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

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

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

North Sea security threats

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

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

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

A ‘Hybrid Hub’

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

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

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

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

Industry

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

Fighter pilots on the bench

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

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

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

Iceman’s children

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

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

Don’t retire Maverick just yet

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

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

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

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

‘Top Gun’ class of 2027

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From market mechanism to strategic instrument

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

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

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

The logic of sovereignty: Prioritising resilience

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

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

The emergence of a coordinated model

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

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

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

Regulatory tension and the limits of the current framework

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

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

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

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

Rethinking what ‘competition’ means in defence

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

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

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

A hybrid future for defence markets

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

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

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

Coherence as the central challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The nature of the threat

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

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

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

Towards a British and German response

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rebuilding European naval supremacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Five national interests

1. National cohesion and civic unity

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

2. A dynamic and resilient national powerbase

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

3. A zone of denial

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

4. Strategic indispensability to key alliances

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

5. Sovereign control of the nuclear escalatory ladder

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fragmentation as a political choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

Britain’s role in a divided Europe

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

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

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

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

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

Minilateralism and the future of specialisation

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

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

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

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

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

Why NATO remains central

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

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

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

What Britain could do

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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On 30th May 2026, AUKUS defence ministers gathered in Singapore to issue a pivotal joint statement on the progress of their trilateral security partnership. Marking a significant acceleration for Pillar II of the agreement, the ministers announced their first signature project: the collaborative development of advanced payloads for Uncrewed Undersea Vehicles (UUVs). Crucially, the meeting also reaffirmed that the Pillar I submarine programme remains firmly on track. For the United Kingdom (UK), this means progressing toward a projected class size of up to 12 new SSN-AUKUS nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), while Australia remains poised to procure at least five.

The AUKUS partnership has matured significantly since its historic unveiling by Joe Biden, then President of the United States (US), Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister of the UK, and Scott Morrison, then Prime Minister of Australia, on 15th September 2021. Originally negotiated in unprecedented secrecy during mid-2021, AUKUS was designed to facilitate the transfer of top-tier British and American nuclear propulsion technology to Australia, alongside a suite of advanced joint capabilities spanning cyber, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies.

What began as a disruptive capability-sharing agreement has now solidified into a generation-defining pillar of British, American, and Australian statecraft. But what originally drove these three nations to establish AUKUS? What are the enduring geopolitical implications of the agreement? And where is this trilateral partnership heading next?

Strategic drivers

Australia sought closer relations with Britain and America because it wanted SSNs. In 2015, the Royal Australian Navy agreed to procure 12 diesel-electric attack submarines (SSKs) from Naval Group, a French defence company, which would have provided it with a modest capability enhancement.

Since then, however, Australia grew increasingly perturbed by the geopolitical revisionism of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) under the imperious leadership of Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The final straws were the CCP’s handling of Covid-19, its implementation of ‘wolf warrior’ diplomacy, and particularly the outlining of ‘14 Grievances’ in 2020. Allied with the rapid Chinese naval build-up, Australia saw the PRC’s trajectory as a threat to its sovereignty and right to self-determination.

Given the vast distances involved to travel between Fleet Base West in Perth – Australia’s main submarine base – and potential stalking grounds surrounding the South and East China seas, French-designed SSKs would have limited endurance: 0-14 days in comparison with at least 70 for SSNs. This melded with escalating costs for France’s more limited boats, leading Canberra to turn to its more traditional and well-armed allies – London and Washington – for strategic assistance.

When Australia approached the UK, Her Majesty’s (HM) Government responded positively. AUKUS animated ‘Global Britain’, the idea developed in the 2021 Integrated Review that the UK would ‘tilt’ towards the Indo-Pacific, becoming ‘the European partner with the broadest, most integrated presence in support of mutually beneficial trade, shared security, and values.’ Subsequently, AUKUS has become essential to the new Labour government’s Strategic Defence Review, which stressed a ‘NATO first, but not NATO only’ geostrategic posture.

