In response to the televised version of Sky News’ podcast The Wargame, the Russian Embassy to the United Kingdom (UK) issued a statement that were Russian territory to be targeted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the Kremlin would respond by ‘using all means at Russia’s disposal, including nuclear weapons’. Such rhetoric is far from unusual, however, with the Kremlin’s mouthpieces consistently positioning ‘Perfidious Albion’ as Russia’s primary opponent in its attempts to rewrite the international order in its favour.

Britain is framed as the reason for the Kremlin’s failures in Ukraine, prolonging the conflict by directing Kyiv behind the scenes, and Russia consistently views the UK as a greater challenge than other free and open nations. Considering the antagonism emanating from the Kremlin, for this week’s Big Ask, we asked six experts: How should Britain prepare for being Russia’s leading adversary?

Prof. Klaus Dodds

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

Russia is a revanchist power, maintaining a Soviet-era preoccupation with a bastion defence posture in and around the Kola Peninsula. The Kremlin views the UK as a strategic adversary and enabler of NATO’s presence in the High North and the North Atlantic. Britain’s strategic relationship with Norway, leadership of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), and military support for Ukraine colour Russia’s highly prejudicial view. The Kremlin has warned of ‘consequences’ for this support for Kyiv, and the UK’s critical infrastructure and military assets are targets.

Britain’s approach to the High North demands a solid understanding of operational realities. First, the High North is linked to the wider security of the North Atlantic, North Sea, and Baltic Sea. Second, near-constant maritime awareness in the High North is vital given that Russia’s ships, autonomous vessels, aircraft, and the ‘shadow fleet’ threaten undersea infrastructure and contribute to general disruption.

Third, Russian-sponsored Global Positioning System (GPS) jamming and Electronic Warfare (EW) disrupt civilian and military traffic in northern Norway, including Svalbard. Fourth, credible readiness is crucial. UK Commando Force worked with allied European and American counterparts on vital islands such as Jan Mayen and the Faroe Islands in summer 2026.

Finally, a refreshed British Arctic policy framework draws attention to the role of and for Arctic science in building and sustaining coalitions of the willing. The Arctic is no longer reliably frozen, and that matters to the UK’s weather and seasonal volatility.

British command of NATO Joint Force Command Norfolk (with an area of responsibility that includes the North Atlantic, the Arctic, the High North, and sea lines between North America and Europe) provides an opportunity to demonstrate that deterring Russia requires capability, credibility, and communication with friends and foes alike.

Della Heptinstall

Defence Sector Lead, Walker Morris LLP, and Army Reserve Officer

The UK should prepare for being Russia’s leading adversary by understanding why the Kremlin appears to view it differently from many other European states. Russian hostility towards Poland, Finland, or the Baltic states can readily be explained by geography and history. Britain’s role is different.

Despite its relative distance from Russia, the UK remains one of Europe’s foremost military powers, a nuclear-armed state, a leading intelligence actor, and a central pillar of NATO. For the Kremlin, Britain has come to symbolise not simply opposition to Russian aggression, but the wider resolve of free and open nations that constrains Russian ambitions.

The revival of terms such as ‘Perfidious Albion’ suggests this hostility is becoming increasingly ideological rather than purely geopolitical. If so, the UK should assume that Russian pressure, whether through cyber operations, espionage, disinformation, or military intimidation, will persist regardless of developments in Ukraine.

Preparation therefore requires more than stronger armed forces. Britain must strengthen the resilience of its critical infrastructure, improve its ability to counter ‘grey-zone’ activity, and maintain a defence industrial base capable of sustaining long-term competition. Just as importantly, it should continue investing in the alliances that amplify its influence.

The UK should not become more cautious or less engaged in European security. Rather, it should demonstrate that sustained leadership carries no strategic penalty. The most effective answer to Russian hostility is a Britain that remains confident in its role, resilient at home, and unwavering in its commitment to NATO.

Dr Robert Johnson

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

In the podcast and television programme The Wargame, the skeletal nature of the UK’s defences was brutally exposed by a full-scale Russian armed attack. Of course, the scenario is highly unlikely – not least because of Britain’s nuclear deterrent and because of the cohesion within NATO, which in conventional terms dwarfs that of Russia.

It is not in the nuclear and conventional fields that the UK will be attacked directly. The Kremlin has already commenced a policy of coercion using disinformation, economic leverage, threatening military presence, strategic rebalancing, violent proxies, and assassination. Through fear, Russia is waging political warfare against Britain.

It is into this gap in the UK’s capabilities that measures are required. Its preparation should include training and deploying personnel in a proactive campaign to expose Russian disinformation. It needs not only comprehensive surveillance and built-in redundancy of communications networks, but also active defence measures to ensure that costs are imposed immediately on those who perpetrate hybrid forms of attack. It requires a robust legal system that ceases to persecute its own military personnel and focuses instead on defeating Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) and other vexatious foreign legal claims. It needs to bolster its counterintelligence and counterespionage capabilities. It needs to seek out more diverse sources of supply to ensure no pressure can be applied through economic warfare. It needs to rediscover the art of political warfare itself, to detect, deter, and defeat deliberate attempts to sow division, subvert, mislead, and undermine its constitution and national unity.

Britain requires more confidence in long-term planning, to give the public confidence in the future rather than a diet that fosters fear and insecurity. After all, when was the last time you heard a political leader offering a vision of the long-term future that was positive? To defeat an enemy in political warfare, one needs to make a better offer.

Christopher Pool

Visiting Fellow, Centre for Statecraft and National Security

It may or may not be self-evident, but the UK is not Russia’s leading adversary. Ukraine is. It is Ukraine that is fighting the Russian Ground Forces across a 1,200 kilometre-long front, inflicting 30,000 casualties per month, and that has put over 50% of Russia’s oil refining capacity offline.

Kyiv is doing this at brutal cost, but it is buying time for Britain and European allies to prepare for what is perhaps inevitable, and it is showing lessons that the UK must learn.

One lesson is the capacity of society. In a total war, a state must reach beyond its immediate resources and tap into the latent potential of society at large: it must mobilise the country. Unlike British historical precedent, and as Ukraine has shown, this goes beyond mobilising civilians into soldiers.

Ukraine’s pre-2022 software developers are now designing the defence technology that is punishing the Russians and saving civilian lives. Kyiv’s volunteer groups assist in supplying Ukrainian soldiers with kit and intelligence, and are repairing damaged homes. Civilian data analysts provide strategic and tactical insight that drives policy and reform. None of this is under direct government control.

This is what a ‘whole-of-society’ approach looks like, and the UK should embrace this approach now. It must establish the frameworks and partnerships that, if it comes to it, can be stood up quickly to ensure all the latent capability of British civilians and society is utilised. We will not have time once the shooting starts.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

Russia sees the UK as its principal antagonist because British power and political resolve obstruct the realisation of Russian hegemony. The Kremlin cannot be appeased or placated; it seeks the overlordship of Europe, which would be intolerable to British interests. The UK must now prepare for the long haul.

Hardening the domestic sphere – protecting Critical Undersea Infrastructure (CUI), purging illicit capital, and countering foreign digital interference – is an essential baseline, and work that is largely underway. Yet, domestic resilience alone will not deter future Russian aggression. Britain cannot secure its interests simply by becoming a more durable punchbag; passive defence permanently cedes the initiative and invites perpetual probing.

To regain the initiative, the UK should advance along three key vectors:

1. Asymmetric offence: His Majesty’s (HM) Government should take the fight to Russian networks. The National Cyber Force should systematically degrade Russian military intelligence infrastructure, while British maritime surveillance persistently monitors and disrupts Russian undersea transit corridors, turning the Kremlin’s own covert playbook against itself.

2. Forward military containment: The UK should leverage its naval leadership within NATO and the JEF to dominate the Wider North, aggressively interdicting Russia’s sanctions-busting shadow fleet and constricting its fleet mobility. It should also double down on supporting Ukraine by helping Kyiv strike deeper and harder into the Russian interior.

3. Network disruption: Britain should weaponise its intelligence and regulatory apparatus to wage offensive economic and information warfare – hunting Kremlin revenue streams and evasion hubs across third-party jurisdictions, while actively dismantling Russian influence channels abroad and inside Russia itself.

Ultimately, the UK needs a new kind of statecraft, not merely to deter Russia, but to undermine and weaken it. By exhausting the Kremlin’s resources and forcing it into a permanent defensive crouch, HM Government would ensure that the Kremlin is too consumed by its own acute vulnerabilities to menace the British state.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan

Minister of State for the Indo-Pacific (2022-2024), and Minister of State for the Armed Forces (2019-2020)

Russia likes to portray the UK as its principal European adversary, reviving the old colonial invective of ‘Perfidious Albion’, because Britain is the leading driver of support for Ukraine. This perspective is deeply embedded in Kremlin thinking, and the UK should be under no illusion that it cannot expect a prolonged period of strategic competition and ‘grey-zone’ threats.

The first priority must be national resilience. Russia will target Britain through cyber attacks, disinformation, espionage, and other forms of hybrid warfare. I do not anticipate Russian troops landing on the beaches of Brighton, but cyber security, critical infrastructure protection, and public preparedness should be treated as core elements of national defence requiring urgent investment.

The UK should also strengthen maritime security. As an island nation dependent on trade, energy imports, undersea cables, and global supply chains, it remains vulnerable to disruption beyond its shores. Protecting CUI, offshore energy assets, ports, and strategic maritime routes should be first priority for HM Treasury. Without economic security assured, economic growth becomes challenging – as the Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated.

Defence modernisation must accelerate. The conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated the importance of industrial capacity, secure supply chains of critical materials, stockpiles, and innovation alongside advanced military platforms. Britain needs greater munitions reserves, stronger domestic defence manufacturing, improved air and missile defence, and expanded investment in autonomous systems and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The UK should also recognise that competition with Russia is ideological as well as geopolitical. Protecting democratic institutions, social cohesion, and public confidence is a national security imperative, and the challenge of achieving it should not be underestimated.

Britain is a founding member of NATO, the most successful and committed defensive alliance in the world. However, Russia chooses – incorrectly – to interpret it as threatening. Success in protecting the UK’s assets and citizens will depend on assured resilience, credible deterrence, and strong alliances.

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To an aerospace engineer, the most important factors governing success are thrust, drag, and lift. For those within His Majesty’s (HM) Government responsible for delivering complex programmes, it is these three factors alongside funding – and politics. When a nation has space ambitions, funding and political ambition run the risk of being divergent as a result of planning fallacies and strategic misrepresentation.

In 1962, the United Kingdom (UK) became the third country after the United States (US) and the Soviet Union to operate in space with the launch of Ariel 1, a programme of six research satellites developed with the US’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). It went on to develop Black Arrow, a launcher programme which, despite being cancelled due to domestic economic pressures and political focus on other complex programmes such as Polaris and Concorde, placed the British-built Prospero satellite into a near-polar orbit in 1971. This enabled HM Government to lay the groundwork for creating a strong satellite production sector through a focus on research and satellite engineering and instrumentation.

In 2010, the Space Innovation and Growth Strategy set a target to capture 10% of the global space market over the following 20 years (i.e., by 2030) to establish the UK as one of the world’s leading space nations. This goal was reiterated by the 2015 National Space Policy. With the publication of the National Space Strategy in 2021, however, HM Government quietly dropped this target, with the British share of the global market stagnating around 5-6%.

Since 2021, the UK has provided an abundance of policy and strategy around space – including the National Space Strategy in Action, the Defence Space Strategy, the Defence Industrial Strategy, the Space Industrial Plan, the Modern Industrial Strategy (which also spun out the Advance Manufacturing Sector Plan, covering inter alia opportunities for the space industry), and the UK Space Strategy, which was published in September 2026.

Does the latest in a long bibliography of government guidance provide a foundation for future growth, and is it ambitious enough to meet national security and resilience challenges in the current geopolitical environment? Or is the Space Strategy the classic Punch caricature of the curate’s egg?

Before addressing that question, the political context is important. Since 2020, Britain has seen five prime ministers in 10 Downing Street, nine secretaries of state responsible for the UK Space Agency, and five secretaries of state for defence. With this comes a desire to do what is best for HM Government, but the inevitable burden on briefing by officials and a changing world has placed a challenge on successive leadership.

The economic factor

The Space Strategy recognises that ‘space is unequivocally a priority for the UK and for this government’, and that it underpins a significant contribution to Britain’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of 18%. Yet, the technical delivery annex and opaque funding envelope remain modest relative to that dependence – and far below the scale of investment and risk‑taking now visible in near-peer nations and global commercial actors.

In stark contrast, the US allocates approximately 0.3-0.4% of its GDP to space (roughly US$80-$100+ billion [£65-£75+ billion]), with a heavy slant towards military capability. While America is an outlier, spending more than half of the global space budget, France’s National Space Strategy 2025-2040 earmarks €3 billion (£2.5 billion) – around 0.1% of its GDP – to its public space budget, whereas the UK spends 0.05% on space. Compare this to British welfare spending at around 10% of GDP and the well-clarioned 2.3% on defence. The UK may talk like a space power, but funding and its approach place it as a mid-tier player, mismatched to its economic dependence on space capabilities.

Having said that, there are several clear pointers within the new Space Strategy:

• Defence and national security are now the organising logic: The largest lines (satellite communications and Space Domain Awareness [SDA]) are explicitly security-driven; a clear shift from 2021’s private investment framing. Additionally, prioritising In-Orbit Servicing and Manufacture (ISAM) and Access to Space is a clear signal from HM Government.

• The Space Strategy is a consolidation exercise, not a funding boost: The value-add is a single, costed, trackable plan across the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and civil space, not new Treasury money. There are, however, several inconsistencies.

• The funded period is four years; the ambition is ten: Beyond the 2029-2030 financial year, there are no committed means except select Defence Investment Plan items, leaving the Space Strategy’s later ambitions unfunded on paper.

• Governance has yet to be tested: The proposed new approach to cross-government procurement using the Enterprise Space Category (ESC) has not been used, and it is unclear how the ‘One Government’ approach will be represented at cabinet committee level.

International space commitments

The above points also need to be set in a global context. Within Europe, Germany, France, Poland, Norway, and others recognise the operational advantage of space, as well as its risk to infrastructure failure and economic opportunity. Germany has committed €35 billion (£29.5 billion) to 2030 for military space programmes and is seeking to procure a large satellite constellation, as well as exploring offensive capabilities. France is committing a total of €10.2 billion (£8.6 billion) to 2030 for military space purposes, and Emmanuel Macron, President of France, has been unequivocal in stating that reliance on a third great power or a private space entity is ‘out of the question’. Similarly allied nations such as Canada have also significantly boosted their commitment to military space and, by extension, their domestic space sectors.

Beyond Europe, the case for space is not only a commercial and scientific one. Levers of national power are woven into nations’ aspirations for space. Jared Isaacman, Administrator of NASA, has laid out a vision to the Moon and Mars, partnering with nations that support American ambitions and values. This framing creates a strategic frontier where leadership, not accommodation, is the goal.

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) continues along a state-backed, highly consistent, step-by-step approach to the Moon based on its Long March class of rockets, as well as supporting scientific research through its own Tiangong space station. India continues to diversify from a rapidly maturing state-based space sector into a commercial competitor for access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and scientific missions to the Moon. These examples demonstrate soft power by other means.

By contrast, the Space Strategy emphasises ‘deep collaboration with allies old and new’ and rules‑shaping through international bodies such as the United Nations’ Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS). However, it stops short of defining missions or red lines that would signal true leadership.

Conclusion

Taken together, the Space Strategy reads as if it understands the new space era perfectly, then chooses for Britain to participate rather than to lead. It describes an approach of competitiveness and intervention, acknowledges that space underpins a huge share of GDP, and recognises intensifying geopolitical competition. However, compared to the mission‑driven ambition of the US, the aggressive repositioning opportunities created by Russia’s commercial decline, and India’s confident nurturing of firms like Skyroot Aerospace, the UK’s approach is cautious.

HM Government has found the right rhetoric, and has delivered far greater transparency and specificity than previous strategies. This is welcomed by the space sector. What is now required is a willingness to match that rhetoric with investment, mission clarity, and risk‑taking commensurate with the economic and security dependence that the UK Space Strategy openly describes.

Ian Annett is the former Deputy CEO of the UK Space Agency, and spent over 30 years in the Royal Navy as a weapons and communications specialist. He sits on the Executive Committee of UKSpace, and chairs the UKSpace Launch Committee alongside his own consultancy, Celestial Fix Ltd., providing advice on defence and civil space matters. He is also a strategic adviser on space to PA Consulting and a Board Adviser to Astroscale UK.

This article is part of the Council on Geostrategy’s Space Power Enterprise.

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The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy (JCNSS) has recommended that His Majesty’s (HM) Government acquire a sovereign capability for cable repair by 2030. With the United Kingdom (UK) already committed to resource sharing with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), how important is a sovereign capability for the security of British Critical Underwater Infrastructure (CUI), and what options does HM Government have?

The necessity of cable repair capability

In the early 20th century, British telecommunications companies championed the undersea cable industry, with giants such as Cable and Wireless operating 14 cable ships out of British ports by 1929. These ships, while private, could be requisitioned by the state in times of need – as would happen ten years later in 1939. The UK’s success in maintaining its CUI during both world wars owed much to the rapid response made possible by these privately owned, British-based assets.

Today, the UK relies more heavily on CUI than ever before. Upwards of 97% of communications data transits the undersea cables that also carry the data underpinning the economy. Indeed, £1.4 trillion in daily British transactions – 23% of the world’s total – relies on subsea cables.

In peace time, damage is rare and manageable. As Al Carns, then Minister for the Armed Forces, told the JCNSS in May 2025, the UK averages five cable breaks a year, 80% accidentally caused by routine shipping (primarily anchor drag). These breaks are generally repaired within eight days – a rate three times faster than the global average. However, a wartime precedent for the strategic importance of cable repair means that Britain cannot take peacetime performance for granted.

Severing communications cables has historically been an efficient way to disarm and disorient an adversary early in a conflict before other forms of engagement occur. As an island nation with security commitments across the Irish Sea, the High North, and to European allies, the UK’s posture needs to be agile and proactive; ready to respond quickly to several simultaneous incidents at once, and across a substantial geographic range.

What is available today?

Multilateral cooperation towards defence of CUI has increased significantly over the past ten years, providing different routes for Britain to contribute both to its own and to allied CUI protection. The UK currently has access to just three cable repair ships through the Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA). Four cable ships owned by Keppel Corporation, a Singaporean company, are registered to Britain, although these ships have competing national contracts.

More broadly, the UK is involved in CUI defence initiatives through NATO, such as BALTIC SENTRY and hosting NATO’s Maritime Centre for the Security of Critical Undersea Infrastructure within the alliance’s Maritime Command; through the JEF via Operation NORDIC WARDEN; and with AUKUS investment in Uncrewed Undersea Vehicles (UUVs) to protect undersea cables.

Britain does, of course, also benefit from support from its allies. France has access to around nine French-flagged repair vessels, and Norway and Italy have three each. However, in the event of war and a period of sustained attack on communications, allies will have their own priorities to contend with, and it is uncertain whether these capabilities would be enough.

It is unlikely that the UK will be operating alone in a period of sustained attack. However, considering the burden of being an island nation, relying on 64 communication cables and ten subsea electricity interconnectors – alongside the reliance on transatlantic cables that is not felt so acutely by its European allies – a sovereign capability would be beneficial for national security.

The sovereign fleet solution?

