges this shift by embedding cooperation across multiple domains – military, industrial, cyber, and resilience – where Poland’s rapidly growing armed forces and cyber capabilities, as well as frontline position are essential.

For the UK, the partnership serves as a vehicle for re-engagement in European security after Brexit; for Poland, it anchors its role as a central node in a North and North-Eastern European security network. In this sense, the treaty is as much about shaping the future geography of European defence as it is about managing current threats.

William Freer

Research Fellow (National Security), Council on Geostrategy

The Northolt Treaty brings together European NATO’s two most significant military powers. Poland is fast becoming, and in fact probably already is, Europe’s premier land power. Within a few years, the Polish Army will field 24 combat brigades – more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. While there will be teething problems from such an extensive expansion over so short a time, it is a remarkable and commendable feat.

The UK, despite being in a capability trough, is in the process of modernising its forces and remains a nuclear power with impressive capabilities across a wide spectrum, especially in the air and maritime domains. As two of Europe’s most significant military powers, and with a track record of political and military leadership that takes the Russia threat seriously, the partnership could well come to define a future ‘Europeanised’ NATO. The Northolt Treaty helps provide the framework and signposts for what the next few years of deepening UK-Poland cooperation will look like.

With that said, it must also be recognised that the treaty is another in a string of bilateral treaties signed between the UK and European allies that have been signed more for their symbolism than their content. As important as symbolism is on the international stage, it is evident that answering the question of where and how the UK should cooperate more deeply with countries such as Poland, France, and Germany is still yet to be fully fleshed out.

Gemini

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

Signed by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, and Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, the Northolt Treaty represents a landmark deepening of defence and security ties between the UK and Poland. Hailed as the most significant bilateral agreement between the two nations in a generation, the pact carries profound geopolitical and strategic weight. At its core, the treaty addresses escalating security concerns in Europe, driven primarily by the threat of Russian aggression and hybrid warfare. It establishes extensive industrial cooperation, focusing on the joint development and manufacture of weapons, most notably a next-generation medium-range air defence missile.

By integrating defence supply chains and prioritising interoperability, the two nations aim to enhance the resilience of their defence industries and fortify NATO’s eastern flank through large-scale joint exercises in electronic, counter-drone, and land warfare. The treaty also serves as a strategic hedge against transatlantic uncertainty, offering a unified European response amidst shifting United States (US) foreign policy dynamics.

For the UK, the pact aligns with a broader post-Brexit diplomatic strategy to reset relations with European allies and stay embedded in the continent’s rearmament efforts. For Poland – NATO’s highest defence spender relative to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – the treaty supports its ambition to expand domestic arms manufacturing through technology transfer. Beyond conventional military defence, the treaty incorporates a Joint Action Plan on irregular migration, economic resilience, and cyber defence coordination to counteract hostile state espionage and sabotage.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

The Northolt Treaty is significant for four key reasons:

1. Both countries have committed, through Article 5 of the Northolt Treaty, to defend one another, and to provide military assistance, in the event of an armed attack on either nation. This is particularly important for Poland, because the UK, as a nuclear power, has agreed to provide an additional defence guarantee beyond NATO.

2. As with previous bilateral treaties, including those with France and Germany, as well as Norway, Estonia, and Ukraine, Britain can use its nuclear, intelligence, and defence-industrial heft to bypass the European Union (EU) as a security actor. As the UK entangles itself deeper into the geopolitics of Europe, it makes itself strategically indispensable.

3. Poland has proven that it now dances with the big powers of Europe. In the past, the UK has favoured the so-called ‘E3’ cosy with France and Germany. Yet, Polish power and influence have grown over the past ten years, especially as the Polish military buildup has got under way, to the extent that Britain now sees it as an equal of the other two.

4. The two allies have used potent discourse in the treaty to exert narrative control. They identify Russia as ‘the most important long-term threat’ to Euro-Atlantic security, which will throw down the gauntlet to those governments that may be contemplating a softening of sanctions and the reopening of dialogue.

In short, the Northolt Treaty confirms the growing strength of British-Polish relations, as well as how the two countries, with similar geopolitical interests, can work together and use their growing weight to shape European security.

Professor Mark Webber

Professor of International Politics, University of Birmingham, and Non-resident Senior Fellow at the NATO Defence College in Rome

The treaty reflects a spirited effort by the UK to engage with European states in an area (defence) where it has a lasting reputation. That reputation has been dented in recent years by the erosion of British military capability, but the UK is still one of NATO Europe’s foremost military powers. As well as Poland, Britain has bilateral defence agreements with France, Germany, Ukraine, and Romania. Specific arrangements (defence ‘roadmaps’, joint declarations, partnerships, and so on) exist with several other European states.