For Britain, AUKUS is a practical demonstration of the linkages between the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic areas. As Sir Stephen Lovegrove, the Prime Minister’s Special Representative for AUKUS, pointed out in April 2026, the partnership’s capacity to facilitate underwater naval expansion does not only empower Britain and Australia to project power into the Indo-Pacific; it also fundamentally strengthens Britain’s hand within the Euro-Atlantic theatre, giving the Royal Navy additional SSNs to deter Russian aggression.

Moreover, the UK also views the trilateral as an opportunity to energise the British defence industrial base – the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines are probably closer to Australian requirements than US Navy ones. This is a point that Johnson was keen to stress in September 2021 when the deal was announced. The subsequent Labour government has also nailed its colours to this mast through the concepts of ‘securonomics’ and the ‘defence dividend’.

For the US, AUKUS greatly empowers one of its two closest Indo-Pacific allies (the other being Japan), while drawing its closest Euro-Atlantic ally permanently into the Indo-Pacific, thereby creating a stronger counterweight to Chinese power in the region. The conception of the partnership showed that, after the bungled withdrawal from Afghanistan, the US was not turning inward or becoming isolationist. Instead, it indicated that America in 2021 was doubling down on pursuing its more immediate geostrategic interest: moderating the rise of the PRC. It should not be a surprise, therefore, that the Trump administration, deeply sceptical of the PRC’s geopolitical intent, and keen to draw in allies and partners to ease the burden, has continued to support AUKUS.

AUKUS generated such debate because it seemingly came out of nowhere. However, for those familiar with Australian strategic policy, and Australia-UK-US relations more generally, the agreement was not a ‘bolt from the blue’. The three countries already had a very close relationship, and their ability to interoperate and interchange forces with one another is perhaps the most extensive in the world – a consequence of little-known and informal terrestrial, naval, and air spin-off agreements connected to the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence grouping. At least for Britain, AUKUS built on the 2013 defence agreement between the UK and Australia, which allowed for the transfer of military technology between the two partners.

Geopolitical implications

As early as January 2022, AUKUS had already begun to have geopolitical implications. After Brexit and the messy US withdrawal from Afghanistan, it served as a timely reminder to those doubting British and American strength and determination that both nations still wielded considerable power and great creativity in realising their geostrategic goals. As Sir Stephen, then National Security Adviser, told the Council on Geostrategy the day after the AUKUS announcement in September 2021, the agreement represented ‘perhaps the most significant capability collaboration anywhere in the world in the past six decades.’

Australia, too, showed how important AUKUS was: having moved from ‘down under’ to ‘top centre’ in only a handful of years, the country centralised its role in maintaining a free and open Indo-Pacific. AUKUS will enable Australia to operate advanced SSNs – the SSN-AUKUS class – greatly empowering the Royal Australian Navy during a time when other countries in the Indo-Pacific (the PRC in particular) are engaging in a rapid naval build-up.

Moreover, the announcement of AUKUS also reverberated in Europe. The extraordinary and sharp French reaction to the agreement quickly became apparent, even though France was unlikely to (and did not) mount a lasting challenge. Although Paris used AUKUS to argue for the acceleration of European ‘strategic autonomy’, the sheer cost and politics of that endeavour was – and still is, even after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – a politically insurmountable challenge. Later, France brandished its nuclear status across the continent, but frontline states in Northern and Eastern Europe viewed AUKUS as a boon to British – and by extension, European – security. This calculation was later validated by the vital UK support for Ukraine from 2022, as well as British moves to reinforce deterrence across NATO’s northern flank.

Indeed, these nations continue to look to the UK and the US, as well as those who provide the mainstay of troops, aircraft, and warships to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) Enhanced and Tailored Forward Presences they need for protection. Many even praised AUKUS, insofar as Britain’s participation indirectly binds Australia and America closer to Euro-Atlantic security, providing fresh animation to the emergence of an integrated Atlantic-Pacific region.