British industry leaders have raised concerns about reliance on foreign-flagged repair ships, as well as the security implications of cable repair passing through foreign-owned companies. Many ships are foreign-flagged and foreign-crewed, which leads to complications in wartime repairs. Current insurance for commercial vessels does not cover war risk, and crews are not necessarily prepared to sail into contested waters once standard cover lapses.

Furthermore, governmental war risk insurance, as envisioned in the War Risks Act of 1952, is untested in the modern environment where ‘grey zone’ threats are more likely than a declared, conventional war. This is the sort of political reality technically required for the roll-out of governmental war risk insurance schemes.

In both peacetime and wartime, the UK has the responsibility to help lead a NATO and JEF cable repair effort, potentially built around the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA), with sovereign capabilities – a unique position given Britain’s geography spanning the High North, the continental shelf shared with Ireland, and its role supporting Euro-Atlantic allies.

The JCNSS’ 2030 target is not arbitrary. ACMA’s UK-based CS Sovereign was built in 1991 at a cost of £32 million, and cable repair ships typically have a service life of 35-40 years, meaning its retirement is on the horizon. Without taking action, Britain risks losing even its existing, modest access to domestic repair capacity just as the geopolitical threat picture worsens.

A sovereign fleet solves many of these problems, but comes at a huge price. CS Sovereign cost £32 million while RFA Proteus cost £70 million to purchase in 2023. A dedicated repair vessel would cost a similar amount to the latter. However, a full sovereign fleet is not necessarily required, nor affordable or politically palatable. A middle path, closer to the United States’ (US) retainer model and Cable Security Fleet – whereby Washington has paid privately owned, US-flagged vessels an annual retainer of US$5 million (£3.8 million) for guaranteed availability for laying, maintaining, and repairing critical cables – is more realistic.

This option would comprise one or two UK-owned, UK-flagged vessels using the benchmark of £70-£100 million set by RFA Proteus as a financial guide. It would be backstopped by retainer agreements with multinational operators covering the remainder of Britain’s current access to roughly seven vessels (through the ACMA and Keppel-registered vessels), alongside government-backed wartime insurance. In peacetime, these could be leased to industry when necessary.

The personnel factor

A further, and often underappreciated, area of undersea cable repairs, both today and throughout history, is the skill and training necessary to fix the cables and operate the vessels required. During both world wars, cable ships were sitting ducks while the specialist crews worked tirelessly to repair the UK’s telecommunication cables. Notably, the CS Alert was sunk in 1945 while carrying out this exact mission.

An additional bottleneck arises around the importance of a trained British crew. John Wrottesley, Executive Director of the European Subsea Cables Association, told the JCNSS directly that ‘skills and workforce is probably one of the most pressing challenges’ facing the sector, not just training naval reservists. Alasdair Wilkie, Chairman of the ACMA, also told the Committee that a repair ship takes around three years to build, while the staff needed to crew and operate a vessel takes closer to ten years to train.

Wrottesley similarly expressed a need for better support from HM Government on cable repairs in a ‘conflict-type situation’. A trained, sovereign crew solves a critical challenge in the UK’s repair capabilities by providing British personnel for commercial vessels attending to cable damage in wartime that would not be covered by standard insurance. However, given the ten-year training horizon, a workforce programme started today would only reach maturity around 2036 – six years after the JCNSS’ own capability deadline.

Conclusion

Over the next 10-15 years, the UK’s dependence on undersea cables is expected to increase. As the British economy digitises, data traffic will increase in line with increased investments in Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5G and 6G, and the Internet of Things (IoT). These important technologies require protected and capable undersea cables.

In peacetime, a middle-path, hybrid, sovereign capability would reinforce the UK’s position as a leading maritime security provider – an island economy dependent on cables, with responsibilities towards the Republic of Ireland, the High North, and NATO and JEF allies. In wartime, it would offer a capability better matched to the task of CUI repair in a contested and targeted contingency, as was guaranteed during both world wars. HM Government should therefore look towards internal training issues while acquiring the base of a sovereign repair fleet, new retainer contracts between itself and private repair vessels, and the means to protect these crucial capabilities.

Liberty Hunter is the Sir Julian Corbett Adjunct Fellow in Maritime Security at the Council on Geostrategy. She works as a Project Manager and Researcher at the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy, and is also a Research Associate at the Hertford College Diplomacy Centre.

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At the Conservative Party conference on 6th October 2026, James Cartlidge MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, unveiled a £10 billion plan for ‘Britannia Shield’, an anti-missile and anti-drone defence network for the United Kingdom and certain overseas territories.

With threats to the British Isles and the Overseas Territories growing, should the UK focus on building a robust defensive shield to safeguard its territory and critical assets, or double down on expeditionary reach, deep-strike capabilities, and nuclear deterrence to keep threats far from its shores? This week’s Big Ask hinges on this strategic balance, as we asked six experts: Should Britain shift towards a more defensive military posture?

John Foreman CBE

Honorary Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, Euro-Atlantic Security Specialist, and Former UK Defence Attaché to Moscow

Shield or sword: Does Britain need a more defensive military posture?

A heightened sense of the Russian threat to Britain has taken hold in the public consciousness. The Head of MI5 has warned that Russia is seeking to ‘unsettle’ Europe through ‘grey zone’ attacks short of launching a conventional conflict. Yet fear of the latter has been stirred by Russia’s war against Ukraine, concerns about the state of the British Armed Forces, and alarmist media reporting.

The UK must do more to defend itself. But there are significant dangers in overcorrecting toward a ‘Fortress Britain’. A defensive crouch would leave the country less secure, not more.

First, being overly defensive invites trouble. A posture built around, for example, hiding behind an ineffective ‘shield’ or ‘bastion’ surrenders the initiative to an adversary and would leave us open to coercion.

Second, the protection of Britain is more than the capacity to absorb punishment. Deterring Russia by threatening punishment is wiser and probably cheaper than relying on homeland defence if war breaks out. The challenge is achieving the right balance between offensive and defensive capabilities.

Third, the UK cannot insulate itself from attack. As during the Cold War, forward presence, intelligence sharing, allies, and the ability to strike targets at range can help prevent dangers from reaching home. Retreating from these commitments would weaken allied cohesion and give any adversary greater freedom of action.

Before the First World War, concern about the vulnerability of the homeland arguably clouded strategic judgement, distorted defence planning, and corroded those offensive capabilities that have repeatedly delivered advantage in the past. Britain shouldn’t make that mistake again. The choice is not between shield and sword. The UK needs both.

William Freer

Research Fellow (National Security), Council on Geostrategy

Warfare in the missile age is a constant struggle of finding the right balance between offensive and defensive capabilities. The short answer is that though Britain does not need a more defensive posture overall, it does need to invest far more in its defensive capabilities. Air defences are one of the most significant capability gaps facing the UK today but erecting an impregnable umbrella is neither practical nor cost-effective.

The point of air defences should be to buy time for offensive capabilities to do their job in destroying an adversaries ability to continue launching strikes. But as the United States (US) and Israeli forces operating in Iran have shown, hunting the ‘archers’ is no easy feat even after air superiority has been achieved. As such, any investment in UK air defences should be focused on the most sensitive sites and the most likely threats. This means protecting sites such as Faslane, RAF Lossiemouth, and GCHQ from Russian ballistic missiles or cruise missiles which ‘leak’ through assets deployed further forward.

It is vital that this investment, however, does not become an opportunity cost for offensive capabilities. The ability to hunt Russian submarines and keep them bottled up beyond the Bear Gap (the stretch of water from Svalbard to Norway), to keep Russian aircraft at arms length, and to strike the enabling structure behind these platforms from missile factories to airbases and submarine pens also requires more investment. Without greater ability to hit back it would only be a matter of time before the umbrella cracks and lets the rain in.

Matthew Palmer

Sir John Moore Adjunct Fellow in Military Affairs, Council on Geostrategy

As a general rule, the UK is best defended at reach through expeditionary forces, as these most ably support its NATO commitments. Russia is best deterred – and, if necessary, fought – closer to its own border, rather than on the British Isles, whether at land, sea, or in the air.

However, the call for improved homeland defences should not be dismissed. Britain has some serious vulnerabilities in terms of security, air defence, and civil protection. Key political, economic, and military sites are vulnerable to sabotage, interference and, in the worst case, missile strike. While the UK does not face the same threat as other frontline allies, all of its adversaries stock long-ranged cruise and ballistic missiles in their arsenal which can reach the British Isles. The UK currently has limited options that can reliably defeat this threat.

I have recently visited Kyiv, and experienced bombardment from Russian cruise and ballistic missiles firsthand. It is not a threat to be taken lightly. In case of a full-scale conflict, Russia could hit London, Faslane, Cheltenham, or Portsmouth using long-ranged ballistic missiles, disrupting key nodes in the British war effort.

As such, moderately increased investment in homeland air defence – especially against ballistic missiles – for key sites and creating a civil defence force would be sensible options to improve the security of the British Isles while the British Armed Forces take the fight to the enemy. The shield and sword are not mutually exclusive, but should instead complement each other for maximum effect.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

The Kremlin would not fear a British anti-air missile shield. It knows it can fire hundreds if not thousands of missiles at British territories in Europe and that some will always get through. Even Israel’s expansive, integrated system – with close (Iron Dome), intermediate (David’s Sling), and long range (Arrow) defences – cannot intercept every missile or drone.

Insofar as Britain does need enhanced air defences, they should not be anchored to static silos on land. Rather, they should be delivered through a dispersed fleet of large autonomous anti-air vessels integrated into the New Hybrid Navy. Controlled from crewed warships or even the UK territories, these modular platforms would provide mobile air-defence pickets when required, while pivoting to offensive strike, sensing, and escort roles at other times. This prevents capital from being locked into single-use, purely defensive assets.

In any case, what Russia really fears is offensive firepower: the Royal Navy’s and Royal Air Force’s ability to launch devastating raids on Russian air stations, naval bases, radar facilities, and command and control systems, as well as energy and communications infrastructure. The Kremlin also respects escalation dominance: Russia’s doctrine exploits the rungs between conventional conflict and all-out strategic nuclear exchange – a flexible sub-strategic nuclear capability the British Armed Forces currently lack.

Britain should not attempt to turn itself into a solitary but tough little punch bag. Rather, it needs to think of itself as the pivot of a wider defensive formation. Frontline allies – Norway, Finland, Sweden, the Baltic states, Poland, Germany, Romania, and Turkey – are geographically positioned to provide NATO’s anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) shield. The UK should champion their efforts while investing in long-range deep strike systems, agile naval mass, and a credible sub-strategic deterrent instead. That is what will deter Russia from miscalculation or outright attack.

Julien de Saint-Quentin

François Crouzet Adjunct Fellow in Comparative Geopolitics, Council on Geostrategy

The issue is not so much about offence versus defence as it is about wars of choice versus wars of necessity.

The perennial problem of maintaining expensive armed forces in peacetime is that governments are tempted to use them as discretionary instruments of foreign policy, sometimes relying on rather convoluted arguments to establish a connection with national security. Arguably, the British public lost its appetite for such interventions some time between 2013 and 2018. One telling sign of this shift was the quiet disappearance of the word ‘expeditionary’ from the Franco-British Combined Joint Expeditionary Force in 2025. Conceived in 2010, the force belonged to the golden era of discretionary intervention, perhaps best epitomised by the 2011 Libya campaign.

Of course, the nuclear deterrent remains the bedrock of non-discretionary homeland defence. Much of the Royal Navy, alongside elements of the other services, contributes to its conventional underpinnings. There is substantial overlap between ‘making the deterrent safe’ and ‘making home waters safe’. Britain’s homeland is arguably less well protected against a conventional air threat than it was from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War, when a complex network of distributed radar stations and air stations protected its skies. However, it is difficult to imagine how a major conventional attack of that nature could remain separate from the risk of nuclear escalation.

Perhaps the most overlooked vulnerability, however, lies beneath the sea. Yes, Britain is an island nation. But no, it is not because 90% of its economy depends on goods arriving by sea. Tonnes are not pounds sterling, and imports are not Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Britain is overwhelmingly a services-based economy and, according to recent studies, an emerging AI powerhouse. It is therefore disproportionately dependent on the uninterrupted flow of international data, some 99% of which travels through submarine cables.

Perhaps it is time to reconsider the traditional assumption that protecting maritime trade – escorting container ships up and down the Red Sea, if need be – should remain the organising principle of a fleet built around ‘escorts’ and expeditionary operations, and the natural destination for the lion’s share of its budget. And perhaps it is those cables that are the new ‘Atlantic convoys’: the only thing that kept Sir Winston Churchill awake at night.

Olha Tolmachova

Junior Political Analyst, Serpens Centre for International Security

Britain should give greater priority to closing critical homeland defence gaps rather than expanding its ability to project power while its own territory and infrastructure remain vulnerable.

The Defence Committee has warned the UK has ‘next to nothing’ in integrated air and missile defence – even the Conservative Party’s proposed £10 billion may cover only a fraction of the investment required to build a comprehensive air-defence system. This suggests that continued investment in power projection without closing critical defensive gaps could leave Britain increasingly exposed and those gaps harder to address under attack.

Ukraine’s case suggests the competition is already skewed as strategically vital domains such as electronic warfare and anti-drone systems remain chronically underfunded while capital concentrates elsewhere. Considering Ukraine’s campaign is the most intensive real-world test of integrated air defence in modern warfare, data shows an attacker can generate more threats than a defender can afford to stop. To show the numbers: 281 interceptor drones costing roughly US$450,000 downed 258 Russian drones worth about US$25 million. The idea is not that cheap systems beat expensive ones, but that outcomes depend on allocating scarce assets across threat types by interception economics.

With contemporary threat landscape and warfare tactics, deterrence indeed remains necessary, but Ukraine’s experience shows that sustaining the fight requires reliable command and control, careful allocation of scarce interceptors, affordable interception and constant adaptation. The UK should prioritise closing defensive gaps while maintaining credible deterrence and expeditionary capabilities. Threats to overseas bases like Royal Air Force (RAF) Akrotiri show why the sword needs a shield.

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Were the United Kingdom (UK) to give up its nuclear deterrent and decline to rebuild its conventional forces, it would not produce an immediate windfall for His Majesty’s (HM) Treasury. It would also leave Britain more dependent on the United States (US), France, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) at a moment when European security assumptions are under pressure. Nevertheless, the case for nuclear abolition deserves a serious answer.

The abolitionist case is not confined to the margins. The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has long argued that the nuclear budget would be better spent on hospitals, housing, and public services. The Green Party is committed to pushing the UK to sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to begin dismantling its arsenal. In March 2026, John Swinney, First Minister of Scotland, told the Scottish National Party (SNP) that ‘Trident nuclear weapons have no place in Scotland’, and promised that an independent Scotland would ban them in its constitution.

These arguments deserve a reply now. Public finances are tight, and every claim on them, including the nuclear one, should be tested. The decision is also timely: the four Vanguard class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs) are having their lives extended while the Dreadnought class is built, so any choice to stop would have to be made within the next few years. Britain has retired 23 nuclear submarines since 1983, and is only now dismantling the first. Abolition is possible, but it would be a long, costly, and largely irreversible process – not a switch to be flipped. The answers to two key questions decide in favour of retention: firstly, what would abolition actually save, and when; and secondly, what risks would the UK and its allies be assuming in exchange?

Who threatens Britain?

Russia is currently the only state whose language approaches nuclear intimidation. Its November 2024 doctrine broadened the circumstances for nuclear use and lowered the declared threshold. However, this is coercive signalling aimed at constraining NATO decisions, not a declared intention to strike the British homeland, and it is important to say so plainly.

In June 2026, Sir Keir Starmer, then Prime Minister, warned that NATO assessed that ‘there could be an attack by Russia on NATO as soon as 2030’. The alliance also judges the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to be on track to hold up to 1,000 nuclear weapons by the same date. Decisions taken now are being made for the 2060s: the Ministry of Defence (MOD) intends the Dreadnought class to sustain Britain’s nuclear Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD) ‘out to the 2060s and beyond’.

Despite the reality of the nuclear threat, the immediate ones faced today are mostly non-nuclear – although this is, of course, in no small part due to the existence of the nuclear deterrent. In October 2024, Ken McCallum, Director General of MI5, described Russian military intelligence using ‘arson, sabotage, and more’ – evidenced in the Russian-backed arson attack on a Ukrainian-owned east London warehouse in March that year – and in 2025 announced that the agency had disrupted more than 20 potentially lethal Iran-backed plots in the past year. In November 2025, MI5 issued an espionage alert over Chinese officers cultivating parliamentary contacts through networking sites, and in October 2025, the National Cyber Security Centre named Beijing a highly sophisticated threat actor. No government would fire Trident over an arson attack, and no adversary expects it to.

The case for abolition taken seriously

The moral objection is the strongest part of the abolitionist case – indeed, the CND has called Trident ‘militarily useless, immoral, and hugely expensive’. There is a real diplomatic argument too: renunciation would strengthen the UK’s standing when it presses the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) bargain on others – although it is unlikely that it would be strengthened to the point that any adversaries would follow suit.

There is also a sound strategic observation at its core: the role of nuclear weapons in deterring conventional aggression is ‘less clear’. Sabotage, espionage, cyber intrusion, and cable tampering call for resilience, policing, and air defence – not warheads.

What abolition would actually save

The fiscal case for abolition is weaker than either side usually admits. The House of Commons Library records in-service costs of about 6% of the defence budget (roughly £3 billion in 2022-2023), with £31 billion to build the four Dreadnought class SSBNs and a £10 billion contingency. Much of the wider Defence Nuclear Enterprise (DNE), however – nuclear propulsion, submarine building, regulation, and the skills base – would survive abolition, which brings its own decommissioning, site security, and workforce transition costs, and would require funded conversion for Barrow, Faslane, Devonport, and Aldermaston.

The realistic net dividend is in the low billions per year, arriving only after those costs are paid, and set against a rising baseline: the Defence Investment Plan sets out £298 billion of spending over the four years to 2029-2030, against the NATO pledge to spend 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence and wider security by 2035, of which 3.5% is for core defence. A few billion pounds per year is a genuine social choice, but it will not provide a transformation of the National Health Service (NHS), and more importantly is not worth the risks outlined.

Why the threats still justify retention

Three factors weigh decisively towards retaining Trident. Firstly, one category of threat has no conventional substitute: nuclear coercion, or a threat to the survival of the UK or a NATO ally by a nuclear-armed state. Unilateral renunciation of the nuclear deterrent would remove British control over that risk without removing a single Russian, Chinese, or North Korean warhead.

Secondly, the UK’s conventional shortcomings make the deterrent more necessary. The Strategic Defence Review (SDR) concedes that the British Armed Forces have been ‘hollowed out’; the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) estimates munitions stocks would sustain about a week of high-intensity fighting; the Defence Committee found that the military would struggle to sustain warfighting; and transatlantic analysts warn of a window of vulnerability as Washington turns towards the Indo-Pacific and hemispheric defence. A country that cannot sustain a conventional fight cannot discard its last form of insurance.

Thirdly, gaps in the current posture are arguments for repairing rather than abandoning it. A missile fired from Kaliningrad would reach London in roughly six minutes, leaving no interlude for identifying the warhead; absent a Type 45 destroyer on the correct bearing there is no around-the-clock intercept option; and the UK has been assessed as being behind (an understatement, to say the least) on Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD).

Dual-use systems such as Russia’s Oreshnik missile make warhead ambiguity a deliberate coercive instrument. Britain’s escalation ladder also has a missing rung: unlike the US and Russia, the UK has no sovereign sub-strategic option between a conventional response and a full strategic strike. Nuclear abolition would not close any of these gaps; it would only leave fewer options for facing the same challenges.