The UK is not unique in pursuing such cooperation. Defence bilateralism across Europe has been an accelerating trend during the 2020s, spurred by concerns over Russian belligerence and America’s increasingly conditional support of NATO. France and Germany have signed as many bilateral deals as Britain. The very same day the UK-Poland treaty was signed, Norway reached agreement with France on a comprehensive defence partnership. And unlike the UK, France is actively leveraging its nuclear capability. Nine states (Britain included) are pursuing bilateral dialogue with Paris as part of France’s ‘forward nuclear deterrence’ initiative.

Bilateralism of this sort adds to the complexity of Europe’s defence provision. Three tiers are now evident – the multilateral (involving NATO and increasingly the EU), the regional (with initiatives such as the British-led Joint Expeditionary Force), and the bilateral. These trends add up to a Europeanisation of defence – even within NATO, where the United States is stepping back. This is complexity without coordination and reflects a certain political and commercial jockeying for position among not just Europe’s traditional big three (France, Germany, and the UK), but also its rising military powers – Poland, Sweden, and Ukraine.

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European nations are rearming at a pace not seen since the Cold War. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered a surge in defence spending, new procurement programmes, and renewed attention to deterrence. Yet, despite this mobilisation, European military power remains fragmented – and, in some respects, risks becoming even more so.

The central problem is not technical. European countries do not lack institutions, frameworks, or expertise. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) provides established interoperability standards and integrated planning, while the European Union (EU) has begun to mobilise significant financial instruments for defence. Rather, fragmentation persists because it reflects deeper political and strategic divisions among European states. These divisions limit the scope for meaningful capability specialisation – the shortest pathway to a more efficient and credible European defence posture.

This presents both a constraint and an opportunity for the United Kingdom (UK). As a leading military power outside the EU, but central to European security, Britain is a necessary partner in shaping a more flexible model of defence integration adapted to European realities.

Fragmentation as a political choice

European defence fragmentation is often described as the result of inefficient procurement or insufficient coordination. While these factors matter, they are symptoms rather than causes. At its core, fragmentation reflects the persistence of national sovereignty in defence policy. Simply put, European states do not fully agree on the purpose, scope, or future direction of defence integration.

Countries on NATO’s eastern flank – particularly Poland and the Baltic states – prioritise immediate readiness against Russian aggression and remain strongly committed to the alliance. For them, rapid capability acquisition and American security guarantees are paramount. By contrast, France continues to frame defence integration in terms of European strategic autonomy, focusing on strengthening continental capacity to act independently of the United States (US) when necessary.

Germany occupies a middle position, seeking to reconcile NATO commitments with industrial policy objectives and ambitions for technological sovereignty. Southern European states, meanwhile, often approach defence cooperation through the lens of burden sharing and industrial participation, shaped as much by domestic economic considerations as by strategic priorities.

Moreover, neutral or militarily non-aligned EU member states, including Austria and the Republic of Ireland, remain cautious regarding deeper defence integration. While this reflects constitutional constraints and political sensitivities surrounding military alignment, it also entails their factual continued reliance on the security provision of more actively engaged European partners, instead of a model of armed neutrality – like that of Switzerland – that would indirectly contribute to the continent’s collective defence.

These divergent perspectives extend beyond strategy into defence industrial policy. Governments continue to view defence procurement as a tool of economic policy, technological development, and employment protection. Control over critical supply chains and industrial capacity is increasingly associated with strategic resilience. As a result, states remain reluctant to accept cross-border consolidation when it threatens national industrial capabilities or political influence.

This helps to explain why European defence continues to be characterised by duplication – encompassing multiple tank programmes, competing combat aircraft projects, and fragmented naval procurement. These are not so much industrial inefficiencies as they are political choices.

Britain’s role in a divided Europe

Brexit has complicated the defence landscape, but it has not diminished the UK’s strategic importance. Britain remains one of Europe’s most capable military powers: a nuclear state, a leading defence industrial actor, and a central player within NATO. Any model of European defence that excludes the UK is therefore structurally incomplete.

The post-Brexit relationship between Britain and the EU has begun to stabilise, with the 2025 establishment of a Security and Defence Partnership providing a framework for dialogue and cooperation in areas such as cyber security, maritime operations, and defence research. However, this arrangement remains limited, and the UK continues to stand outside key EU defence industrial instruments.

In practice, Britain has adapted by deepening bilateral and minilateral defence cooperation. The Lancaster House Treaties and the Northwood Declaration with France continue to underpin close operational collaboration between Europe’s two nuclear powers. More recently, the Kensington Treaty with Germany has signalled renewed efforts to strengthen British-German defence ties across operational and industrial domains. At the same time, the UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), linking ten Northern European countries, has emerged as a flexible framework for regional security cooperation and rapid response. Most recently, on 27th May, the British-Polish Northolt Treaty on a Security and Defence Partnership was signed.

The Northolt Treaty is particularly significant in this regard. Beyond reaffirming commitments to defence cooperation and strategic consultation, it highlights the growing importance of bilateral frameworks in addressing the political constraints on broader European defence integration. Crucially, the treaty is explicitly anchored in NATO obligations, reinforcing the Alliance as the primary framework for European security rather than generating alternative institutional pathways. Bringing together two countries with convergent threat perceptions and a strongly Atlanticist outlook, it reflects a wider shift towards cooperation among like-minded allies within NATO. Such agreements can therefore complement the Alliance by enabling more targeted forms of capability development and coordination, without requiring full strategic convergence across Europe.