Despite the initial outcomes, the real geopolitical impact of AUKUS is to be felt over the longer term. Although it may never be central to a free and open Indo-Pacific in the same way that NATO is to the Euro-Atlantic, particularly given the geostrategic importance of India and Japan as well as the emergence of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue, the three maritime democracies have confirmed with AUKUS that they are dissatisfied with existing multilateral arrangements, and that they are not prepared to wait indefinitely for regional stakeholders to take the necessary action in light of a worsening situation.

As a minilateral group, AUKUS – agile and nimble – swiftly created a new centre of geopolitical gravity and, despite British, Australian, and American attempts to dampen regional fears, it throws down the gauntlet to other countries and actors in the Indo-Pacific. The partnership reminds them that they cannot sit on the fence, or else the three nations will ultimately take measures into their own hands.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, AUKUS makes regional geopolitics more complicated for systemic competitors, namely the PRC, but also Russia. As Map 1 shows, AUKUS ‘triangulates’ power between three geostrategic nodes: the British Isles, North America, and Australia. It extends to the Australians technology and resources that they would not otherwise have, while strengthening Britain’s position in the Euro-Atlantic. It should be no surprise that Russia and the PRC have framed AUKUS so negatively.

Map 1: The geopolitics of AUKUS

Through AUKUS, the UK and the US are showing that they can deter revisionists not only by sending their own strategic assets into the Indo-Pacific, but also by empowering a vital regional partner. At the same time, by simultaneously focusing on next-generation technologies, the three countries have combined forces to create a more potent ‘technology accelerator’ to compete with the PRC.

A centre of geopolitical gravity

Given the strategic drivers behind AUKUS, the future of the trilateral partnership looked bright in late 2021 and early 2022, and continues to do so in 2026 with the three defence secretaries’ announcement. Looking ahead, perhaps the biggest question is whether the arrangement will remain exclusive, or whether it serves as the beginning of a more systemic rearrangement of geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific, and even, the Euro-Atlantic.

Despite not being a formal alliance, AUKUS generates a centre of geopolitical gravity based on shared interests and deep trust to convene – even align – other UK, US and Australian allies and partners. Indeed, as early as October 2021, Gen. Sir Nicholas Carter, former Chief of the Defence Staff, indicated that AUKUS will not necessarily remain exclusive, even if future members decide not to partake in nuclear submarine cooperation – which, in any case, may turn out to be of secondary importance compared to future Pillar II collaboration.

Canada and New Zealand – the other Five Eyes partners – could almost certainly get involved in AUKUS, particularly in terms of Pillar II’s advanced scientific research, even if the New Zealanders are averse to the military application of nuclear technology. Other countries, particularly Japan, could also potentially align with AUKUS, not least because of the closeness between the US and Japan, as well as between Australia and Japan, but also due to the emergence of the ‘quasi-alliance’ between London and Tokyo.

Given how AUKUS will support Britain’s posture in the North Atlantic, it is conceivable that it will become central to the Joint Expeditionary Force and NATO, particularly as Gen. Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord, develops the New Hybrid Navy, the Atlantic Bastion, Shield, and Strike concepts, and the Northern Navies Initiative, with key Northern European allies. Indeed, the technologies generated through Pillar II may become indispensable to deterrence in the North Atlantic.

Conclusion

AUKUS has successfully bridged the traditional divides between regional theatres, establishing a sophisticated regulatory and technological ecosystem that links the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific. By connecting the industrial bases of the UK, the US, and Australia, the partnership does more than simply project naval power into the Indo-Pacific; it establishes an enduring bulwark designed to ensure that autocratic rivals do not dictate the rules of the 21st-century international order.

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

A previous version of this article was published in January 2022. This is an updated version.