The insurance Britain should buy

In terms of nuclear deterrence, the UK should retain CASD and complete the Dreadnought programme. It should fund the missing escalatory rung, a sovereign sub-strategic option, and publish the cost rather than expanding the nuclear mission piecemeal through acquiring F-35A Lightning II Joint Combat Aircraft and joining NATO’s dual-capable aircraft mission without a stated total.

On conventional forces, HM Government should adopt the ‘consent budget’ figure as policy: core defence spending of 4.3-4.4% of GDP by the mid-2030s (about £115-130 billion a year) – above NATO’s 3.5% core target and within its overall 5% commitment. This should be spent on readiness rather than headcount, as the SDR intends.

This spending increase is necessary given Britain is still short of armour, warships, air defence, and artillery. The money should be conditional on delivery: the National Audit Office found the Equipment Plan’s forecast costs exceeded its budget by £16.9 billion, and ministers could name verifiable progress on only 12 of the SDR’s 62 recommendations. Thus, HM Government should consider fewer programmes that are properly funded, with published tracking against all 62 recommendations.

Homeland resilience should also be given a real budget. Finland maintains civil defence shelters for about 4.8 million people, Germany has committed €10 billion (£8.6 billion) to civil protection until 2029, and Poland added zł5 billion (£982.8 million) in 2025. Meanwhile, Britain’s Home Defence Programme has neither budget nor delivery date. Investment of around £1 billion per year to 2035 in areas such as undersea infrastructure, counter-sabotage, and cyber resilience would address the threats that the country actually faces. HM Government should also continue to press for risk reduction, verification, and reciprocal reductions, which is where the abolitionist diplomatic argument can do real work.

Conclusion

In exchange for the few billion pounds per year nuclear abolition would save, the UK would face a state like Russia that has lowered its nuclear threshold, with the prospect of a second nuclear-armed adversary with a growing risk tolerance in the PRC. Meanwhile, its forces would be unable to sustain a conventional fight and would have no answer of its own to nuclear coercion. That is not a trade worth making.

Thus, Britain should retain its nuclear deterrent, fund the missing escalatory rung, raise core defence spending to 4.3-4.4% of GDP by the mid-2030s, and invest around £1 billion per year into civil defence. HM Government should also say honestly that this is paid for through tax and borrowing, rather than out of a peace dividend that does not exist. The moral discomfort does not disappear; it is the price of insurance.

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

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The United Kingdom’s (UK) most striking military Artificial Intelligence (AI) statistic of the year is a planning cycle rather than a model benchmark. At the Land Warfare Conference in June 2026, Gen. Sir Roly Walker, Chief of the General Staff, stated that ASGARD DECIDE had reduced a corps-level planning cycle from 72 hours to one, and increased the number of targets a corps could process in a day by roughly tenfold.

The operational result is impressive, although the strategic implication is larger. Sir Roly also described ASGARD as part of the data flows through which Britain is building its Integrated Force, and the system used during Exercise ARCADE STRIKE was linked to troops operating on Exercise SPRING STORM in Estonia. The British Army’s own account of the exercise says that the system is interoperable by design, and can bring different countries and languages into a common digital environment.

That means that the UK is testing more than a faster headquarters; it is testing a digital layer through which allied sensors, decision support systems, and military effects can increasingly be connected.

A targeting web is also a strategic network

His Majesty’s (HM) Government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published in June 2025, already places the Digital Targeting Web inside a wider geopolitical design. It adopts a ‘NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation] First’ posture, says that the Integrated Force must be able to operate inside NATO component commands by design, and makes a common digital foundation central to how British forces connect with allies and partners. The SDR sets 2027 as the goal for the wider Digital Targeting Web.

The point goes beyond moving the UK’s targeting data faster. A system that can connect sensors, deciders, and effectors across domains can also become the connective tissue between forces that own different platforms, operate under different national chains of command, and contribute different elements of a coalition operation. The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) describes the web in precisely those cross-domain terms: a way to connect the components that detect, decide, and act in a contested environment. The official programme description therefore has implications for alliance architecture as well as battlefield efficiency.

For Britain, this would create a form of strategic advantage that does not depend on owning every platform in a coalition. A country that helps to provide the digital layer through which partners combine their capabilities can shape interoperability standards, integration habits, and the tempo at which allied forces operate.

Dependence through interoperability

The same network that multiplies allied capability can create new dependencies. A coalition that relies on a common data fabric has to know what happens when one national service is degraded, a security boundary changes, an update is delayed, or one ally cannot share the same information as another.

NATO’s Alliance Digital Strategy, published in January 2026, recognises this challenge. It calls for secure, resilient, and interoperable digital capabilities; federated identity and access management; common data standards; and cross-domain command enabled by sensor-to-effector data flows. This is compatible with the UK’s direction, but it also makes clear that a national targeting web cannot simply become alliance infrastructure by being technically impressive.

The strategic test is whether partners can plug in without becoming locked in. An allied formation needs to benefit from British data and decision support while retaining the ability to operate when the British node is unavailable, when communications are contested, or when national policy prevents a particular use of shared information.

Layers beyond Britain

The geopolitical setting matters, as the UK is not building into an empty field. In March 2025, NATO’s Communications and Information Agency acquired the Maven Smart System NATO, an American commercial AI platform, for Allied Command Operations at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), in one of the fastest procurements in the alliance’s history. NATO’s operational command architecture now includes a major American commercial AI layer. A British targeting web that reaches allied land forces will either federate with that layer or sit beside it, and the choice is strategic rather than technical – deciding whether the UK will contribute a sovereign node that European allies can rely on when the United States’ (US) priorities shift, or a second dependency stacked on the first.

This is also where the web touches the wider European debate. Britain now sits outside the European Union (EU) but remains the leading European naval and air power, and European defence firms and officials – particularly in France and Germany – have raised concerns about dependence on American technology and data sovereignty.

A British layer that is interoperable with the alliance standard, exportable to partners, and demonstrably able to operate when the transatlantic link is contested would give the UK something few European allies can offer: a hedge that is neither American nor Brussels-made. Whether the Digital Targeting Web is designed to be that hedge, or only a national accelerator, is a decision that HM Government has not yet made in public.

The necessity of visible national authority

This is where the mission command problem in the original ASGARD debate becomes a coalition problem. Different allies bring different rules of engagement, legal authorities, risk tolerances, and national caveats. A common operational picture does not erase those differences, nor does faster decision support create a common right to act.

A British headquarters may be able to see an ally track a target, recommend an effect, and route the request in seconds, but that does not mean that the British commander owns the allied decision. The architecture therefore has to distinguish between sharing evidence, proposing an action, and possessing the authority to approve it.

This distinction matters for trust. Allies are more likely to integrate deeply with a system when they can see where their national authority begins and ends, when interventions are attributable, and when connecting to the network does not silently transfer control upward or across borders. In this sense, mission command is not only a British Army doctrine issue; it becomes part of alliance cohesion.

Coalition resilience: The harder test

ASGARD has already demonstrated speed. The next strategically relevant evidence is different: how quickly can an allied unit join the environment, can national restrictions survive translation into the shared workflow, can the alliance continue when the common picture fragments, and can a partner disconnect or operate locally without losing the ability to fight?

These questions matter because the web already reaches NATO’s eastern flank, where the UK’s forward land forces in Estonia are meant to convert from a ‘tripwire’ into a credible invasion-stopping capability; a targeting layer that allies trust there is a deterrence asset, and one they cannot rely on is a vulnerability advertised in advance. They also matter because the SDR does not imagine the Integrated Force fighting alone. It explicitly designs it for NATO, coalition, and sovereign configurations. The value of the Digital Targeting Web will therefore depend on how well it moves between those configurations without confusing technical connectivity with political or military authority.

ASGARD’s compression of 72 hours into one is an operational achievement. For the UK, the larger strategic question is whether that capability becomes something allies choose to rely on because it makes them faster without making them less sovereign or less resilient. If it can do that, the Digital Targeting Web would be more than a British command tool. Rather, it could become alliance infrastructure: a way for the UK to contribute not only weapons and formations, but the digital architecture to help allied forces combine them.

If it cannot provide this reliance, Britain may still gain a faster national headquarters, but the wider strategic promise will remain unproven. Ultimately, the decisive measure is whether allied forces can connect to the web, retain their own authority, and keep operating when the connection is no longer there. How many targets it can process will only be of secondary concern.

Burak Oktenli is an independent researcher based in Washington, DC, focusing on authority, assurance, and governance in autonomous and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled systems. He holds an MBA and is completing a Master of Professional Studies in Applied Intelligence at Georgetown University.

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With the waning of the post-Cold War ‘peace dividend’, the world is again coalescing into spheres of influence and power hierarchies. Great powers exist alongside ‘middle powers’ – those with a significant level of international influence, but to a lesser extent than the great powers.

In Davos in January 2026, Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, advocated for middle powers to collaborate with each other as great power rivalry intensifies. While such efforts have occurred before – notably the Non-Aligned Movement of the Cold War – the effectiveness and relevancy of middle power coalitions is contested. Using this as the basis for this week’s Big Ask, we asked nine experts: Are middle powers natural allies of each other?

Dr Przemysław Biskup

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

Middle powers can be natural allies, but the challenges involved are considerable. Their central problem is aggregating and coordinating complementary resources to compensate for the concentration of power in a single great power. This requires military and industrial capacity, economic resilience, and – crucially – sustained political will.

The European Union (EU) illustrates this well: its 27 members possess enormous economic and significant military potential, yet converting these assets into a coherent strategic actor demands constant political efforts and investment, with no guaranteed success. As a result, American leadership of free and open nations remains extremely difficult to replace, providing both capabilities and a framework for coordinating allies.

This helps to explain why countries on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) eastern front – facing a persistent Russian threat – are reluctant to consider security arrangements premised on reducing the United States’ (US) leadership. As Carney argues, great power competition makes increased middle power cooperation highly desirable for the sake of greater resilience against coercion.

Yet, from a Polish and broader Central and Eastern European countries’ perspective, this does not make a ‘third path’ between great powers more feasible. Their fundamental strategic interest remains deterring Russia, which is best achieved through NATO and maintaining strong American engagement in Europe. Therefore, middle power cooperation can and should complement core alliances while enhancing participants’ ability to influence both partners and adversaries.

Poland’s relations with the United Kingdom (UK), the Nordic states, Canada, South Korea, and Japan show how countries can work together where interests converge. Defence and defence‑industrial cooperation, critical minerals, energy, cyber security, technology, and resilient supply chains are particularly promising. Nonetheless, middle powers’ strategic relevance will ultimately depend on transforming shared interests into collective capabilities rather than merely diplomatic coalitions.

Dr Hillary Briffa

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Senior Lecturer in National Security Studies, King’s College London

There is nothing inevitable about middle power solidarity. Middle powers are most likely to cooperate when a common problem creates a common interest. In periods of great power rivalry, that may mean they align most readily around what they stand against – such as coercion, forced choices between blocs, or the erosion of multilateral rules that give them room to manoeuvre. Indeed, the Non-Aligned Movement exemplified this. Coalition-building can also give states influence they would struggle to exercise alone.

Nevertheless, ‘middle power’ is a relative category, and it is deeply history-laden. Strategic cultures develop through geography, historical experience, available resources, and perceptions of threat. For instance, Japan and South Korea are both commonly described as middle powers, both are US allies, and both face many of the same pressures in East Asia. Yet, Japan’s imperial rule over Korea from 1910-1945 remains politically salient and continues to shape bilateral trust – a shared position in today’s international hierarchy does not erase yesterday’s relationships.

Middle power cooperation is therefore likely to be pragmatic and issue-specific, far from automatic. Carney’s rousing proposition is most persuasive as a call for flexible coalitions, whereby states work together where their interests coincide while accepting that they will diverge elsewhere. In this spirit, middle powers can find common cause, particularly when great power competition threatens their room for manoeuvre, but that does not make them ‘natural’ allies. Whether in love or diplomacy, relationships will always take hard work.

Prof. Amelia Hadfield

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

The question of whether middle powers are natural allies highlights a significant geopolitical debate unfolding in both Europe and Canada, but with striking differences.

From Ottawa’s perspective, Carney remains the most prominent advocate of middle powers, both as a necessary counterweight to superpowers, and as natural partners. His landmark Davos address was a warning that the international order was experiencing ‘a rupture, not a transition’ and called for medium-sized liberal democracies to withstand geopolitical challenges collectively.

Imposing retaliatory tariffs on the US (ironically, alongside the People’s Republic of China [PRC]) in response to Washington’s trade war, Carney was adamant in his recent speech to the European Parliament that his vision is not of ‘a great power rival – only with better manners’ but a nimbler, ostensibly values-based cooperation among democracies such as Canada, Nordic nations, Australia, Japan, and EU member states – many with shared concerns over American capriciousness, and Russian and Chinese ambitions.

European reactions, however, have been ambivalent. Despite the broad endorsement by Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, of Carney’s ‘middle powerism’, the suggestion that Canada become an ‘associate member’ of the EU received a decidedly cool response.

Carney considers Canada both the definitive middle power and European in calling, while European decision-makers argue that the EU itself is hardly a middle power. While certainly a convenient collection of middle powers, the real question is whether the EU regards itself as a coalition for them, particularly as a balance against overactive great powers.

Carney’s vision presupposes that middle powers can and should work together, but not necessarily to the limits of pooling sovereignty or aggregating into a great(er) power to succeed. Having pooled significant amounts of power, competence, policy, and influence, Europeans – at least those keen on developing the EU’s strategic autonomy – already regard themselves as a great power, albeit an uneven one.

Whatever the differences, Canada has upped its geopolitical game: a visible and useful improvement in the eyes of Brussels. Equally, Carney’s words about deteriorated Canadian-American relations remain a cautionary tale for European nations: ‘a trade relationship that was once a great strength has now become a serious vulnerability’.

Prof. Robyn Klingler-Vidra and Prof. Ramon Pacheco Pardo

Professor of Political Economy and Entrepreneurship, King’s College London; and Professor of International Relations, King’s College London

Middle powers can work together, but are not necessarily natural allies. They may share an interest in preserving room for manoeuvre amid intensifying American-Chinese rivalry, but their economic dependencies, security relationships, and national interests differ too greatly to make a durable ‘middle power club’ easy to build, let alone to sustain.

For countries such as the UK, one option is simply to wait out the remaining years that Donald Trump will be President of the US. However, this overlooks an important feature of Trump’s approach to international relations: his predisposition for ‘the art of the deal’ – as well as his track record of bilateral negotiations.

Additionally, most of the bilateral agreements that the Trump administration signs are likely to survive, given their economic, security, and diplomatic benefits for the US. Rather than seeking strength primarily by banding together, middle powers should focus on increasing what they individually bring to the negotiating table. This means cultivating what can be called ‘niche superpowers’: areas of concentrated economic, technological, or regulatory strength that confer disproportionate strategic relevance relative to a country’s overall material capabilities.

South Korea offers a useful example. Faced with Washington’s tariff pressure in 2025, Seoul made its shipbuilding capabilities central to negotiations through its ‘Make American Shipbuilding Great Again’ (MASGA) initiative. A sector in which South Korea possesses exceptional capabilities became leverage in its negotiations with Washington.

The lesson for middle powers is not that cooperation is undesirable. Coalitions can amplify their influence when interests align. However, autonomy in a transactional international order ultimately rests on each nation state’s strategic indispensability. Cultivating capabilities that great powers need may offer middle powers a more reliable route to national self-determination than attempting to stand behind a lasting club among themselves.

Dr Alexander Lanoszka

International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Assistant Professor of International Relations, University of Waterloo (Canada)

No country is ever a natural ally of another. After all, alliances are the product of geostrategic priorities, political interests, and even cultural affinities. Alas, even these factors hardly guarantee their formation, and thus if alliances themselves are indeterminate, then so is the concept of ‘middle powers’ – an ambiguous category of states that are neither great nor minor but somewhere in between.

Still, what Carney had in mind is how countries with sufficient bandwidth have a shared interest in being stewards of an international order that has long been dependent on the preponderance of American military and economic power for its own functioning.

This idea is appealing, but it is nevertheless hard to imagine that the usual candidates for middle power status – for example, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Türkiye, South Korea, and Mexico – would not only agree on what to do together, but would also provide the capacity necessary for guaranteeing freedom of the seas, providing a common and global reserve currency, and acting with sufficient unity to overcome the collective action problems that a strong and willing US has arguably done in the past. To say nothing of other potential middle power candidates, those countries put together differ enormously in their military capabilities, strategic interests, cultural perspectives, and international goals to be a coherent bloc.

Yet, disorder is not inevitable either. Even with Washington setting the highest tariffs since the 1930s, for example, many countries appear to recognise that beggar-thy-neighbour policies are a dead end, and can find scope for mutually beneficial cooperation all the same.

Dr Zeno Leoni

Lecturer, Department of Defence Studies, King’s College London

Middle powers, particularly those of the so-called ‘Global South’ rather than European NATO members, are not necessarily natural allies, but they often share important diplomatic interests. Many support key elements of the liberal international order while advocating reforms to make international institutions more representative and responsive to developing countries. They also tend to value multilateralism and strategic autonomy, seeking to avoid excessive dependence on any single great power or becoming entangled in great power competition.

At the same time, middle powers are rarely united by common security interests. Their foreign and security policies are largely shaped by geographical realities, meaning that states respond primarily to challenges in their immediate neighbourhoods. As a result, the security concerns of a Gulf state, a Southeast Asian country, and a Latin American power may differ considerably, limiting the scope for meaningful strategic cooperation.

Relatedly, limited military capabilities and resources further reduce middle powers’ ability to support one another across regions. Moreover, supporting another middle power on a particular issue may risk damaging relations with a more powerful state.

As a result, while middle powers often share a common vision of international order, differences in geography, security concerns, and national interests frequently limit cooperation in practice. Their relationships are therefore characterised as much by pragmatism as by solidarity.

Dr Stephen Nagy

Professor, International Christian University; Senior Fellow and China Project Lead, Macdonald-Laurier Institute; and Centre for Global Outreach Fellow, Japan Institute for International Affairs

Carney’s Davos speech pitched an attractive idea. In short, a coalition of middle powers would band together to survive the crossfire of great power rivalry. It sounds great on paper. However, assuming these nations are natural allies is a fundamental mistake.

Just because countries share a fear of weaponised trade and shrinking diplomatic space does not mean that they share a game plan. Advanced middle powers and developing countries might both hate being bullied by superpowers, but their actual goals rarely align. Developing nations are not looking at this through a ‘Western’ moral lens. More often than not, they want practical deliverables such as market access, technology transfers, and infrastructure.

Talk is cheap, and building a real coalition is a massive headache. Look at Canada’s own track record. The 2017 Trans-Pacific Partnership walkout mess in Da Nang is a perfect example of how countries do not get to claim leadership just by giving good speeches. Trust has to be earned through actual burden-sharing.

The world is now stuck in a rigid bipolar system, and countries cannot put off picking a side forever. Pretending that American unpredictability is exactly the same as Chinese revisionism is a massive strategic blunder. Middle powers are not magically going to unite just because the geopolitical climate is getting tense. If they want to survive, they need to drop the wishful thinking and start doing the hard, unsentimental work of building real frameworks and actual credibility.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

Whether middle powers are natural allies depends entirely on how the term ‘middle power’ is conceptualised. If it is defined strictly through a positional lens – merely as states that are neither superpowers (the US), or major powers (Britain, France, and the PRC) – middle powers do not make for natural allies of one another. Under this positional perspective, alignment is driven by national interests, regional security dynamics, and geopolitical convenience rather than shared status.