These developments point towards a broader shift in European defence cooperation. Rather than converging towards a single institutional model, Europe is evolving into a more flexible ecosystem of overlapping arrangements: NATO, EU mechanisms, bilateral agreements, and minilateral coalitions. It aligns with the UK’s longstanding preference for flexible, coalition-based approaches to security cooperation and reinforces its role as a central connector within Europe’s evolving security architecture. However, Britain’s ability to sustain this role depends on the rapid strengthening of its own military capabilities after a prolonged period of underinvestment and force reductions.

Minilateralism and the future of specialisation

Full strategic convergence among European states remains unlikely in the near term. Divergent threat perceptions, political priorities, and industrial interests will continue to constrain large-scale integration. In this context, the most realistic pathway towards greater efficiency lies in selective capability specialisation within smaller, like-minded groups of states.

Minilateral frameworks, such as the JEF and emerging groupings on NATO’s eastern flank, are particularly well suited to this approach. They bring together countries with shared threat perceptions, stronger political trust, and greater willingness to coordinate force development. Unlike broader European frameworks, they can move more quickly and avoid many of the political disputes associated with EU-level initiatives.

Specialisation is most feasible in high-cost, high-complexity capability areas. Strategic airlift; missile defence; Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR); logistics; and cyber capabilities are natural candidates. These sectors require sustained investment and offer clear benefits from pooling resources and reducing duplication.

However, even in these areas, progress will depend on political incentives rather than institutional designs. Governments will not accept specialisation if it is perceived to undermine sovereignty or damage domestic industries. Instead, cooperation must be framed as enhancing national capabilities through burden sharing.

Standardisation is equally important. European countries’ proliferation of military platforms reduces interoperability and increases costs. Incremental convergence around existing systems, such as on the F-35 Lightning II Joint Combat Aircraft or shared air defence solutions, offers a more realistic path forward than ambitious but contested new programmes. Convergence should also be pursued in emerging areas such as drone warfare, where political and bureaucratic barriers to international cooperation are less entrenched than in legacy systems.

Why NATO remains central

Despite the growing role of EU initiatives, NATO remains the only politically acceptable framework for large-scale capability coordination across Europe. It accommodates both EU and non-EU members, preserves the American strategic anchor, and provides established structures for planning and interoperability.

By contrast, EU defence integration remains politically contested. Instruments such as joint financing programmes represent an important step forward in industrial coordination, but they also highlight underlying tensions over governance, access, and strategic orientation. For countries such as the UK, participation in these mechanisms remains constrained.

In this context, a NATO-centric model of defence integration, supplemented by EU financial tools and regional initiatives, appears more politically viable than a fully integrated European defence system. The challenge is not the absence of institutional frameworks, but the lack of sufficiently strong incentives to encourage states to use them more effectively.

What Britain could do

If fragmentation is political, then overcoming it requires political leadership. The UK is well placed to provide it. Firstly, it should prioritise minilateral defence cooperation as the primary vehicle for capability integration. Strengthening the JEF and expanding partnerships on NATO’s eastern flank, as well as deepening cooperation with France and Germany, would allow Britain to shape patterns of specialisation among like-minded states.

Secondly, the UK should focus on leading in specific capability areas. It already possesses comparative advantages in intelligence, cyber operations, maritime power, air power, and advanced defence technologies. Concentrating investment in these sectors would enable Britain to act as a hub within broader European capability networks.

Thirdly, the UK should seek pragmatic engagement with EU defence initiatives. While full participation in EU mechanisms may not be feasible, selective cooperation – particularly in areas such as research, innovation, and supply chain resilience – could benefit both sides.

Finally, Britain should reinforce NATO as the central framework for European defence. This means not only maintaining strong commitments to the alliance, but also using NATO structures to promote standardisation, interoperability, and coordinated capability development.

Conclusion

European defence fragmentation is not the result of a lack of institutions or technical solutions. It reflects enduring political divisions over sovereignty, strategy, and industrial policy. These divisions will not disappear in the near term.

However, fragmentation is not inevitable. Through selective capability specialisation, minilateral cooperation, and incremental standardisation, Europe can build a more coherent and effective defence posture. This process should not be aimed so much at building a unified European army as reducing the costliest forms of duplication and strengthening collective deterrence.

In a period of geopolitical uncertainty amid renewed Russian aggression and American strategic repositioning, European countries – although they can never fully specialise – should work together to move the dial further towards specialisation to improve returns on investment. The balance struck by nations closer to the immediate threat should be emulated more widely across NATO.

Dr Przemyslaw Biskup, Senior Lecturer at the SGH Warsaw School of Economics and Senior Research Fellow in the European Union Programme, Polish Institute of Foreign Affairs (PISM).

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

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