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The 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) had within it a clear message: defence can no longer be ‘contracted out only to our Armed Forces, good and brave as they are.’ With multiple current and future threats and challenges facing the United Kingdom (UK), ‘a whole-of-society approach is essential. Everyone has a role to play and a national conversation on how we do it is required.’

A year on from the SDR’s publication, and with threats mounting from all directions, this conversation is starting. Polling in support of increased defence spending is trending in the right direction – that is, unless you are part of the sizeable percentage who abhor defence and think it is a waste of money.

A sensible communications campaign is not going to spend much time on that group. Those already in favour should not need extensive targeting either, but are often targeted anyway, because doing so is easier and less risky. Everyone likes talking to their own echo chamber, and nobody enjoys being called a warmonger.

Yet, it is the middle of the normal distribution – the majority of the British population – where most effort should lie. This audience is often described in polls as ‘disengaged’, and those who think defence is either someone else’s problem or that the military has it covered. Indeed, the inability to deploy a single Royal Navy warship to protect the UK’s air stations on Cyprus seemed to be the first time that many within this middle group realised how thinly spread the British Armed Forces have now become.

Defence language

Reaching this group requires a clarity of language that defence does not naturally possess. Armed forces language has always been slightly exclusionary. This is no different from other professional groups, from finance to medicine to law – ‘this is our gang and you’re not in it’. Each service having its own lexicon also does not help. This is controversial, but perhaps the whole business of defence does not attract the best communicators. It certainly does not always attract good writers, and the technical, clipped style demanded in written communication throughout a career does not improve matters.

Add to this the extreme brevity required on many radio circuits, and the result is a mash-up of jargon abbreviations and codewords, often incomprehensible to the person sitting next to you, let alone an interested outsider. Without care, you can leave the service and before you know it, you are using the 24-hour clock at work and saying ‘roger’ at the end of sentences and everyone else in the office thinks you are weird.

Online, where character limits matter as much as airtime on a radio circuit, the problem is equally acute. Acronyms such as SDR, JEF, NAS, NATO MARCOM, and PJHQ are sprayed about on the assumption that everyone knows what they mean.* A recent Royal Navy post on X about Exercise TAMBER SHIELD illustrates this nicely:

Personnel from @815NAS conducted rescue and firefighting training with the @Sjoforsvaret during Ex #TamberShield. The exercise runs under JEF, the UK-led coalition of Northern Europe nations which works in support of @NATO_MARCOM ops. @JEFnations

The only people who understand this language are in the wrong target audience, and even they find it grating. They then lead the ridicule, which in turn discourages wider engagement. And while many social channels encourage tagging users and employing hashtags, they should not be used at the expense of clarity.

Clunky language, mangled syntax, and the occasional made-up word is not the root cause of defence’s problems, but it is a highly visible symptom. The real problem runs deeper than language alone. It is a fundamental communication problem. The national conversation does need to happen, and it must be conducted in plain English. However, it also needs to be honest, both internally and externally, or the ‘say-do’ gap will continue to widen and undermine trust.

Centralised control

Speaking to those who handled communications for the individual services during the Cold War and 1990s, it is clear that they had a level of freedom unrecognisable today, despite having far fewer channels. Over-centralisation of messaging has become entrenched. It was already well established in the Ministry of Defence by 2011 when David Cameron, then Prime Minister, issued his famous ‘you do the fighting, and I’ll do the talking’ reprimand to Sir Mark Stanhope, then First Sea Lord, who had merely suggested that providing an extra ship off Libya might stretch the Royal Navy.

Sir Mark did, of course, deploy an extra ship on top of all the other standing tasks of the day, and the issue was quickly forgotten. But this papering over of the cracks is part of the problem. The British Armed Forces have a built-in desire to say ‘yes minister’. This is part of being in a democracy. Not doing so is also the fastest way to guarantee being passed over for promotion.