True, ‘middling countries’, such as Russia, Türkiye, Japan, India, Indonesia, Germany, Australia, and Canada share a structural classification, yet their strategic priorities are very different. Their relations remain transactional; they pursue sovereignty, or coalesce around greater powers (as Canada and the Nordic and Baltic states are with the UK through the Joint Expeditionary Force [JEF]).

If, however, the term ‘middle power’ is understood as a normative identity – defining states that embrace international law, multilateralism, and the so-called rules-based international system – a stronger case emerges for natural convergence. Under this classification, middle powers such as Canada, Australia, Japan, Germany, and Sweden share a foundational interest in preventing greater powers from overriding their interests. They embrace multilateralism and pursue global governance structures in order to prevent geopolitical and geoeconomic revisionism.

Perhaps the real question is whether states should willingly embrace ‘middlepowerdom’ in this normative sense, as Carney recommends. For some, it is a strategic necessity, making them natural partners out of shared vulnerability.

Britain, however, has the luxury of playing both roles: it has close pre-existing relationships with many normative middle powers, but it also retains the raw strength, nuclear capability, and global reach to act as a geopolitical centre of gravity (e.g., through the JEF, AUKUS, and NATO). For the UK, the imperative is not to shrink into the middle tier, but to leverage its position to offer security and structure to those that do.

Gray Sergeant

Research Fellow (Indo-Pacific Geopolitics), Council on Geostrategy, and PhD Student, Department of International History, London School of Economics and Political Science

Shared interests make partnerships; shared values make them a natural fit. Despite Carney’s emphasis on pragmatism, he does acknowledge this. The two exemplars of ‘variable geometry’ that he holds up – the Coalition of the Willing and Security Action For Europe (SAFE) – are composed of democracies.

Among like-minded countries, ad hoc groupings and minilaterals make sense. In certain circumstances, their nimbleness may give them an edge over large, legacy arrangements. Indeed, they can enhance and complement the existing US-led alliance system. Yet, Carney appears to be presenting a different proposition: that ‘new networks and…pragmatic alliances’ provide an alternative to, or even a counterbalance against, American power.

Proponents of middle power coalitions argue there is no choice, given the US’ turn inward and against its allies. Yet, Trump is sui generis. Assuming his approach will permanently define American foreign policy would be premature. Traditional internationalist currents remain powerful in the Democratic and Republican parties, and among the American people.

It would be better for free and open nations to encourage these tendencies and collectively build frameworks to constrain any rash unilateralist impulses within Trump’s successors. They would be better placed to do so if they also address one of Trump’s major – and entirely legitimate – criticisms: their underspending on defence. Done properly, the US-led alliance system, more balanced than before, could emerge stronger.

Trying to obtain security and prosperity through middle power coalitions would be neither feasible nor desirable. The US is the world’s premier military power, its economy continues to outperform those of Europe, and American companies lead the global race in Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The only serious alternative to American pre-eminence is Communist Chinese pre-eminence. Yet, those who promote middle power coalitions appear to understate the stakes of this great power competition, while simultaneously bemoaning the breakdown of an order only made possible by Washington’s triumph in the Cold War.

In the late 1940s, Ernest Bevin, then Foreign Secretary, was able to prevent a war-weary US from abandoning European security – and consequently, NATO was born. This can be done again. Like-minded middle powers can form bespoke partnerships, but they should not write off nor dismiss the value of American leadership.

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Australia’s defence and security relationship with the United Kingdom (UK) has been defined customarily in terms of historical links and close cultural affinity rather than as a formal alliance with binding obligations. However, this is changing under the impetus of a partnership that is increasingly interests-driven to suit a more threatening and unpredictable global environment, in which shared values no longer constitute a sufficient base, or engine, for a relationship of this importance and potential.

The intensified government-to-government defence and security relationship also needs a wider base to enable further alignment of British and Australian deterrence strategies and defence priorities. With some justification, based on deep personal connections, Australians and Britons instinctively feel that they know each other well – often better than they do Americans.

However, with cultural and linguistic proximity comes an attendant ‘familiarity trap’. Geographic separation places structural constraints on the bilateral defence security partnership, especially given the UK’s diminished capacity to project power as a global defence actor, the result of decades of underinvestment, and the Australian Defence Force’s more limited regional focus.

Neither country should take the other for granted, or entirely on trust. For all they hold in common, London and Canberra need to understand each other with fewer preconceptions, and less sentiment. This will necessitate opening up the relationship to greater scrutiny, both political and public, and assessments of added defence value that are free of conjecture.

A decade of political churn and lacklustre economic performance have sapped international confidence in Britain’s leadership abilities and defence competence. Beyond repeating the official mantra of ‘indivisible’ security linkages between the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, His Majesty’s (HM) Government should maintain a convincing consistency of physical military presence in Australia’s local region and transparency about the recapitalisation of its defence industries at home, as well as avoiding sending mixed signals on its defence commitments to Australia.

Equally, Australians should not reflexively underestimate the UK’s ability to deliver nor belittle its international security contributions just because this has become a satisfying, cultural dig. Rather, Canberra should assess an enhanced British presence on its merits, not on perception. As the saying goes: trust, but verify.

The key fact driving this need for a wider bilateral defence and security base is that British-Australian defence ties are now more consequential for both countries than at any point in the last 50 years. The UK’s reinvigorated importance as a strategic defence partner for Australia means that there is much more riding on the relationship than previously in terms of national interests, particularly Britain’s responsibility for delivering the Royal Australian Navy’s future frontline capabilities in the form of a new joint class of nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) and Hunter class frigates based upon a British design. As well as building SSNs together, the two countries are collaborating on a raft of advanced strategic technologies with the United States (US) – their common ally – via AUKUS Pillar II.

Firm but informal foundations

Until comparatively recently, the British-Australian defence relationship was largely informal. A basic bilateral defence and security treaty was signed in 2013, which included a commitment to mutual consultations on threats to international peace and security. To codify their deeper joint commitments under AUKUS, London and Canberra signed a new defence cooperation agreement in 2025: the Geelong Treaty. It incorporates a status of visiting forces element that the relationship had previously, and surprisingly, lacked, as well as commitment to ‘strengthen their combined military capabilities, boost their collective industrial capacity, and enhance their ability to promote stability and security in the Indo-Pacific and beyond’. This suggests that the core bilateral partnership – even if it is not officially termed a military alliance – is very close to that status.

Elsewhere, the UK and Australia continue to cooperate under the aegis of older, and enduring, minilateral arrangements, such as the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA), which commit both countries to regular military exercises and defence consultations in Southeast Asia, alongside Malaysia, New Zealand, and Singapore. The deepest anchor of security cooperation, and one that naturally lends itself to cyber cooperation and sharing secret information, is both countries’ common membership of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing framework.

Britain maintains an enabling Indo-Pacific presence through a number of UK-run defence support facilities, including in Singapore, Brunei, and Diego Garcia – at least for now. After a prolonged hiatus in significant British deployments to the region earlier last decade, the UK’s expeditionary maritime and air deployments to the Indo-Pacific have maintained a regular drumbeat since 2018, including two visits and one maintenance period by Astute class SSNs to Western Australia, and separate visits by an amphibious and aircraft carrier task group to Darwin. Britain has also committed to deploying an SSN to HMAS Stirling in Western Australia, under Submarine Rotational Force – West (SRF-West), which will commence operations from the end of 2027.

Towards a broader bilateral defence relationship

Australia has officially identified the UK as a key strategic partner for several years. The 2023 Defence Strategic Review highlighted Britain’s importance to Australia, stating that ‘engagement with the United Kingdom in the Indo-Pacific must be enhanced’. This requirement has been carried over into the biennial National Defence Strategy, couched in terms of ‘deepening...collective deterrence networks’, as well as cemented further in the Geelong Treaty.

New areas of bilateral defence cooperation have opened up, including coordinated naval demonstrations of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. Lower-key, but still important, defence and security coordination is ongoing in the Southwest Pacific, taking advantage of the UK’s expanded defence attaché network in the region, as well as the presence of two British roving patrol vessels, HMS Tamar and HMS Spey, permanently deployed to the Indo-Pacific since 2021.

Australia, for its part, has repeatedly deployed surveillance assets and military personnel into the area covered by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and participated in Operation ORBITAL, the UK-based training initiative for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which began in 2014. In September 2026, it signed a new bilateral security agreement with Kyiv, indicating that Canberra reciprocally values its broader strategic connections to European countries.

Britain and Australia have a compatible military culture and an extensive history of operational cooperation in multinational coalitions. Yet, until a few years ago, the Australian Defence Force operated very little British equipment, nor was there any meaningful defence industrial collaboration. This began to change when Australia opted to select a British design for the Hunter frigate programme in June 2018. The real acceleration started from September 2021 with the announcement of AUKUS. More speculatively, should Australia in future opt to participate in the tripartite Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), most likely through observer status, this would add a third major weapons programme with substantial bilateral involvement.

While both countries’ defence industrial bases are now collaborating to a much greater extent, and they jointly subscribe to the close security interconnection between the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific, greater alignment between their respective deterrence strategies and defence priorities is not assured. It will require a sustained and concerted investment of effort and detached analytical rigour on the part of both governments, including a clear-eyed assessment about the threats they face, their respective capacity to deliver on AUKUS, and other aspects of defence and security cooperation.

The UK and Australia face a common challenge from the People’s Republic of China’s exceptionalist maritime claims, its coercive behaviour, and its unparalleled military build-up, including its nuclear forces. Both countries’ contribution to deterrence in the Indo-Pacific lies partly in their ability to play a concerted role in regional defence engagement, but just as much in their combined influence in Washington at a time of rising doubt about the US’ commitment to regional security. Influencing the Trump administration is a challenge even for close allies.

There is a tendency in Australia to view AUKUS through the prism of its alliance with the US, and to perceive the UK as a weak link, or to disregard it altogether. This underestimates London’s role in strengthening Canberra’s bargaining power in Washington, a critical factor in helping to overcome entrenched sectoral resistance in the US to opening up its defence industrial base and selling Virginia class SSNs to Australia. Indeed, coordinated lobbying in Washington certainly helped to preserve American backing for AUKUS.

Public commentary in Australia also overlooks the fact that Britain bears responsibility for delivering the bulk of value within Pillar I (AUKUS’ submarine pillar), in the form of SSN-AUKUS. When the UK is mentioned, it is often accompanied by extreme scepticism about its ability to live up to these industrial and operational commitments. Evidence-based scepticism can be useful, but blanket dismissal is not. Familiarity should not be allowed to breed contempt.

Commentary on AUKUS in Britain lacks the controversy that it stirs in Australia, although there is a corresponding scepticism in the UK’s strategic circles about whether it can – or even should – divert its strategic focus from the Euro-Atlantic when Russia’s ‘grey zone’ and conventional military threats are so acute and the US’ security commitment to Europe under the Trump administration is wavering far more obviously. Both Britain and Australia should accustom themselves better to one another’s domestic AUKUS narrative, allowing them to inject political confidence into the agreement through more targeted messaging and in-depth public statements and debate, particularly when an official response would clear doubt and subdue misleading representations that otherwise thrive in an information vacuum.

Conclusion

For all its growing importance, neither government appears particularly motivated or comfortable exposing the British-Australian bilateral defence and security relationship to wider public scrutiny. However, it needs a broader base than government-to government-relations alone; both London and Canberra should take seriously the current opportunity to actualise their converging interests and operational arrangements. This would enable pushing the partnership, previously based around shared values and culture, beyond the normative comfort zone and deeper into the operational realm.

AUKUS is a notable fillip in this direction, but questions still remain around operational and doctrinal harmonisation. Cultural proximity sometimes goes against the strategic grain. There is simply too much riding on this relationship, now and in the future, to leave it to its own devices.

Dr Euan Graham is an Expert Associate at the Australian National Security College and an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

Patrick Triglavcanin is a Research Assistant at the Defence and Strategic Institute at the University of Western Australia and an International Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

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In conversation with Viktorija Starych-Samuolienė, Co-President (Strategy) of the Council on Geostrategy, they examine how the cadet experience can build confidence, teamwork, discipline, and practical life skills. The discussion also looks at opportunities in cyber capabilities, drones, aviation, engineering, and STEM, and how these experiences can introduce young people to future careers across defence, industry, and the emergency services. Drawing on her own experience as both a former cadet and an adult volunteer, Sqn. Ldr. Lane reflects on the impact the organisation can have on young people from a wide range of backgrounds.

The conversation considers what sustainable expansion will require, including more adult volunteers, improved facilities and digital support, and stronger partnerships across government, education, charities, and industry. Brig. Lamb also explains how cadets can reach parts of society that traditional defence does not and contribute to greater national resilience. Looking to the future, he sets out an ambition for the cadet forces to be recognised not simply as a defence activity, but as a national youth asset embedded across British society.

In 2009, Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, used the United Kingdom’s (UK) chairing of the Group of 20 (G20) to contain the damage of the global financial recession. In 2027, His Majesty’s (HM) Government under Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, may need to save the G20 and the very concept of consensus-based multilateralism itself.

The challenges to the G20 and the principle of consensus-based multilateralism have increasingly come from the United States (US) under the second presidency of Donald Trump. While the second Trump administration has not abandoned multilateralism, it has expressed disdain for traditional multilateral structures like the G20, and boycotted the 2025 summit in South Africa. Even though these bodies leaned towards American preferences historically, Washington still had to build consensus to achieve its desired outcomes.

In contrast, the second Trump administration places an emphasis on deals running through Washington, resorting to coercive methods such as tariffs when its demands are rebuffed. The US’ pivot to protectionist great power politics has risked turning the G20 into more of a ‘talking shop’ of the type that Washington berates such groupings for being, putting the UK in the unenviable position of reinvigorating the group as its incoming president.

Meanwhile, the clock is already running on outlining Britain’s G20 presidency in 2027. As presidencies are shaped at least a year in advance, the Burnham administration has inherited the G20 plans laid out by its predecessor, including the hosting of the summit in Manchester. As such, HM Government should take the initiative in reshaping the UK’s G20 agenda.

The ‘C7’: Why the Commonwealth should matter to the G20

Britain’s accession to the G20 presidency while the group is at its lowest ebb also means inheriting the most room to redefine it. The Commonwealth of Nations is one of the best-placed platforms to restore the G20 to working order and build a coalition both within and outside the group.

To that end, the UK should propose a steering group of seven Commonwealth members – the ‘C7’ – comprising Britain, Australia, Canada, Ghana, India, Singapore, and South Africa, formally supported by the Commonwealth Secretariat. This group would act as a caucus that pre-negotiates common policy positions and injects them simultaneously into the G20, the Commonwealth, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and the African Union (AU).

Why these seven Commonwealth countries, two of which are not even full G20 members? The composition reflects a rare alignment in 2027, as three of the world’s most important multilateral bodies will be chaired by Commonwealth members: Britain at the G20, Singapore at ASEAN, and Ghana at the AU. Singapore and Ghana will therefore attend G20 meetings alongside the five Commonwealth members already at the table. Such an alignment across the G20, ASEAN, and the AU will not reoccur for decades.

Beyond their membership credentials, some countries have experience and diplomatic weight that would benefit the group further. India and South Africa chaired the G20 in 2023 and 2025 respectively, and have recent institutional memory of running it. Australia and Canada bring the weight of advanced economies and more geographic diversity to the C7.

A provisional agenda for the C7 should be concrete and proactive, starting with topics like critical minerals and supply chain resilience, climate action, and sovereign debt. Mineral-rich members like Australia, Canada, and South Africa could help the rest of the C7 and the wider Commonwealth break the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) monopoly on the critical minerals needed for green technology. Additionally, the Commonwealth’s mix of wealthy lender nations and developing borrower nations, including small island states, could make it an even-handed referee regarding global climate funding. It could work similarly to speed up slow international debt-relief systems like the G20’s Common Framework, especially since the UK holds unique legal leverage over bonds in some African countries.

Within the C7, the Commonwealth Secretariat should function as a convenor, partly because of its oversight of the Commonwealth Climate Finance Access Hub (CCFAH) and its debt management programme. Furthermore, Shirley Botchwey, the Secretariat’s Secretary-General, is Ghana’s former foreign minister, which deepens the group’s link to the AU 2027 chairing.

The C7 would effectively borrow an institution with a mandate, a budget, a convening authority, and a biennial summit cycle instead of building one from scratch. Accordingly, the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Antigua and Barbuda this November is where Britain could – and should – raise the prospect of forming the C7.

Objections to the C7

One expected grievance with such an idea is that the Commonwealth is a relic from the UK’s colonial past, and a minilateral like the C7 would merely be an attempt to create a ‘British Empire 2.0’. However, the C7’s centre of gravity would be closer to the so-called ‘Global South’, as four of its seven members are African or Asian, with India’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) even overtaking the UK’s in 2022.

The C7 would likewise give India and South Africa a standing platform to promote developing countries’ priorities in a G20 presidency other than their own, and to link them directly to the activities of ASEAN via Singapore and the AU via Ghana. Like the Commonwealth, the C7 would be a convening of equals who share legal systems, language, and institutional habits with which to ease cooperation. The Commonwealth may be a product of the British Empire, but it has long since evolved beyond that.

The second challenge to the C7 is that minilateral groups proliferate and die, and the C7 may have an in-built expiration date given that Singapore and Ghana would lose access to the G20 in 2028. Nevertheless, compared to other minilateral groups like the Democratic 10 (D10), the C7 is anchored to both the Commonwealth Secretariat and the G20. Due to its reliance on existing machinery rather than new institutions, the C7 has a potential life beyond the UK’s G20 presidency. Moreover, its relatively small size and nature as an ad hoc policy platform means that it can trial more agile and experimental policy initiatives without the bureaucratic inertia of larger global blocs.

The third (and perhaps most reasonable) criticism is directly tied to the C7’s convening of states with wide-ranging strategic objectives. Britain, Canada, and Australia are members of overlapping US-led security structures. Meanwhile, India and South Africa are both members of the US-sceptical BRICS grouping. However, whereas India pursues a realpolitik-informed multi-alignment strategy by concurrently remaining an active member of the US-led Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the Quad) alongside Australia and Japan, South Africa prefers a values-based foreign policy of non-alignment.

Singapore and Ghana effectively avoid membership in strategic blocs altogether, while pursuing leadership roles in their respective regional intergovernmental groups. Singapore carefully hedges between American and Chinese interests as an active ASEAN member, while Ghana follows its own multi-alignment strategy, hinged on both security and developmental interests, primarily within AU channels.

On the surface, such a varied caucus would struggle to agree on anything, let alone act as a catalyst for policy coordination across four multilateral forums. Yet, the C7 would not be designed to function as the steering committee for a military alliance, nor be centred on any shared grand strategic vision. Its remit would be the reinvigoration of multilateralism and economic statecraft with a development dimension, which all members agree on in principle.

Where the D10 faltered not least because of the required ideological alignment of its members, the C7 asks for comparatively less, and can therefore deliver more. Indeed, the divergence is its primary strength, as it enables each of its members to strengthen their own influence with the G20, Commonwealth, ASEAN, and AU.

Conclusion

The window for action grows increasingly narrow. If HM Government does not outline a plan soon, Britain’s presidency risks defaulting to a communiqué that few will read and a family photo that nobody remembers. For the 2027 G20 summit in Manchester to avoid this fate, the UK’s G20 team should open discussions with the other prospective C7 members and the Commonwealth Secretariat at the CHOGM this November. Should this be done, the 2027 Manchester summit could join its 2009 London counterpart on the shortlist of consequential moments in the G20’s history.