The follow-on problem is the military’s ability to deliver, while hiding the ‘duct tape’ required to make it happen. The result is a damaging lack of honesty: politicians not being entirely frank with the public about the state of defence, and the military not being entirely frank with politicians in return – a communications issue, in other words.

This obsession with centralisation shows no sign of abating, and is certainly not confined solely to the Ministry of Defence (MOD), nor to either side of the political aisle. Not long ago, there was a discussion floating around Whitehall about removing all ministries’ communications departments and doing the whole thing centrally. If this overreach feels as though it verges on parody, consider that Brexit and Covid-19 communications were the examples used to justify it.

Computer says ‘no’

In such an environment, it is easy to see why individual services struggle to get their messages to the right audiences. For HMS Dragon – which was deployed to the Gulf of Oman in early May – to communicate anything beyond routine matters, approval is required from the UK commander in Bahrain, the Joint Headquarters in Northwood, the Operations Directorate in the MOD, and ultimately the Directorate of Defence Communications. A single ‘no’ anywhere in the chain kills the opportunity.

This ponderousness causes defence to miss literally thousands of good outreach opportunities every year. The iconic image of HMS Diamond firing her Aster missile at an incoming drone was released in error – just as well, since the system would otherwise have blocked it. All told, this has produced an all-time high in risk aversion towards unit-level communications, with no sign of improvement.

Threats

The urgency of fixing these problems is clear. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, daily sub-threshold activities against Europe, questions over American commitment to allies, and an impending energy shock should be warning enough. This is not just a Royal Navy issue; it is pan-defence. One hopes the visit by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, to a Vanguard class submarine that had been at sea so long it changed colour might be a trigger. If the ‘pointy stuff’ is being exposed as this thin, the underpinnings raise a whole new level of concern.

Yet even now, the official language speaks of sticking plasters and ‘increases in due course’. The latest proposed plaster is smaller than the black hole it needs to fill. This is what used to be called ‘more cuts’, and it helps explain why the Defence Investment Plan has still not appeared a year after the SDR upon which it is based. Meanwhile, Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) which could help to plug gaps at relatively low cost struggle with communications barriers, often by design. The system continues to claim it is ‘meeting all operational tasking’ when it is demonstrably not.

This was effective as a ‘line to take’ when Britain still had enough mass to paper over the cracks. Now, though, it does not.

Conclusion

The SDR was right: a national conversation on defence is essential if the UK is to understand the gap and therefore vote to improve national resilience.

This is a whole-ship sport, and clear, honest communications – using plain English, delivered through a spread of channels and voices and based on ambition, not fear – sit at the heart of it. Each service has the capability, but their shackles must be loosened. This does not mean a free-for-all, but an environment in which communications risk is properly tolerated and managed, just like any other operational risk.

All that is required is the courage from the top to delegate authority effectively and to accept the associated risk. The alternative is that change will be forced upon Britain, when it will be too late and much, much more expensive.

*Strategic Defence Review, Joint Expeditionary Force, Naval Air Squadron, North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Maritime Command, and Permanent Joint Headquarters for those who do not know.

Tom Sharpe OBE is a communications consultant who specialises in enhancing and protecting reputations in complex and contested environments. Prior to this, he served for over 25 years in the Royal Navy, the last five of which were spent in military plans and communications.

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

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In April 2026, Lord Robertson, former Secretary of State for Defence and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) Secretary General, stated that the United Kingdom (UK) is ‘under-prepared. We are under-insured. We are under attack.’ Britain, he argued, is fundamentally unready to meet global threats.

Preparedness is not simply a nation’s ability to respond and recover from an emergency crisis. It is also a test of a nation’s resilience – its preparedness for emergencies including pandemics, extreme weather, terror attacks, and war.

Risks can be acute or chronic. Chronic risks pose challenges that erode the economy and societal cohesion, and manifest over a longer timeframe. To withstand concurrent or consecutive crises, a nation must have readiness through the building of systemic endurance across society.