Francis Shin is a joint PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London and the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore, specialising in geoeconomic conflict and multilateral governance.

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Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 permanently altered the strategic landscape of the Euro-Atlantic. It exposed an aggressive revisionist power willing to deploy high-intensity conflict and sub-threshold coercion to perpetuate its great power status – as well as brazen enough to demand that the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) withdraw from Eastern Europe.

While the Kremlin’s immediate military focus remains on NATO’s eastern front, its long-term ambition to dominate the Arctic and North Atlantic presents the most direct maritime threat to the United Kingdom (UK) and its regional allies. Through the deployment of Yasen class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), specialised undersea warfare assets of the Main Directorate of Deep-Sea Research (GUGI), and attempts to territorialise the Northern Sea Route (NSR), Russia seeks to control emerging maritime spaces and hold European Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) at risk.

Existing security institutions are ill-equipped to address this northern challenge alone. NATO’s 32-member structure suffers from sluggish decision-making, while the United States’ (US) changing geopolitical priorities diminishes Washington’s strategic bandwidth for Euro-Atlantic defence. Additionally, the European Union (EU) lacks both the institutional mandate and military instrument to project decisive naval power. To fill this void and challenge Russian aggression in Northern Europe, Britain should take the lead in transforming the ten-nation Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) into the primary vanguard of security in the North Atlantic and Wider North.

Transforming the JEF

The JEF’s members number among the highest defence spenders in Europe by proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), share a common perception of the threat posed by the Kremlin, and possess the combined resources required to deny Russian aggression. However, it currently falls short of its strategic potential, largely remaining a flexible concept rather than a permanent security provider. This is not to say that this potential cannot be unlocked though, as a number of steps can be taken to strengthen the group’s position in the Wider North.

The UK should lead the establishment of a large, permanent JEF headquarters, complete with a dedicated secretariat and planning staff. Crucially, this headquarters should be located in a central regional nation – e.g., Norway or Denmark. Distancing the administrative hub from London distinguishes the JEF from existing European minilateral security arrangements, which appear to serve little purpose beyond being ‘vanity projects’ for the framework nations. Doing this also demonstrates a genuine British commitment to regional burden-sharing while also allowing the UK to step back administratively – cementing its leadership via operational military strength rather than bureaucratic dominance.

The JEF’s strategic focus also requires adjusting for the new age of geopolitical confrontation. The Cold War-era emphasis on defending the Northern Gap (between Greenland, Iceland, and the UK) from Russian naval incursions should be superseded by concentrating on the ‘Bear Gap’ between Northern Norway and the Svalbard archipelago, correcting the widespread belief that committing to the Northern Gap signals a lack of commitment to Svalbard or Eastern Greenland. Additionally, explicit affirmation from the JEF that NATO Article 5 applies fully to Svalbard would reassure northern allies, deter adversarial opportunism, and reinforce free and open European nations’ control over maritime Arctic approaches.

Naval posture in the Wider North

To counter the Russian Northern Fleet and the Kremlin’s declarations of ownership over the NSR, the JEF should develop an economic and military playbook for the Wider North. Collaborating with allies with regional interests (particularly France, Germany, and Canada – becoming the ‘JEF+’) would bolster the JEF’s ability to deny the Kremlin’s attempts to coerce shipping companies transiting the NSR and strengthen naval capabilities in the region.

The military necessity for an upgraded JEF posture is underlined by the balance of High North naval forces. While the Russian Navy retains significant numerical submarine strength, the combined naval power of the ‘JEF+’ possesses clear operational overmatch:

Although massed uncrewed systems represent the long-term operational future, current defence postures must employ existing legacy platforms – e.g., aircraft carriers, fast combat aircraft, and attack submarines. The JEF should maximise the utility of these platforms and construct its strategy accordingly while advancing the transition towards autonomous warfare. Here, integrating Royal Navy assets would enable Britain to boost its power projection without requiring a prohibitively expensive investment in a standalone dedicated Arctic fleet.

Operationalising warfighting capabilities

In the demanding operating environment of the Arctic, geography dictates that the best defence is a potent forward offence. The Cold War showed that the most effective way to prevent Northern Fleet submarines from surging into the Atlantic is to threaten their home ports on the Kola Peninsula, forcing the Kremlin to use its strategic assets on defensive postures.

Systematic integration of the Royal Navy’s Carrier Strike Groups with JEF air forces – cohering British F-35 Lightning II Joint Combat Aircraft, Swedish early warning aircraft, and Finnish F-18 Hornets (as well as Dutch air defence frigates) – provides the best means for holding the Kola Peninsula at risk. While the deployment of the UK’s Carrier Strike Group 2026 under Operation FIRECREST is a welcome first step in this direction, the scale and scope should be enlarged.

Regular intense exercises – held every other year as during the Cold War – involving 2-3 European carriers and coordination with Nordic air forces will rebuild atrophied Arctic warfighting expertise and foster interoperability under Arctic conditions, as well as reassuring allies and deterring adversaries. Doing this sits within the remit of a transformed JEF, as NATO currently appears too sclerotic to conduct such activities.

The New Hybrid Navy framework is also critical to operationality in the Wider North. Uncrewed systems reset the regional risk calculus in Britain’s favour and shift the environmental burden onto adversaries. Complementing high-tech weapons systems with low-cost, high-volume strike drones will present a persistent threat against Russia’s Kola Peninsula assets. Additionally, these drones can be deployed by Arctic-trained Royal Marines in an unpredictable manner.

Adopting Uncrewed Surface Vehicles (USVs) to provide Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), as well as Extra-Large Uncrewed Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs), will enable interception of Russian vessels attempting to break out of the Bear Gap while also projecting power into the Barents and White seas. Furthermore, the JEF should build offensive seabed warfare capabilities to hold Russian undersea assets at risk. Developing sea mining capabilities will disrupt the NSR, effectively impeding Russia’s Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) and oil exports and thus depriving the Kremlin of crucial economic arteries.

Building preparedness in the Wider North

Being ready to deploy the stated uncrewed capabilities requires preparation from the JEF. Its members should pre-position a network of redundant climate-controlled warehouses in Norway; institute Arctic exercises focusing on automation and resilience in both summer and winter conditions; and adopt specialised propulsion systems while investing in cold-weather explosives, energetics manufacturing, and rocket motors. Here, it is most cost-effective to tailor specific equipment rather than instituting a blanket Arctic capabilities requirement across all systems.

Routine JEF freedom of navigation exercises, hydrographic surveys, and ice-hardened patrol ship operations would maintain a peacetime presence in the Wider North. Independent Geographical Intelligence (GEOINT) and sea-ice monitoring capabilities would provide informational autonomy, while communications challenges can be met by deploying a JEF satellite constellation, utilising launch facilities in Norway or Scotland and complemented by mobile Long-Range Navigation (LORAN) beacons. The UK already possesses a technological edge in defence space; positioning British industry as the crux of JEF space capabilities translates this into long-term strategic indispensability.

Finally, human and industrial capital needs to be secured. Concentrated efforts within the Royal Navy and Ministry of Defence (MOD) to recruit and retain Arctic experience – including assisting Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) to navigate Arctic requirements – would guarantee Britain’s position at the forefront of the JEF’s operational capabilities.

Conclusion

The JEF provides the UK with essential tactical mass and geographical access to the Wider North, although its members remain reliant upon high-end British sovereign capabilities. By transforming the grouping into a fully fledged regional vanguard for defence, Britain can ensure that adversaries are deterred and allies are reassured as the Wider North becomes ever more significant in an era of growing geopolitical competition.

Dr Marc De Vore is Senior Lecturer in the School of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews and an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

Dr Rachel Pawling is Principal Consultant at K39 Consulting Pty Ltd.

H I Sutton is an independent writer, illustrator, and analyst; and an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

This Memorandum is an abridged version of a longer Point Paper commissioned by the Royal Navy. It is reproduced with the Royal Navy’s permission. Any similarity with His Majesty’s Government or Royal Navy policy is purely coincidental.

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In his first speech to the United Nations (UN) General Assembly on 22nd September, Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, announced the formation of a National Centre for Information Defence (NCID) to combat disinformation spread by the United Kingdom’s (UK) adversaries. With the prevalence of social media in the lives of British citizens and the expanding capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI), information warfare is an increasing challenge for the UK’s national security.

The NCID will bring together intelligence agencies, government departments, police, and social media companies, aiming to ‘detect, attribute and disrupt these kinds of hostile state information attacks…to support and defend our democracy’. This forms the crux of this week’s Big Ask, in which we asked six experts: What should the new National Centre for Information Defence look like?

Prof. David Betz

Professor of War in the Modern World, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

The NCID should not exist.

The UK does not lack institutions for supervising what the public may hear, say, and believe. It has too many of them. Online speech is already policed at a rate that would have embarrassed a late-Soviet censor: arrests for posts judged offensive, regulators and platforms enforcing approved language, and public broadcasters and advertisers managing the moral temperature of what passes for news and entertainment. The habit is no longer to argue. It is to administer opinion, in the vocabulary of compliance, cohesion, and harm. A National Centre for Information Defence is another office in that apparatus, not a defence of democracy.

The announcement gives the game away. The threat is described as an assault that ‘twists what people feel about their own country’ and produces a ‘narrative of decline’. Foreign information operations are a real, narrow problem, already covered by the intelligence services and the National Security Act. What is being built here is something else: a body entitled to treat discontent, pessimism, and unapproved accounts of the country as hostile activity.

This is the logic of a system that talks about democracy while narrowing the ground on which it can be practised. Hostile services amplify grievances. They do not create the conditions that make those grievances plausible. A centre charged with disrupting the feeling of decline will spend its time on the public, not on the Kremlin.

We have seen this film before. Late-stage systems cling on by managing appearances. They do not correct the causes of distrust; they police the expression of it, and call the policing defence. Adding a quango to detect, attribute, and disrupt ‘information attacks’, working with police and platforms and briefed on community cohesion, will not make Britain more secure. It will make the approved-news regime a little more explicit.

The democratic answer to a brittle information environment is competent government and open argument. It is not a further licence for the state to decide which accounts of the UK are safe to hold.

Prof. Rory Cormac

Professor of International Relations, University of Nottingham

A look through the history of British attempts to counter hostile information activity suggests three recommendations for the NCID and one thing to avoid.

Firstly, it should be a strategic decision hub determining when and how to intervene, but also – crucially – when not to intervene. Predecessors quickly learned that attribution and exposure could be counterproductive, especially if done by the wrong person, if the line was gaining little traction, or if it perhaps had too much of a kernel of truth for comfort. These are delicate decisions to be thought through carefully, rather than a reflexive response.

Secondly, the Centre should sit at the heart of a network bringing together wide expertise. Effectiveness of attribution and disruption depend heavily on local context and the credibility of the messenger on the target audiences. The Centre should build and sustain networks across academia, media, technologies companies, civil society, and international partners.

Thirdly, it should be part of a unified strategy. Convincing attribution sometimes depends on intelligence that cannot be fully disclosed, and disruption can involve counterattacks on hostile infrastructure at source. The Centre will therefore require a close relationship with other branches of His Majesty’s (HM) Government, not dissimilar perhaps to the relationship between the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the National Cyber Force.

And to avoid? It should not be – or be seen to be – some sort of public arbiter of truth, or even of what constitutes disinformation (and of who, domestically, is peddling it). This will lead to politicisation and exploitation, at best grinding the Centre to a halt, and at worst backfiring horribly.

Paul Mason

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

The NCID should be modelled on the NCSC – a public facing and accountable body to protect British civil society from a range of hybrid and cognitive attacks. Although it should be strictly politically neutral, its aim should be to prevent, disrupt, and attribute acts of cognitive aggression.

Here, proactivity is key: the best defence against AI-driven disinformation campaigns is a population educated – and institutions trained – to identify and filter inauthentic online behaviour. This could include, for example, weekly bulletins to schools, universities, local authorities, and police forces identifying and pre-empting key themes of disinformation from the ‘CRINK’ nations (the People’s Republic of China [PRC], Russia, Iran, and North Korea); free online courses for public servants; and a public information campaign to establish the state’s right to conduct cognitive self-defence.

As with the NCSC, the new Centre should be backed by the coordinated and legitimate efforts of the UK’s intelligence community to protect the country’s populace from harm. The Centre should be explicit: it does not monitor UK citizens, we monitor attempts to manipulate their cognition. We do not transgress the information rights of fake accounts and disinformation swarms because machines do not have such rights.

Dr Lukasz Olejnik

Independent Technology Consultant, and Visiting Senior Research Fellow, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

Information influence, interference, and operations are a defining security challenge of our time. Russia’s activity targeting the UK is but one example of a broader and growing risk. AI increases that risk further.

HM Government is right to create an NCID. The Centre’s task should be continuous monitoring of the information environment for signs of malicious interference, including coordinated behaviour, artificial amplification, cross-platform activity, and supporting infrastructure. It should then act on the detected signal, understand and investigate the threat, and ultimately disrupt it.

Such analytical and practical actions should be considered primarily as a technology and security problem. Disinformation reduced to a media or journalistic framing will not succeed. The Centre needs strong technical and security expertise, supported by proper analytical systems, software, compute, and access to both frontier closed and open AI models.

AI changes conventional staffing assumptions. Capable teams can use it to combine technical, linguistic, communication, public relations, human science, and regional knowledge without requiring rigid divisions between backgrounds. This is the model that the Centre should adopt.

The analytical objective should be campaign-level attribution. The Centre should link incidents, malign activities, and the infrastructure used into coherent threat assessments that can inform policymakers and lead to warning society. Disruption should be handled by existing authorities, such as Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) for technical infrastructure and MI5 where hostile-state influence or malign influencer-for-hire activity is suspected.

AI-powered information operations are redefining the landscape, and will make the Centre’s mission challenging by lowering costs and enabling more persistent, adaptive campaigns – and this will be a quickly evolving field.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

In the words of Jonathan Swift in 1710: ‘Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale has had its effect’.

Hostile CRINK states, especially Russia and the PRC, are waging political warfare against the UK. From coordinated flurries of tweets on X designed to inflate domestic division, to Facebook campaigns reinforcing narratives of national decline, these efforts are deliberately designed to turn Briton against Briton, ultimately weakening the country.

If the NCID becomes merely another reactive fact-checking body, it will fail. Misinformation will always outpace official corrections – which will be lost, in any case, in the drumbeat of the modern media.

Instead, the NCID must become an agile, proactive, and cross-sector entity – part of a broader transformation towards asymmetric statecraft. Rather than chasing individual lies, it should operate as an intelligence-led horizon-scanning unit – combining threat intelligence, behavioural science, discourse analysis, and technological expertise to map covert state campaigns, expose adversarial infrastructure, and build institutional resilience before hostile narratives take root.

Operationally, it should go on the offensive by championing critical thinking and cyber-literacy in schools, as well as public education campaigns targeting older people who may be more prone to nostalgia.

It should also focus on binding the nation together and regenerating national self-confidence. Hostile narratives prey on national self-doubt; a confident, unified British nation provides the strongest shield, ensuring that foreign deception and misinformation meet immediate scepticism and resistance.

Andrew Yeh

Executive Director of the China Strategic Risks Institute

Britain may not be the PRC’s prime target for information operations, but it is still firmly within its sights. Here, two objectives stand out.

The first is neutralising dissent within diaspora communities, particularly the UK’s large Hong Kong population – many of whom moved to Britain fleeing political repression. The second is weakening public support for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the transatlantic alliance more broadly.

Beijing pursues these through a broad toolkit, from state media such as China Global Television Network (CGTN) platforming anti-NATO voices to networks of directed social media accounts amplifying preferred narratives. Increasingly, it also uses AI to design and execute information operations. YouTube channels run by bots post AI-generated content praising the PRC’s rise, while UK-based Hong Kong activists have been targeted by deepfake videos. Leaked GoLaxy documents suggest that Chinese state-backed actors are seeking to automate the entire cycle of information operations: monitoring narratives, profiling targets, generating tailored content, and distributing it through humanised bot accounts.

To succeed, the new Centre must first engage directly with the diaspora communities most exposed to these operations. Much of this content circulates in Chinese-language spaces on platforms such as WeChat, Xiaohongshu, and Douyin, outside the view of mainstream monitoring. The Centre will only detect and attribute these campaigns if it builds trusted, regular channels with these communities, and integrates diaspora members into government working groups.

Secondly, Britain should engage with Taiwan. No country has faced Beijing’s information operations more intensely, and Taiwan has often been a testing ground for tactics later deployed elsewhere. Its government has pioneered rapid ‘pre-bunking’ techniques to dispel misinformation before it circulates widely, and numerous civil society groups have set up fact-checking and media literacy training at the community level.

Regular dialogue with the Taiwanese government and civil society would give the Centre an early warning of the type of tactics that may be deployed in the UK. Only by listening to those at the frontline of the PRC’s information operations – both at home and in Taiwan – can the new Centre succeed.

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In June 2023, Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, raised the prospect via the messaging app Telegram of ‘destroying our enemies’ ocean-floor communications cables’, citing alleged free and open nations’ involvement in the 2022 Nord Stream pipeline explosions. In September 2026, Reuters reported that British, Norwegian, and American forces had interrupted a Russian rehearsal for disabling undersea cables near Svalbard earlier that spring. These threats pose a serious question for the United Kingdom (UK): if several cables are cut, who will put them back into service?

Britain’s cable security depends on what happens after the first cut. A vessel must reach the fault – being equipped and crewed to repair it – while essential services keep operating. The Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy’s (JCNSS) September 2025 report on undersea telecommunications cables recommended a new sovereign repair ship by 2030.

While His Majesty’s (HM) Government’s Defence Investment Plan commits £330 million over four years to protecting critical undersea infrastructure, including enhancements to Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) Proteus, ministers should explain how this investment and the proposed sovereign repair capability will together secure the vessels, crews, and deployment arrangements needed to restore connectivity in a crisis.

The limits of routine resilience

The JCNSS report deserves credit for distinguishing routine resilience from crisis preparedness. The UK has multiple cable routes and established commercial maintenance arrangements. Accidents and negligence remain the most common causes of disruption, meaning the case for investment need not depend on treating every dragged anchor as sabotage. Rather, it rests on whether arrangements designed for ordinary faults can withstand simultaneous damage and a contested environment in which repairs become dangerous.

The Committee heard that a mid-Atlantic repair could involve seven days’ transit followed by ten days’ work, with bad weather extending the timeframe for the operation to a month. It is also important to remember that these timings assume an adversary is not attempting to disrupt repair efforts. Each vessel can only attend to one break at a time. A government facing several failures could therefore find its recovery timetable determined by a commercial repair queue, as other countries need the same ships.

In Britain, policy has moved since September 2025. HM Government’s December 2025 response announced an Undersea Infrastructure Security (UIS) Oversight Board and accepted the need to plan for coordinated sabotage. In May 2026, Liz Lloyd, then Minister for Digital Economy, promised a decision on retaining a UK-based and UK-flagged sovereign repair capability by the end of the year. Building upon this, ministers should make crisis availability a condition of any public support, specifying vessel access, crew readiness, and deployment arrangements.

Historical analysis shows that governments and cable companies have long valued redundancy for different reasons. Commercial operators must justify redundancy costs against business needs, and governments also need communications to survive strategic emergencies. Expecting firms to finance every national contingency leaves that difference unresolved. Public money should purchase the additional readiness that national security requires, while operators retain responsibility for routine maintenance.

Making repair capacity dependable

The Cabinet Office, through the UIS Oversight Board, should ask each relevant department to identify the essential services and connectivity that must survive different disruption scenarios, with telecoms officials and operators assessing the technical requirements. The JCNSS warned that theoretical cable capacity exceeds what is immediately available to carry traffic. Exercises should therefore test both rerouting and repair, including failures affecting European connections and infrastructure ashore.

Targets should distinguish ship mobilisation, arrival, and restoration of service, as weather and damage severity make a single universal repair deadline misleading. The Oversight Board should use the results to identify where funding would shorten disruption most, comparing extra repair capacity with alternative routes and improvements at landing stations.

Governmental procurement can then follow those requirements. Long-term agreements with commercial providers could fund specified vessel availability, spare equipment, and additional trained personnel, with clear government activation rights. Ministers should compare this with owning a vessel and contracting its operation. The decisive test is whether either arrangement keeps repair ships and crews available when several countries need them at once. Buying preferential access to an already overstretched fleet may simply move Britain ahead of an ally in the queue.

Crews make this more than a shipbuilding decision. Alasdair Wilkie, chair of the Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA), warned that training experienced personnel could take about ten years, while building a repair vessel would take about three. The JCNSS’ proposed reserve cadre should therefore involve continuing work and training alongside commercial specialists. It should expand the pool of qualified people, as mobilising the same engineers away from another repair vessel would create little additional capability. Retention and regular practice deserve funding alongside hardware.

Deployment also depends on conditions at sea. A study from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) records industry concerns about obtaining insurance for repair ships in the Red Sea. The UK should settle arrangements for war-risk cover and potential government indemnities before a crisis, alongside joint exercises involving repair operators and naval escorts. These should test realistic protection requirements and competing naval commitments. A commercial contract by itself cannot make an unsafe deployment feasible.

International cooperation should make that capability more dependable. The March 2026 UK-Ireland framework provides for coordinated responses and live exercises. The European Union’s 2025 cable security action plan proposed additional repair capacity, with a call for €40 million (£34.3 million) following in June 2026. Britain should use these openings to agree reciprocal access and repair priorities with partners, checking that national plans do not all assume that the same vessel is available. Indeed, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) Critical Undersea Infrastructure Network already brings together civilian, military, and industry representatives. The alliance should use this forum to test competing national repair assumptions and coordinate exercises, while governments and operators negotiate access to vessels.

Recovery should also extend beyond the seabed, given limited connections and distance from repair hubs compound the vulnerability of small islands. National capacity figures can conceal severe local outages. Exercises should include outlying islands, landing stations, and their power supplies, with operators demonstrating how essential services would continue while physical repairs proceed. The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research likewise places repair within a wider system of preparedness, regulation, and recovery.

Conclusion

Parliament identified a strategic requirement that commercial efficiency alone cannot satisfy. By the end of 2026, ministers should publish a funded delivery timetable and explain how readiness will be exercised and scrutinised, keeping sensitive operational details protected. The UK’s repair capability will be credible when the people expected to restore its connections have the resources, authority, and protection to do so.

Lyle Bryant is an MSt candidate in International Relations at the University of Cambridge. His interests include British national security policy, critical infrastructure, energy, and climate change. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.

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Over the past year, drone incursions over European airspace have become increasingly common. What were major news stories in 2025 are now commonplace events, with Luxembourg and Berlin airports being the most recently affected by drone sightings. Despite its denials of responsibility, such probing of European and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is typical of Russia’s sub-threshold hostilities against free and open nations.

As the Kremlin’s needling of the continent continues, the United Kingdom (UK) as an upholder of European security should send a clear message that such actions are intolerable. This necessity forms the basis for this week’s Big Ask, in which we asked eight experts: How can Britain deter Russian aggression in Europe?

Dr Ruth Deyermond

Senior Lecturer in Post-Soviet Security, Department of War Studies, King’s College London

As Russia continues its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, its aggression against the rest of Europe is growing. Sub-threshold attacks have been occurring for several years, and countries including the UK have been slow to respond. The current escalation seems to have several causes, including the weak response to earlier attacks, a misplaced perception of Russian strength and European weakness, and the Trump administration’s fracturing of NATO.

The British response needs to address all these issues, in cooperation with its allies. Deterrence relies on credibility, and the Kremlin needs to believe that further attacks – let alone escalation – will be met by a proportionate response, including a military response if necessary.

Most European states have been fearful of the consequences of this, but the real danger comes from letting Russia believe that the continent is too weak to impose any red lines. European countries need to demonstrate that they can and will act independently of the United States (US), now that Washington is prioritising detente with Russia over alignment with Europe.

European states, including the UK, need to stop sending mixed messages to the Kremlin. The European Union (EU) lifting sanctions on two oligarchs was a serious mistake. The statement made by Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, earlier this month that national security ‘can’t come at the expense of social security’ was deeply unhelpful in the signal it sent – domestically, to allies, and to Russia.

Lastly, all of Europe needs to recognise that the most effective way to deter Russian aggression is to help Ukraine to win.

Keir Giles

Director, Conflict Studies Research Centre, and Senior Consulting Fellow, Chatham House

Politics and military capabilities evolve, but the fundamental principles of deterring Russia remain constant. Potential victims of the Kremlin’s aggression need to demonstrate that they and their allies are both capable of inflicting costs on Russia that would be meaningful and personally threatening for its leadership, and are determined to do so if attacked.

This means that since current and previous British administrations have declined to join European allies in reinvesting in conventional capabilities, His Majesty’s (HM) Government must resort to asymmetric means of challenging the Kremlin, and more convincing displays of the will to use them.

Russia will not challenge a NATO ally until it is fully convinced that the US will not come to its aid. However, it will also not challenge a country where a sufficiently powerful coalition of European states has made it clear that aggression will be answered assertively. When that challenge comes, there is unlikely to be much time available to create an ad hoc coalition of the able – and a purely performative ‘coalition of the willing’ will be of little relevance. The balance between making sufficient preparations for a non-NATO response to Russia, and overcompensating in a way that hastens erosion of faith in the alliance itself, is delicate but vital.

The UK has already squandered much of its leadership capital through defence delinquency, leading to active discussion even of its status as the framework nation of the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF). If Britain wants to play a more significant role in European deterrence, the first and essential step is to overcome its own reluctance to regenerate the capabilities to do so.

Della Heptinstall

Defence Sector Lead, Walker Morris LLP, and Army Reserve Officer

Russia’s increasing use of drone incursions, cyber activity, and other forms of sub-threshold coercion reflects a deliberate effort to probe European vulnerabilities without crossing into open conflict. These incidents are not merely acts of provocation; they are attempts to test response times, expose weaknesses, and assess political resolve. The UK’s task is therefore not simply to respond to individual incidents, but to convince the Kremlin that such efforts will fail.

This begins with deterrence by denial. Britain should continue to strengthen air and missile defence, counter-drone capabilities, and persistent surveillance alongside its NATO allies. Recent experience in Ukraine has demonstrated how relatively inexpensive uncrewed systems can impose disproportionate costs on defenders. The UK should help to lead efforts to reverse that equation by better integrating intelligence, detection, and response capabilities across Europe.

Yet, military capability alone is insufficient. Russia has adapted its economy for sustained confrontation with free and open nations, and European countries must demonstrate greater staying power. Deterrence rests not only on immediate military strength, but also on perceptions of endurance. Faster procurement, resilient supply chains, and a defence industrial base capable of scaling production during crises are therefore strategic necessities rather than economic ambitions.

Ultimately, the UK can best deter Russian aggression by helping to build a Europe that is resilient, technologically advanced, and industrially prepared. A continent that can absorb pressure, sustain competition, and deny strategic gains is one that the Kremlin will be far less inclined to challenge.

Tomas Jermalavičius

Head of Studies, International Centre for Defence and Security

Britain is already a major pillar for deterring Russian aggression. It leads NATO’s’s forward land presence in Estonia, serves as the framework nation for the JEF, and contributes in myriad other ways – conventional, unconventional, and, of course, nuclear. Its military aid to Kyiv – its main and most effective instrument for imposing costs on the Kremlin and coercing it into peace – dwarfs that of some other key powers in NATO.

The problem, therefore, is not a lack of willingness to demonstrate resolve and take action. Effective deterrence requires sustained investment in capability, rebuilding mass and reserves wherever relevant and necessary; expediting the integration of Ukraine’s lessons from drone warfare; and fortifying British society against coercion by adversaries.

The British Armed Forces have been losing mass across all services for years, and have struggled to secure the investment required to bring both their existing and emerging capabilities to the necessary scale and readiness levels that would properly impress Russia. The UK’s industry and society are woefully exposed and unprepared for the disruptions and hardships that fighting a large-scale peer conflict would inevitably impose.

Fixing this is not only about reaching the formal NATO commitment of spending 5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence and defence-related matters – a commitment that nonetheless keeps slipping out of HM Government’s reach. Just as importantly, it is about moving at the speed and scale required, with the requisite sense of urgency, and as a whole-of-society endeavour. The credibility of NATO’s Article 5 rests on, and indeed starts with, the robustness of Article 3 – something that Britain needs to place back at the heart of its deterrence posture without further delay.

Dr Eoin McNamara

Postdoctoral Fellow, Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA)

Deterrence policy in Europe is multifaceted. The UK has a key role leading evolution in nuclear and conventional deterrence as well as in resilience against sub-threshold threats. British leadership on deterrence in Northern Europe is longstanding, but the French-led nuclear ‘forward deterrence’ initiative is currently a major talking point in Nordic and Baltic capitals.

Supplementing NATO’s extended nuclear deterrence, strength in French proposals will still be seen through Paris’ bilateral partnership with London – centred on the Lancaster House Treaties and refreshed in 2025 to prioritise technological cooperation on nuclear stockpiles. The UK’s leadership of NATO’s forward land forces in Estonia, and of the JEF to ensure it remains militarily effective, are key priorities in conventional deterrence.

Resilience against sub-threshold ‘hybrid’ threats more closely concerns Britain’s maritime hinterland and the protection of CNI. The UK sits strategically at Europe’s transatlantic frontier, generating and facilitating critical data and energy connectivity linking its closest neighbours. Critical undersea infrastructure and important air corridors need to be protected from any sub-threshold manoeuvres that the Kremlin may contemplate.

To avoid difficult defence resourcing choices between protecting domestic supply flows and maximising deterrence commitments elsewhere in Europe, investment in Britain’s defence technological innovation is necessary in tandem with solutions for its military’s recruitment and retention problems. A closer partnership with the Republic of Ireland, focused more on common strategic realities and less on historical precedents, will mutually benefit both countries’ resilience against sub-threshold activities in the Atlantic and the Irish Sea, helping to secure important supply lines linking the UK, Ireland, and the wider EU.

Matthew Palmer

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy

The first, obvious point is that Britain cannot deter Russian aggression alone – it has to be a coordinated effort alongside European allies. This can be done through a combination of groupings – NATO remains the bedrock of European security, but alternative structures like the JEF or bilateral agreements can add flexibility and complicate matters for the Russian adversary. The UK should work closely with European allies to develop contingency plans for deterring Russia, with clear agreements on responsibility and effort.

Russian sub-threshold and political warfare should be robustly countered, ideally in a planned, coordinated fashion to ensure that the Kremlin feels pain for attacking Europe. Seizing ‘shadow fleet’ vessels, injections of funding to Ukraine, and countering Russian influence through covert action are examples of tools in Europe’s arsenal that can be wielded against the Kremlin.

Britain can also add significant heft through its status as a European nuclear power. While carefree nuclear ‘sabre-rattling’ should be strictly avoided, there should be serious consideration of how Russian threats might be managed through deliberate strategic messaging, using both conventional and nuclear means.

Of course, to do so, the UK has to have the capability and capacity to match its rhetoric, or it will be increasingly seen as a paper bulldog by both adversaries and allies. In both the long and short term, the clearest strategy that HM Government can take is to rearm seriously, credibly, and sustainably. Britain’s bark must be backed up with serious bite.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

To deter Russian aggression in Europe more effectively, HM Government should combine domestic resilience, credible military capabilities, and proactive regional leadership.

First, the UK needs to harden its domestic information space to prevent the Kremlin from exploiting British political openness. By developing the new National Centre for Information Defence and legislating to compel social media companies to remove or hide anonymous accounts, HM Government can close off the primary vectors through which Russian political warfare operates.

Second, the UK should initiate a large boost to defence spending while generating a sub-strategic nuclear capability. As dramatised in The Wargame this week, relying solely on conventional forces or the Royal Navy’s strategic Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD) leaves a dangerous operational gap. Russian doctrine is engineered to exploit structural ambiguity; establishing a credible sub-strategic nuclear option would eliminate this vulnerability and reinforce Britain’s ability to deter, even if the US was unable to assist.

Third, the UK should transform the JEF into a high-readiness vanguard for NATO while simultaneously deepening its military assistance to Ukraine. Rather than adopting a passive or reactive posture, Britain should show decisive leadership by coaxing European allies into accepting, and fully resourcing, a joint plan for Ukrainian victory.

By countering sub-threshold ‘grey zone’ actions, bridging critical force posture gaps, and rallying European strategic resolve, the UK can project the strength required to deter the Kremlin from attempting to revise the Euro-Atlantic order any further.

Dr Victoria Vdovychenko

Programme Director for Security Studies, Centre for Defence Strategies, and Joint Programme Leader, Future of Ukraine Programme, Centre for Geopolitics, University of Cambridge

Britain can deter Russian aggression by making hostile action harder to conduct, less useful when attempted, and more costly once attributed. That means affordable counter-drone defences, resilient CNI, credible collective consequences, and a permanent security partnership with Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s drone campaign against Europe is not a series of isolated provocations. They will become more evident each month as Russia tests Article 5 and expands non-kinetic actions with kinetic ones. Britain cannot deter by matching each incursion with a fighter sortie, but it can deter by making denial cheap, punishment predictable, and Ukraine’s battlefield expertise a permanent part of European defence.

Consider Leipzig/Halle Airport. In August, an explosive-laden drone was found beside a Ukrainian An-124, at a hub serving both NATO airlift and Ukrainian supply; Berlin attributed it to Russia four weeks later. Probing has moved from surveillance to sabotage, and its target is European support for Ukraine. Meanwhile, NATO allies still answer cheap drones with expensive jets.

The UK already builds Ukraine’s Octopus-100 interceptor, which hunts Shahed-type drones at a fraction of their cost. Yet, this remains the exception: beyond it, few Ukrainian firms have opened British offices, and government-to-government delivery at scale has not followed. The UK should match Octopus’ contribution to European defence by pre-announcing the costs of attributed attacks.

Ukraine must be central to this effort. Its armed forces and defence industry have accumulated unmatched experience in drone interception, Electronic Warfare (EW), rapid innovation, dispersed logistics, and infrastructure protection under attack. Britain should elaborate on implementation plans for both the 100-year partnership and its role within the EW coalition, covering joint training, testing, lessons learned, research and development, and co-production. The UK brings capital, industrial capacity, training infrastructure, and NATO interoperability; Ukraine brings battlefield knowledge and a proven culture of rapid adaptation.

Deterrence also demands consequences. Britain and its allies should pre-agree proportionate responses to attributed drone incursions, sabotage, and attacks on CNI: diplomatic action, targeted sanctions, intelligence exposure, lawful cyber measures, and increased military support for Kyiv. The Kremlin must understand that deniable coercion will not remain cost-free.

Finally, the UK must communicate this strategy clearly to the public. Citizens need confidence that HM Government recognises the threat, protects essential services, and makes sure it is in balance with other budget lines. It is becoming increasingly necessary to explain that support for Ukraine, counter-drone investment, and infrastructure resilience are not distant foreign policy choices.

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In recent weeks, multiple actors have questioned the sovereignty of particular British territories. Argentina has renewed its spurious claims over the Falkland Islands; the Maldives has asked His Majesty’s (HM) Government to reopen discussions about the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) – with Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, announcing that his administration will move forward with the planned deal with Mauritius – and the first ministers of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland met in Cardiff to sign an agreement calling for independence referendums in their respective constituent countries.

Great powers have also become embroiled in the debates over the United Kingdom’s (UK) territory. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a close ally of Mauritius and supports its claim to the BIOT, while Donald Trump, President of the United States (US), has suggested that Washington may not support London over a new Falklands conflict, as well as stating that a united Ireland would be a ‘fantastic thing’. Considering these developments, and the inevitability of adversaries taking advantage of them, this week’s Big Ask poses the following question to five experts: How should Britain respond to those with designs on its sovereign territory?

Prof. Jamie Gaskarth

Professor of Foreign Policy and International Relations, The Open University, Associate Fellow, Chatham House, and Associate Commissioning Editor, International Affairs

The UK faces multiple challenges to its sovereignty, both domestically and abroad. Its response will vary according to the case, but should be based on the following five ‘D’s:

Firstly: Deny rival claims. This comes in two parts, denying the facts of the claim, and denying the oxygen of publicity to those looking to provoke a spat. A simple restatement of the British position is often preferable. Claims can be evoked in bad faith for populist electoral reasons (as with the sudden interest in the Falklands expressed by Javier Milei, President of Argentina, as his net disapproval rating nears -30).

Secondly: Discredit rival claimants. Many threats to the UK’s territory are overtly or covertly nurtured by authoritarian governments or populist politicians. Diplomacy and information warfare could be deployed to undermine their legitimacy, such as by drawing attention to corruption, human rights abuses, and domestic social or economic problems. ‘Whataboutism’ can be a useful technique to highlight hypocrisy.

Thirdly: Deter hostile states. Where a military threat exists, Britain must ensure that it has sufficient resources to respond if attacked to deter an adversary from trying in the first place.

Fourthly: Distract adversaries. Many states have boundary disputes with neighbours, civil and ethnic tensions, and internal political divisions. If rival governments are looking to subvert British sovereignty, the UK has the option of responding robustly in turn, either overtly or covertly. Funding can be diverted to opposition groups and separatist movements. International legal cases over their sovereignty can be supported. Problematic histories can be resurrected and disseminated.

Lastly: Demonstrate British commitment to its sovereign integrity. Government policy initiatives and good news stories should be announced with visits to all four nations, not just England. Commitment to overseas territories and dependencies should be demonstrated with ministerial visits and military rotations. A minimal approach to deterrence may be efficient, but it is not always effective (a Royal Navy presence off Cyprus, for example, may not have added much to the defence of Akrotiri in early 2026, but it would have shown that the UK was fully committed to its sovereignty).

Many of these five ‘D’s would benefit from the asymmetric approach recently advocated by the Council on Geostrategy. Above all, Britain should be clear that it will defend its sovereign territory, using the full spectrum of its means of influence, from now on.

Dr Robert Johnson

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

The notion of sovereignty has been so long established, it is easy to forget the struggles of its origins and how much blood has been shed to establish and preserve it. It is a concept; not of territory, but of a people and their inheritance. It is, in essence, not simply a question of interests, but of our very nature. Attacking sovereignty, in whatever form, is an intolerable infringement of our being.

In 1945, after the world’s bloodiest conflict, there was a conscious effort to minimise conflicts over borders by the intervention of the United Nations (UN). The principle of self-determination, established in 1917 concurrently in the UK and the US, was enshrined in the spirit of the UN Charter, and was to be upheld by the permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Today, three members of that grouping are in breach of the charter: Russia, by its aggression against Ukraine and regional states; the PRC, by its coercion and threats towards Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan; and even America, with its demands for sovereignty over Canada and Greenland, and some undiplomatic remarks about Britain with regards to Northern Ireland and the Falklands.