Britain understands this. So, why is it so difficult to start a national conversation on threats, risks, and national resilience?

Security and national resilience: Mutually interdependent

The British public appears to have a tendency to view national security threats as singular events. While attacks such as the 2018 Novichok poisonings, the 2006 polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, or routine cyber attacks attributable to adversaries are taken seriously at national, political, and military and security service levels, they do not generate a national conversation on British security, or how resilient the UK is to sustained attacks on its soil; even though adversaries are clearly systematically testing national resilience.

The view seems to be that British security is reserved for uniformed personnel and security services. The 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR) prioritised ‘warfighting readiness’. Furthermore, an entire section was devoted to the rebuilding of Defence Medical Services readiness for high-intensity peer conflict: since most defence medical personnel work in the National Health Service (NHS), the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) needs to be able to address the handling of mass casualties and the clinical challenges of a reduction in workforce capacity in the event of a major military deployment.

It is also a given that the British Armed Forces will be mobilised to assist civil society in dealing with natural disasters and pandemics through Military Assistance to Civilian Authorities (MACA) tasking. However, if it comes to war, their priority is warfighting. In this instance, civil society will likely need to fend for itself and even assist the military – as experienced in Ukraine.

This is not scaremongering. Clarity and realism are needed. Being better prepared comes from starting a national conversation on resilience, because crisis is becoming the norm. Taking action only when under pressure is not always going to be enough; building national resilience is a more cost-effective endeavour.

Starting a national conversation on risks and threats

In April 2026, Dr Fiona Hill, one of the chief writers of the SDR, asserted that during focus groups, many understood the threats to British security – primarily cyber attacks, but also risks to Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) and undersea cables. It seems that the public is ready for a clear narrative on public roles and responsibilities for risks, threats, preparedness, response and recovery. Furthermore, the National Security Strategy (NSS) recognised that ‘without security and resilience at home, we cannot deliver economic growth or any of the other government missions to improve the lives of the British people’.

A perennial problem is that defence and welfare are viewed as a zero-sum ‘guns versus butter’ trade-off between national security and societal needs. However, recent conversations about food and energy security are in fact both matters for national security and societal needs. Food, health, energy, and environment security are good indicators of national resilience. Germany and the Nordic countries treat national infrastructure, such as roads, rail, education, and health services – all institutions the UK tends to view as societal needs – as part of national defence, because robust infrastructure is needed in an emergency.

NATO’s baseline requirements for national resilience, as required under Article 3 of the NATO Charter, would be a good starting point for a national conversation. Article 3 acts as the foundational requirement for NATO’s ability to defend itself, ensuring members do not just depend on collective protection, but are actively building domestic capacity. It focuses on resilience, especially in energy, transport, communications, and emergency services.

Undergirding civil preparedness is societal resilience. NATO member states are expected to measure their level of preparedness against seven baseline requirements for national resilience: continuity of government, resilient energy supplies, ability to deal with the uncontrolled movement of people, resilient food and water supplies, ability to deal with mass casualties and disruptive health crises, resilient civil communication systems, and resilient transport systems.

Here, Britain has a lot of work to do. Years of austerity across public services and an overreliance on ‘just-in-time’ supply chains heighten the UK’s vulnerabilities. The FM Global Resilience Index for 2026 ranked Britain as the 14th most resilient country, but revealed challenges and areas of vulnerability, particularly regarding inflation, climate exposure, and climate risk awareness.

The National Preparedness Commission’s 2025 industrial resilience report highlighted a key vulnerability in the UK’s heavy reliance on imported materials to make most of its critical items – such as defence equipment, electronics, pharmaceuticals, energy, and food. In response to His Majesty’s (HM) Government’s 2025 National Resilience Action Plan, the Commission’s August 2025 report found notable deficits in resilience awareness, in levels of preparedness among British households, and divergent willingness of said households to engage in enhancing their resilience.