The response should be the quiet but firm diplomacy for which the UK has a considerable reputation and long experience. An advisory word, delivered off the record, can save hours of official talks and avoid embarrassment for all concerned.

We can dismiss absurdities. Buenos Aires does not have the armed forces capable of defeating the British garrison in the Falklands, nor its nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), Carrier Strike Group, and the Royal Air Force (RAF). Washington has absolutely no intention of enforcing the unification of Ireland or carrying out an illegal attack on an ally. The Kremlin is not about to commit national suicide by launching an armed attack that would bring the entirety of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) against it. Beijing knows that an attack on Taiwan would cause economic retaliation that would cost a catastrophic 7% loss to its economy – some US$1.46 trillion (£1.09 trillion) worth of damage, and potentially more.

The bigger threat to sovereignty is, in fact, domestic. Nationalists and separatists see political mileage in pushing their independence agendas, hoping to use the European Union (EU) as leverage against London, even though they must realise that Brussels would be reluctant to take on the costs that England willingly meets in the Barnett formula.

This requires a different approach: a reiteration and remembrance of how, whole and entire, the British Isles left behind the old conflicts and united against the tyrannies of the world. That is the sovereign inheritance that should not, through ignorance and absent-mindedness, be given up.

Dr Alexander Lanoszka

International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Assistant Professor of International Relations, University of Waterloo (Canada)

Milei appears to have ratcheted up his country’s claims on the Falkland Islands out of the sense that the UK cannot do much about them. The Royal Navy is much smaller in 2026 than it was in 1982, and Britain is lurching from one domestic crisis to another amid a merry-go-round of prime ministers and deeply unpopular mainstream political parties. Worsening matters is that Trump has suggested he might review the US’ policy of supporting the British position on the disputed territory.

Indeed, the UK’s allies are under no obligation to render assistance if Argentina were to launch a military campaign against the islands, for they fall well outside the geographical scope defined by the North Atlantic Treaty. London can count on receiving verbal affirmations about the territorial status quo, the inviolability of borders, and peaceful conflict resolution from its allies and partners. However, such niceties would not deter a resolved and armed Argentina.

The best that HM Government can probably do is to convince Trump and his administration that they could go without a new foreign policy crisis which would unsettle markets and divert scarce policy attention. Trump may very well come around to the British position, but the sooner the better, so that Milei does not risk making the same miscalculation as Leopoldo Galtieri and his junta did in 1982.

Dr Danielle Reeder

Law, Defence, and Geopolitical Affairs Researcher

The territorial sovereignty quandaries that currently besiege the UK are not entirely uniform, but share a common thread: an imperial past. Under the provisions of the UN Charter, territorial integrity remains a fundamental right of states, albeit with definitive prohibitions. How territory is obtained or secured in an ostensibly post-colonial era continues to pose moral and legal questions for all nations.

What continues to pang the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland though is the poorly addressed aftermath of that changing order. Like the recent meeting of the devolved nations named specifically, this is Westminster’s problem above all else.

The heart of the issue is self-determination. This holds for the question of devolution, the BIOT, and the Falkland Islands. Argentina’s arguments against the UK – based on colonial grounds – disregard modern realities, administration, and history (and paradoxically simply advance colonialisation by Argentina). As the International Court of Justice adjudged, however, the Chagos issue is a matter of decolonisation, which cannot be viewed without respect to the unjust displacement of the Chagossians themselves.

At the same time, Britain’s primary defence, legally and politically, would be in representing the contemporary wishes of the Chagossian people. Yet, doing so in name but not in action weakens the UK’s right as an administrator, and responsible power. It should be clear that it is not Trump’s comments about a united Ireland which threaten Britain, it is the failure to appreciate that the UK is not England.

The recent Cardiff meeting illuminated the hubris of Brexit, which pulled the smaller nations out of a deeply needed customs union. Westminster cannot continue to take its position for granted. As is often the case, if the UK is concerned about remarks or ‘designs’ on its territorial integrity, it must first secure matters at home.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

The response to this question should be short and simple. Competitors and adversaries with designs on a foreign power’s sovereign territory grow bolder when they smell weakness. Until Britain reasserts strength – by regenerating the Union, rebuilding its armed forces, and prioritising national interests over international law – those with designs on its sovereign territory will only grow louder.

At this stage, it is not about responding to every transgression. The UK needs to reassert itself more generally: firstly, by ceasing with ‘own goals’ such as the peculiar decision to surrender overseas territories for no good reason; secondly, by regenerating civic nationalism at the British level to overcome regional secessionist forces; and, thirdly, by promoting the great feats of British ingenuity – from the steam engine and penicillin to the eradication of chattel slavery and the creation of parliamentary democracy – that have immeasurably improved the human condition.

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In conversation with Viktorija Starych-Samuolienė, Co-President of the Council on Geostrategy, AVM Ridgway draws on Global Strategic Trends out to 2055 and Future Operating Environments 2040 to explain how the Ministry of Defence prepares for a range of plausible scenarios rather than attempting to predict a single outcome. The discussion examines the forces shaping the security environment, the growing interdependence of traditional, space, cyber, electromagnetic, and cognitive domains, and the challenge of balancing readiness today with transformation over the longer term.

The conversation also unpacks the shift from platform centric to architecture centric warfare, the development of a hybrid force combining crewed and uncrewed capabilities, and the need for greater agility as artificial intelligence and autonomous technologies evolve. Finally, AVM Ridgway considers why resilient, interoperable systems, alongside the ability to make better and faster decisions than an adversary, could prove decisive in future conflict.

Drone revolution is transforming warfare in ways which are, to a large extent, undeniable. There are still the inevitable holdouts who refuse to acknowledge it, or filter what they see to fit their legacy thinking, but the argument that it is a fad or does not apply to high-intensity combat (or whichever corner of warfare you choose) no longer holds water.

Ukraine has shown – as have Iran, the Houthis, and others – that drones are reshaping the battlefield and maritime arenas. This applies everywhere, over land and across the seas. Yet, the ways in which drones are affecting land warfare and naval warfare are almost polar opposites in key ways.

In general, drones in land warfare have shifted the tactical advantage to the defender. Meanwhile, at sea they give the advantage to the assailant. The underlying difference is that on land armies need to seize territory to control it, whereas at sea there is always a degree of manoeuvre. Thus, on land it is increasingly difficult to advance, while at sea it is increasingly difficult to defend.

On land, drones favour defence

In land warfare, drones – mainly First-Person View (FPV) quadcopters – provide an effective means to blunt any advance. Attacking troops need to move forward to seize land, whether they are in tanks or on electric scooters – or quad bikes, horses, or whatever the Kremlin’s troops grasp at next. As they advance, they can be picked off by FPV drones.

There have been attempts to overcome this, such as small squad or even single-person infiltration tactics, and reimagined armoured columns of turtle tanks with heavy Electromagnetic Warfare (EW) defences, but nothing has reversed the trend. The current dynamic is for an increasingly deep no-movement zone with mid-strike drones picking off forces before they have even had a chance to start their assault.

There are of course situations and areas where drone technology is also changing the ability to attack – for example long-range strike drones, or Operation SPIDER WEB, where masses of small drones suddenly emerged from disguised truck launchers. However, these types of attacks do not capture ground.

We can perhaps imagine a very near future battlefield where ground drones are the primary means of offence, with humans only following in their wake. But this will not change the drone dynamic: they will still be attrited by FPV-style systems. So, on land, a well-prepared and resourced defender has the overall advantage, and it is hard to see that changing. This largely explains why Ukraine has been able to limit Russian advances despite the Kremlin’s relentless ‘meat grinder’ approach.

At sea, drones favour offence

At sea, navies have seen the opposite to their land counterparts. Drone technology, principally Uncrewed Surface Vehicles (USVs) but also aerial and underwater drones, are becoming the primary means of offence.

Traditional navies are on the back foot. The inherent expendability of uncrewed platforms, particularly ones designed to be cheap, changes the risk calculation on offensive operations. Even if the uncrewed vessels themselves are individually inferior, and nearly always get destroyed before they reach their target, they only have to get through once. One barely hears about the hundreds of naval drones that are destroyed before they reach their target, this not even being a metric among obsessive Russian milbloggers, but the world hears every time that one does get through. The asymmetry is not just in the tactical and operational sense, it is in the narrative sense too.

Even Russia’s most recent naval success of any note, the sinking of the Ukrainian intelligence ship Simferopol on 28th August 2025, was carried out by uncrewed platforms. A Russian USV struck the vessel on the Danube River, watched over and possibly controlled by an Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flying further out to sea. Similar attacks have been launched against Odesa, some successfully. These are operating in waters which Russian Navy vessels haven’t sailed since 2022. The Kremlin is hoping that uncrewed systems can do what its crewed navy dare not even attempt.

Meanwhile Russia’s traditional crewed warships remained in the relative safety of port, although even these are not safe. Physical defences can reduce their vulnerability to surface and underwater drones, but the skies above them are contested. Even with large volumes of air defences, some strike UAVs can get through. So, the traditional Russian Navy is not getting sea time, but is slowly getting degraded by Ukrainian aerial drone and missile strikes. These strikes will only rarely result in the loss of a ship (the UAVs’ warheads are simply too small), but they still cause damage.

Long-range UAVs have enabled these offensive missions to reach the Russian Navy far beyond the Black Sea. Recently, a Russian missile corvette was hit by Ukrainian drones in the Baltic Sea, over 1,000 kilometres from Ukraine, and similar strikes have occurred in the Caspian Sea.

Rebalancing defence and offence

These developments pose significant challenges for traditional navies. The central question is twofold: how to exploit the drone revolution for offensive capabilities while simultaneously defending against those same capabilities in enemy hands. The Russian Navy, the principal force confronting this threat today, has increasingly resorted to hiding in port, supplemented by old-fashioned physical boom defences and an increasingly creative (or desperate) array of drone cages and nets. Some Russian vessels have even adopted First World War-style dazzle camouflage, while others have been painted red with fake windows to resemble a longhouse. It is clear, however, that a strategy based on simply waiting out the threat in port will not be viable across the board.

Free and open nations’ navies would be better served by investing in layered defence, distributed sensor and weapons platforms, and, most importantly, low-cost defensive munitions. Interceptor drones similar to those being used to defeat Shahed drones in Ukraine could, for example, provide both air defence and point defence against enemy surface drones. Extending these defensive capabilities to auxiliaries and secondary vessels will also become increasingly important, as adversary drones will naturally seek out the least-protected platforms.

The most important consideration, however, may be ensuring that protecting the traditional navy does not itself become the objective. The strategic priority should be to adapt to and exploit the new capabilities that drone technology provides.

Swallowing the new reality

This is not just a reflection of the dismal performance of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet since the beginning of its full-scale invasion in 2022; it is the new reality of warfare. Uncrewed systems have allowed Ukraine to conduct strikes and have strategic effects, allowing Kyiv to bottle up the Russian Navy in ways which are inconceivable with any plausible crewed navy. The Kremlin is now finding that it needs to do the same.

Of course, drones cannot replace every ship and every mission in a navy. However, if there is the need to send a system to attack the enemy, to go ‘down threat’, the first instinct is going to be to send something uncrewed. This very quickly changes the equation because those systems become expendable, even relatively expensive ones (or, to use more defence analyst speak, ‘attritable’).

It is difficult to find where this new reality is really being grasped by the slow acquisition process and strategic cycles of free and open nations’ navies. That is not to say that drones are not now top of the agenda. Everyone is buying uncrewed platforms, and the Royal Navy is far from a laggard with its new Hybrid Navy plan.

However, the world is not seeing the mass of expendable systems geared to offensive operations. Free and open nations’ armed forces need to start buying plenty of cheap air, surface, and sub-surface drones, lest they miss the boat.

H I Sutton is a writer, illustrator and analyst who specialises in submarines and sub-surface systems. He is also an Adjunct Fellow at the Council on Geostrategy.

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The Defence Investment Plan (DIP), published in June, turns the Strategic Defence Review’s (SDR) broad vision into a funded programme of capability development. Across the maritime and air domains, its decisions follow a consistent architecture.

The Royal Navy is becoming hybrid, pairing crewed frigates and destroyers with uncrewed missile platforms, submarine-hunting sensors, and Extra Large Uncrewed Undersea Vehicles (XLUUVs), with the whole arrangement commanded through new Common Combat Vessels (CCVs) built to direct dozens of autonomous assets from a single hub. The Royal Air Force (RAF) is pursuing the equivalent transformation through Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), developing autonomous fighters to operate alongside crewed aircraft, with a demonstrator targeted for 2030.

In both cases, the underlying design is the same: a small crewed core, a large autonomous mass, and a command structure built to direct both as a single system. The DIP contains no comparable programme for autonomous space systems, and that gap deserves more attention than it has received: the argument for autonomy applies with greater force in orbit than it does at sea or in the air.

The Royal Navy’s shift to a hybrid model rests on two propositions. Firstly, concentrating combat power in a small number of expensive, crewed platforms creates a single point of failure; and secondly, that autonomous systems can sense, track, and respond faster than a human chain of command operating under fire.

Both of these propositions carry more weight in space than at sea, where a satellite cannot be reinforced mid-engagement, and there is no recovering a damaged spacecraft and returning it to service within the timeframe of a live conflict. The latency between a threat appearing in orbit and a ground-based operator authorising a response routinely exceeds the time the threat takes to resolve, which means that where autonomy improves resilience at sea and in the air, in space it is the only mechanism by which resilience is achievable at all.

The United Kingdom’s (UK) current satellite architecture predates this reasoning, and depends on a small number of high-value spacecraft. Each of these is reliant on continuous, secure communication with the ground; a dependency that Russia’s campaign against Starlink over Ukraine has shown is exploited not by destroying the satellites, but by attacking the links that connect them to their operators. This is conducted through jammed frequencies, hacked terminals, and overloaded ground stations, so that the spacecraft survives while the capability it was meant to provide does not.

The Hybrid Navy concept, even in outline, supplies the template that space requires, because the CCV does not attempt to perform every function itself. Instead, it commands a distributed set of autonomous platforms, each carrying out a narrower role, so that the loss of any single asset degrades the system without collapsing it.

A British space architecture built on the same logic would pair a smaller number of capable command and sensing satellites with a larger constellation of autonomous platforms able to detect threats, manoeuvre independently, and continue functioning when the link to the ground is degraded or severed. The autonomous mission intelligence systems already in development at British space companies, built to let spacecraft interpret their environment and act without waiting for instruction, are the direct orbital counterpart to the uncrewed sensing and missile platforms now being procured for the Royal Navy.

Thus, the capability exists. The DIP has now settled the immediate funding question, although not entirely in space’s favour. It commits more than £5 billion to autonomous systems over four years, while allocating £3.2 billion to space: £2.3 billion for satellite communications and £880 million for space-based Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) and space control. A further £9 billion is planned between 2030 and 2035. This is substantial, but still modest beside the domain underpinning roughly a fifth of the UK’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the majority of the critical infrastructure that the British Armed Forces protects.

The SDR named the growth of autonomy as the central lesson of the conflict in Ukraine, and applied that lesson explicitly to land, maritime, and air domains. The DIP has since recognised space as the ‘central nervous system’ of high-intensity warfare. Yet, its £5 billion autonomous systems programme remains concentrated in the land, maritime, and air domains. The next step is to carry the same logic into orbit, where autonomous, proliferated systems will be vital to resilience, speed, and operational advantage.

To remedy this, the UK should commission a space equivalent of the CCV programme: a small number of sovereign command and sensing satellites networked with autonomous platforms capable of independent threat response, procured through the accelerated model now being applied to uncrewed naval and air systems. The interoperability standards being developed for CCA should extend to allied space programmes with France, Germany, Australia, and Japan, so that a British autonomous satellite and an allied one operate under shared rules of engagement rather than parallel national doctrines.

The £5 billion commitment should now serve as the benchmark for the next phase of space investment, not as a boundary beyond which autonomy stops. The DIP makes a forceful case for autonomy across the maritime, land, and air domains, but without identifying a comparable programme for autonomous space systems. Space is the domain in which that case is strongest. The DIP has recognised its strategic importance; the next task is to apply the logic of autonomy to orbit.

Graeme Ritchie is CEO of Shield Space, a defence technology company developing control and counterspace capabilities. He spent over two decades in special forces and operational command before leading Ministry of Defence programmes in autonomy, Counter-Uncrewed Aerial Systems capabilities, and defence space.

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15th September 2026 marks five years since the announcement of the AUKUS trilateral defence partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom (UK), and the United States (US). Initially designed to provide Australia with a fleet of next-generation nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) and update the Royal Navy’s SSN fleet, AUKUS has since expanded to encompass further defence innovation – including uncrewed systems, quantum technology, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration.

Since its inception, AUKUS has achieved major milestones, such as the establishment of the Australian Submarine Agency (ASA) in July 2023 and the announcement of the first Signature Project under Pillar II in May 2026. This week’s Big Ask builds on these successes, asking ten experts: What has been the most significant achievement of AUKUS in the past five years?

Prof. Basil Germond

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

AUKUS’ most significant achievement has been to institutionalise ‘collective seapower’ among Australia, the UK, and the US, turning strategic alignment into an enduring framework for practical cooperation. Its importance lies less in the capabilities delivered so far than in establishing the political, technological, and industrial foundations from which seapower can collectively be generated over several decades.

AUKUS goes beyond interoperability among three navies. It progressively connects defence industrial bases, technological ecosystems, maintenance arrangements, skilled workforces, and strategic planning. This represents a new model of forward-looking alliance: advanced military capability is produced collectively, rather than developed nationally and coordinated afterwards. Such managed interdependence does not diminish sovereignty; it gives each partner capabilities, resilience, and strategic reach that could hardly be generated alone.

The submarine programme is central, but its significance is also institutional. Its long timescale binds the partners across electoral cycles and makes sustained cooperation strategically necessary. Pillar II reinforces this whole-system logic by connecting submarines with AI, autonomy, cyber, quantum technologies, and undersea systems. AUKUS thereby translates the idea of a free and open Indo-Pacific into an enduring capacity for the collective upholding of the maritime order in the longer term.

This achievement should not be overstated. Political ambition has advanced faster than shipyard capacity, workforce development, and submarine production. Yet, judging AUKUS only by platforms already delivered misses its novelty. Its real test is whether these collective arrangements become credible, resilient, and, most importantly, durable. The three nations are not there yet, but AUKUS has already begun transforming allied maritime cooperation into the collective production of enduring seapower.

Dr Euan Graham

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Expert Associate, Australian National Security College

The biggest achievement of AUKUS since its formation in September 2021 has been to integrate the defence industrial and technology bases of Australia, the UK, and the US in an ambitious, long-term, and strategically relevant capability development project. This alone was worth the effort, despite the associated stresses and the frustratingly long timeline before AUKUS will start delivering a new class of SSNs for the Australian and British navies, as well as other common military capabilities for all three partners.

As a counterbalancing measure principally in reaction to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) breathtaking military buildup, AUKUS was overdue even five years ago. Since then, the axis of cooperation between the PRC, Russia, and other revisionist powers has only tightened. The fact that AUKUS has survived changes of government in all three partner countries is its greatest political achievement.

In today’s more politically disaggregated environment, among the US and allies it would be difficult – if not impossible – to get an initiative like AUKUS off the ground. Its survival shows that it has passed the national interest test in all three capitals, despite encountering partisan frictions in America and Australia, although markedly less so in the UK.

AUKUS strongly supports the logic that alliances are and will remain force multipliers, notwithstanding significant differences in scale and strategic circumstances among the tripartite partners.

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

In Dune: Part One, the film adaptation of the first of Frank Herbert’s book series, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam says ‘our plans are measured in centuries’. While AUKUS’ time horizon is markedly shorter than that of the Bene Gesserit, viewing its successes requires a much broader perspective than merely its first five years.

AUKUS is a framework for long-term strategic cooperation that will reshape the Indo-Pacific and cooperation among Canberra, London, and Washington. AUKUS survived reviews in all three countries, each of which had markedly different political environments, thus demonstrating the allied commitment to this framework.

This commitment will likely continue given the importance of AUKUS to the interests of each country individually and all three collectively, regardless of changes in government. It cannot be taken for granted, and further political capital is needed, but the auguries are positive.

Practically, AUKUS has seen considerable investment in Australia’s naval infrastructure, laying the foundation for hosting, maintenance, and berthing of SSNs via Pillar I. In parallel, it has seen significant upgrades to Canberra’s ability to operate nuclear reactors – itself a long-term investment. This will enable nuclear-powered submarines from all three navies to operate much further and longer across the Indo-Pacific and challenge the PRC’s maritime and territorial ambitions.

Less headline-grabbing, yet arguably as important, the reduction of International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) barriers has dramatically improved defence industrial cooperation and interaction. These rules, while necessary in broad practice, have stood in the way of cooperation among allies (who already share the most sensitive information and intelligence bilaterally and as part of the Five Eyes) and are now steadily being removed. Additional progress and momentum are necessary, but the trajectory is positive.

Work is now needed for better operationalising of Pillar II – technological cooperation and development. Pillar II was initially a bit of a catch-all for future technologies, with little clarity on what it was designed to develop. Now though, the transition towards the development of desired effects is driving the acquisition of and investment in key technologies, and marks a positive development.

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 most significant achievement of AUKUS over the past five years has been its political resilience. Despite the ambition, cost, and risks associated with the partnership, AUKUS remains largely on track, particularly its main effort under Pillar I: Australia’s acquisition of SSNs.

That resilience is significant because all three countries have experienced substantial political change since AUKUS was announced in September 2021. Eight months after the announcement, Australia changed government from the Coalition to Labour. Yet, the government of Anthony Albanese, Prime Minister of Australia, not only retained AUKUS, but has made it central to Australian defence policy.

The US has also undergone a significant political shift. Donald Trump’s return to the presidency in 2025 brought a much more transactional approach to alliances and renewed scrutiny of American commitments. However, its review of AUKUS reaffirmed support for the partnership, with the administration declaring it ‘full steam ahead’.

The UK has moved from a Conservative to a Labour government and has had five prime ministers since AUKUS was announced. Despite political instability, serious pressures on defence spending, and challenges within its submarine industrial base, successive governments have continued to support AUKUS.

AUKUS’ greatest achievement, then, is that political support has endured across three very different political systems and significant changes of government. That suggests something important: each country increasingly sees AUKUS not simply as a partnership that harks back to old relationships, but as being firmly in its own national interest. That political foundation makes AUKUS more likely to withstand the considerable challenges still ahead.

James Rogers

Co-President (Research), Council on Geostrategy

While AUKUS is frequently understood to be a submarine pact or technological accelerator – Pillar I and Pillar II – its most important initial achievement has been conceptual. Over the last five years, it has redefined the mental map through which we see the world. It does this in several ways: firstly, it binds the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific together in a way that did not exist prior to the agreement; secondly, it scotches the narrative of Britain’s decline after Brexit; and thirdly, it re-centres Australia in British and American strategic discourse.

By binding Canberra, London, and Washington into a shared defence industrial and geopolitical ecosystem, AUKUS dismantled the idea that the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific exist in isolation – even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine drew Indo-Pacific actors (the PRC, Iran, and North Korea) into a war on European soil. As AUKUS will provide the Royal Navy with more nuclear submarines, it also becomes central to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) position in the Euro-Atlantic.

Moreover, AUKUS came at the right time: it undermined the inaccurate narrative of the UK’s decline that emerged after Brexit. It proved that the UK was not turning inward – or isolationist – but was undergoing a period of strategic renewal. Those critics who foresaw a diminished and regionally bound Britain could not overlook the fact that London was now co-leading the most consequential defence framework of the 21st century.

More than that, it has created a stronger alignment between the UK and Australia. This relationship had been undergoing a renaissance since the 2013 defence and security treaty between the two nations, as well as the Australian decision to procure Type 26 frigates. Yet, AUKUS takes the relationship to new heights: Australia is becoming part of, and strengthening, Britain’s defence-industrial base. It therefore becomes evermore central to the UK’s interests.

True, it will take many more years for pillars I and II to come to fruition. However, the intellectual marker has been laid down. AUKUS has already reshaped the geopolitical imaginary, ended the notion that the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific are distinct, and affirmed that Britain remains a premier guarantor of international security.

Dr Edward Salo

Professor of History, Chair of the History Department, and Director of the Heritage Studies PhD Programme, Arkansas State University

Looking at the AUKUS agreement from the US Navy’s perspective, one of the most important achievements was the development of forward submarine access and basing in Western Australia. This will allow for better naval force projection in the Pacific though quicker sustainment turnaround and deterrence posture.

In November 2025, the Virginia class attack submarine USS Vermont completed the second submarine maintenance period at HMAS Stirling. This operation showed that the US Navy could sustain a forward-deployed nuclear attack boat on Australian soil. Building on this success, the three nations of AUKUS finalised an agreement to establish Submarine Rotational Force-West (SRF-West) at HMAS Stirling by 2027.

In May 2026, the partners also set the deployment framework for American Virginia class submarines in Western Australia and streamlined Australia’s path to acquiring three Virginia class boats, which will boost the Royal Australian Navy’s abilities in the region. For the US Navy, this new base is not primarily about helping to develop the Royal Australian Navy, it is about a new forward-basing node much closer to contested Indo-Pacific waters than Guam or Hawaii.

Adm. Daryl Caudle, Chief of Naval Operations of the US Navy, called AUKUS ‘one of the most significant strategic undertakings in the history of the submarine force’. However, one caveat to this new plan is the lag in US Navy production of submarines. Virginia class production will need to be nearly doubled to 2.33 boats per year to cover both American and Australian requirements, but pace has slowed to 1.1 per year, resulting in unfulfilled promises for AUKUS.

H. I. Sutton

Adjunct Fellow, Council on Geostrategy; and independent defence analyst, writer, and illustrator

AUKUS leads the way to a stronger and more interoperable force, bringing the UK’s ally and trusted friend Australia into the privileged and advantaged nuclear submarine community. The AUKUS submarines, constructed in British yards, will advance the country’s tradition of building top-tier naval capabilities.

Yet, while headlines and politics largely focus on large submarines, a huge part of the promise resides under Pillar II. Solid investment in quantum navigation and communication, uncrewed underwater platforms, cyber, and other key technologies is a clear net positive for British industry. These capabilities are vital for the three partner countries’ shared future.

As with any major initiative, there are areas that warrant close attention. Much of the discussion has understandably focused on timelines and uncertainties, but there is a less visible strategic risk worth highlighting. The momentum and priority attached to Pillar II should not inadvertently crowd out smaller, promising projects that have merit in their own right, and which may be important to pursue regardless of how the wider initiative develops. As the UK looks ahead, it should ensure that the scale of the investment agenda does not mean that it loses sight of the ‘defence’ in defence investment.

Anne-Marie Trevelyan

Minister of State for the Indo-Pacific (2022-2024), and Minister of State for the Armed Forces (2019-2020)

During the Covid-19 pandemic, calls took place between British and Australian naval and defence department leaders to test whether the UK would be up for the greatest giant of a challenge – to allow Australia to join the family of two (Britain and America) in their nuclear-powered submarine enterprise.

The world was changing. Australian perspectives on its responsibilities to protect and maintain open waterways was increasing, and major powers were not playing nice anymore. Maritime freedom of navigation, the lifeblood of global trade and for all our economic security, was starting to be under strain.

Remember that the AUKUS project was begun before Russia invaded Ukraine. Prescient, perhaps.

So, is this vision and grand ask working out today? Well, the most complex web of new Australian nuclear-capable legislation has been achieved, the US has unlocked vast swathes of historic ITAR limitations, and the UK has committed vast resources to the renewal and growth of its existing nuclear enterprise in order to underpin Australia’s new long-term boat programme.

The social licence to turn Australia into a nuclear nation seemed like one of the greatest hurdles, but as global stability teeters, the Australians have demonstrated their usual pragmatism for standing up to threats. Britons and Americans have leaned in, altruistically as well as with clear-eyed effort, to strengthen their own enterprises and create resilience for the existing SSN fleets.

The investment numbers seem vast, but they stretch over decades, and bring the deepest and most effective deterrent to those who would wish to disrupt or stop maritime freedom of navigation. A resilient maritime environment is vital to economic security.

The AUKUS vision those forward-thinking naval leaders presented is now operational reality across two lines of effort: Pillar I (the submarines) and Pillar II (bringing together naval and industrial innovators to work easily together on project designs to provide asymmetric advantage to the UK and its allies).

Let us be under no illusion how difficult it is to work across three nations and to trust and intertwine beyond even historic wartime efforts – at industrial, doctrinal, financial, and skills development levels and depth beyond even what those determined military leaders could imagine.

The AUKUS trilateral commitment has survived changes of government and political colour across all three countries. Allies and neighbours initially nervous now quietly champion the resilience and protections that they will benefit from, and those who would wish democratic nations determined to protect freedom for their citizens harm are clearer than ever that the AUKUS nations stand firmly together.

Patrick Triglavcanin

International Fellow, Council on Geostrategy, and Research Assistant, University of Western Australia Defence and Security Institute

One of the most significant achievements of AUKUS in the past five years is the progress made towards the operationalisation of SRF-West through the upgrading of HMAS Stirling in Perth and upskilling of Royal Australian Navy personnel there. AUKUS’ first five years have not been without adjustment, controversy, and the perennial need for media firefighting. However, since the announcement of the Optimal Pathway in March 2023, developments at HMAS Stirling have occurred at pace and, importantly, more or less on schedule.

The significance of this stems firstly from Western Australia’s expanded defence ecosystem and architecture. Australian personnel have now assisted in the maintenance of both a British and American SSN at HMAS Stirling, a demonstration of both the technical expertise acquired by Royal Australian Navy personnel and enhanced capacity of the base through AUKUS-related investment. In June 2026, Washington re-established US Submarine Squadron 3, which will operate out of HMAS Stirling, and the Naval Support Activity Stirling, which will support American servicepeople, their families, and contractors rotating through Perth. Indeed, US personnel are already migrating to Western Australia and beginning work at HMAS Stirling.

SRF-West operations are set to commence in December 2027, with the original estimate being ‘as early as 2027’. This relatively consistent timeline for operations, and probable fulfilment of it points to the other significant factor of HMAS Stirling developments: the likely completion and operationalisation of a significant AUKUS landmark as scheduled.

The ability for such a large, cross-hemisphere defence industrial partnership to run into delays is a drum regularly beat by critics, and is indeed a complication with a project of this scale. However, the developments at HMAS Stirling point to the timely fulfilment of one of the more significant steps for Australia in acquiring and operating SSNs – arguably the trilateral’s main goal.

Lord Walney

Member, House of Lords, and Officer, AUKUS All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG)

Five years ago, the AUKUS agreement was received with surprise, hope, and scepticism in equal measure. While there is still much to do to realise the full potential of the landmark trilateral, nobody can doubt the determination of the AUKUS nations to deliver a step-change in the collective national security of free and open nations.

Next year in Barrow-in-Furness, workers will cut steel on the first SSN-AUKUS submarine. That is a formidable achievement. In five years, three governments have agreed on a common design; aligned export controls and nuclear stewardship rules; committed billions to shipyards in Barrow, Derby, and Adelaide; and begun building reactors for a class of boat that did not exist on paper in 2021. This programme is on schedule to begin construction on the timetable set out at the start. Nobody should underestimate what that represents.

Yet, the submarines are the bedrock in AUKUS’ biggest achievement – the fact of binding together three democracies, spanning the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific, in a commitment that will outlast the administrations that signed it and those that have succeeded them. It has survived changes of leadership in all three capitals. It has created the deepest technology sharing arrangement between allies since the Second World War. Above all, it has restored a sense that liberal democracies with shared values are capable of acting together, at scale and over decades, to deter those who would coerce them.

Authoritarian states are rising and testing the resolve of the free world. AUKUS is part of the answer to this. It may yet define the geopolitics of the century ahead.

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Before becoming Prime Minister, Andy Burnham wrote in The Times on 8th July: ‘we must rebuild Britain’s hard power to face a darker world.’ This begs the question: how much darker is the world becoming, and how should the United Kingdom (UK) react?

The eroding international order

For over four years, Russian missiles and drones have rained down on Ukrainian cities, resulting in thousands of civilian casualties each month – the Kremlin’s latest atrocity in its 12 year campaign against its neighbour. The United States (US) attacked Iran on 28th February 2026, with minimal effort made to create a legal basis. Both Russia and the US are permanent members of the United Nations (UN) Security Council, the highest body of the international order, with a unique responsibility for the maintenance of international security and its regulation.

The early 21st century has seen the return of overt territorial revisionism by major powers, with members of the UN Security Council violating the UN Charter and vetoing any UN sanction. The 2014 and 2022 Russian invasions of Ukraine are the most extreme contemporary examples, but the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq and the 1999 NATO operation against Serbia remain hotly contested on the same UN Charter sovereign immunity clause. The American seizure of Nicolás Maduro, President of Venezuela, under US domestic law is an explicit rejection of the same tenets, as are threats to annex Greenland.

In 2025, America imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), with Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, calling the ICC judgements ‘...abuse of power infring[ing] upon the sovereignty and national security of the United States and our allies…’ The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is stretching the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to legitimise the construction of artificial islands to extend its territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). In 2013, the International Arbitral Tribunal at The Hague ruled against the Chinese claims, but Beijing ignored the ruling.

Economic statecraft and strategic leverage

The globalisation of economic interdependence might encourage the view that international economic ties reduce the effectiveness of military coercion. However, after decades of ‘offshoring’, states are now increasingly exploiting asymmetric economic linkages and supply chain chokepoints for strategic leverage. The PRC exploits other states’ dependence on rare earth metals, the Group of Ten (G10) has exploited its monopoly control over the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) banking system to impose sanctions on Iran (2012) and Russia (2022), and the US has imposed punitive tariffs as coercive tools on allies as well as adversaries.

Russia has been excluded from the Group of Seven (G7) since its initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014. The PRC competes against the UN’s International Monetary Fund (IMF), with the Asian International Infrastructure Bank offering competitive infrastructure loans to states without many of the IMF’s regulatory stipulations, but with the infrastructure as collateral. The World Trade Organisation exists to manage exactly these types of disputes, but it is now largely defunct and facing 21st century mercantilism, with powerful states increasingly reverting to aggressive tariff regimes and trade barriers.

The implications of deepening geopolitical competition

Evidently, the international order is under strain – both from those who have long sought to undermine it and, increasingly, those who should be its greatest champions. ‘International order’ is simply a description of the relationships between states. Although the post-Cold War international system was backed by the US as a single hegemonic power, it was largely benign, based on norms or rules often set by international institutions.

A rules-based international order is only effective as long as its advocates enforce those rules. When major powers are seen to be breaking their own rules, the rules become enfeebled. The major powers are undermining the credibility of the UN Security Council and by extension the entire concept of a rules-based international order; if the great powers can act with impunity because of their strength, that is a power-based order. Where would that leave powers such as the UK, which have traditionally seen the upholding of such an order as in their national interest?

The 2021 Integrated Review asserted:

...UK policy has been focused on preserving the post-Cold War ‘rules-based international system’ which has greatly benefitted the UK and other nations. Today…the international order is…characterised by intensifying competition between states...A defence of the status quo is no longer sufficient…

In turn, the 2025 Strategic Defence Review suggested:

The challenge to the free world has intensified through so-called ‘great power’ competition and a collapse of the post-Second World War consensus. The certainties of the international order we have accepted for so long are now being questioned – and not only by authoritarians.

British policy appears to recognise the ‘new reality’, but Ministry of Defence and Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) departmental objectives remain essentially unchanged between 2020 and 2025. The UK could commit to supporting the existing rules-based order, or it could invest in shaping a future order – effectively a balance between short-term and longer-term risk. Both options come with costs. However, the country appears to be planning for neither.

Capability gaps: Allocating resources

Preparing for less international governance will require enhancement to the British Armed Forces and diplomatic capabilities. Even allowing for a ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) first’ focus, there is no flurry of new military acquisition. Conventional military capabilities have continued to atrophy since 2010. The nuclear deterrent comprises submarines already extended past their design lives. The Integrated Review’s announcement increasing the maximum stockpile of nuclear warheads does not change the deterrence criteria or in itself increase the UK’s military capability.

The costs of provision of sufficient military force to protect scattered British commercial interests in a more anarchic international security environment would be considerable. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) included a risible 0.01% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in ‘new’ money to be spent on defence, which led to John Healey resigning as Secretary of State for Defence, stating ‘...[the DIP] falls well short of what is required for defence and the country at this dangerous time.’ Following Healey’s transition to His Majesty’s (HM) Treasury as part of the Burnham administration, it remains uncertain how the UK can maintain its reputation as a dependable partner among NATO allies who face the growing Russian menace and who have committed to devoting 5% of GDP to defence.

Britain has long relied on so-called ‘soft power’ to help sustain its influence worldwide; indeed, the Integrated Review lauded Britain as a ‘soft power superpower,’ citing the BBC and the British Council as key enablers. However, both are now at risk of death by a thousand cuts. Since 2021, the UK’s Official Development Assistance (ODA) – i.e., foreign aid – budget has been reduced by 30%. Cuts to the British Council shut down their offices in 27 states. A 21% reduction to BBC World Service funding led to closure of radio services in Chinese, Russian, and Hindi, and to digital-only for Arabic and Persian, although funding was increased in 2026 to about 80% of the 2021 figure.

While the ability to deliver strategic results through ‘soft power’ in a ‘hard power’ world can be debated, the narrative battle against adversaries in ‘middle ground’ countries will be important, and these steps undermine those efforts.

The future of British strategic influence

As a major power with the world’s fifth largest economic output, a minimum nuclear deterrent, and atrophied – albeit regenerating – armed forces, the UK has benefitted from disproportionate influence, mostly due to its privileged position within the rules-based international order, including its permanent membership of the UN Security Council. Germany and Japan have, for the moment, larger populations and larger economies, but no permanent UN Security Council seat. As the existing order continues to deteriorate, the benefits that Britain has derived are at risk. Evidently, the country needs to rethink its approach.

Despite security policy recognising the context of continuous competition – the Prime Minister’s ‘darker world’ – the UK has not made attendant enhancements to its conventional military and cultural strengths to help shape the operating environment. Defence strategy now relies on capabilities hollowed out by decades of political neglect. The policy trajectory leans towards seeking to shape the future order while maximising the opportunities that the existing order offers, but without making the necessary fiscal commitment to influence the future order or the political investment in the existing order.

Britain is between a rock and a hard place. Reinforcing both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power will be necessary for it to act to sustain the elements of the existing order it wants to, and to influence the evolution of the future international order. HM Government faces real, and hard, choices.

Dr Andrew Corbett is Senior Lecturer in Defence Studies Education at King’s College London. He served as a submariner in the Royal Navy spanning the end of the Cold War, which included commanding two Trident submarines.

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

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