Existing risk frameworks: Emergencies and resilience

The 2004 Civil Contingencies Act (CCA) is the main source of legislation on civil emergencies. Building upon this, the 2022 UK Government Resilience Framework was an important step to approaching national resilience by creating a shared understanding of risks, a focus on prevention and preparation, and communicating that resilience requires a whole-of-society approach.

While developments are occurring, there are concerns over the lack of a coherent joint-up effort and an overly ‘top-down’ approach. The key issue is that preparedness and resilience are often sidelined by immediate, short-term priorities and the political necessity of dealing with current problems. In other words, emergencies are easier to manage than longer-term resilience-building. Compounding this, there is no single minister dedicated to national resilience.

The extent of resilience fragmentation requires testing and regular review. Taiwan takes a whole-of-society approach, with its Whole-of-Society Defence Resilience Committee focusing on six elements of resilience (broadly aligning with NATO’s Article 3 requirements). The Committee has run annual tabletop and small-scale exercises (an urban resilience exercise) for the past two years, and is looking to expand. Through these, the Taiwanese government has been able to stress-test and fix national resilience issues.

There is also the matter of funding. At the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague, Britain committed to spending an additional 1.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to ‘protect critical infrastructure, defend networks, ensure civil preparedness and resilience, innovate, and strengthen the defence industrial base’ by 2035. However, these commitments are not yet reflected in HM Government expenditure plans, nor is it clear how they will be funded due to the delaying of the Defence Readiness Bill and Defence Investment Plan.

Public information campaigns: Being realistic

The Swedish approach is to promote self-help and responsibility. Through Sweden’s Total Defence model, everyone over 18 has a legally defined role in civil resilience. Individuals are mandated to contribute to national resilience through three main areas: military, civil, or public service. If the highest threat state is declared, everyone understands their role and is prepared to act.

In 2018, the Government of Sweden issued a leaflet entitled ‘If crisis or war comes’, and in 2022 it set up the Psychological Defence Agency to tackle misinformation campaigns from foreign entities. There are also 18 voluntary defence organisations training local volunteers in specialist areas such as radio communication, transport, and logistics.

The Netherlands also promotes a whole-of-society approach, recognising that preparedness takes preparation. Its public ‘Think Ahead’ information campaigns emphasise being realistic regarding risks. The Dutch government promotes self-help in the first 72 hours of any crisis, and regularly communicates that it will probably take three days to organise assistance.

Switzerland and Germany provide websites to calculate lists of family needs for a week’s supply of food. Latvia and Lithuania distribute booklets on how to survive for 72 hours in a crisis. By contrast, Britain’s Prepare information website provides only basic information. For instance, the Prepare message on food supplies reads: ‘As with water, how much you need will vary based on your own circumstances. Don’t forget food for pets.’ Evidently, there is much to learn from other countries.

Conclusion

The UK has a long way to go, and time is not on its side. There is government recognition that resilience building and preparedness is a whole-of-society effort. Without a national conversation on threats and risks, and their agency and scale, HM Government reduces its ability to enable the British public to be prepared for the contemporary and future threat landscape. Starting a national conversation on risk is now an urgent necessity.

Dr Anisa Heritage is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. Her research focuses on changes in the international order and international security, particularly in the Indo-Pacific region.

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

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Ahead of the visit of Donald Trump, President of the United States (US) visit to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Beijing signalled its intent to push him to ‘oppose’ Taiwan independence explicitly. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio, US Secretary of State, maintained that Washington would stick with its longstanding position – which has traditionally been: ‘we do not support Taiwan independence’ (although the Trump administration removed this particular wording from its website).

Given Trump’s highly personalistic and unpredictable approach to diplomacy and dealmaking, there was no guarantee that he would not go off script. As ever, the President chose his own words when speaking to Fox News: ‘I’m not looking to have somebody go independent…I want them [Taiwan] to cool down’ (and adding ‘I want China to cool down’, alongside other loose language on arm sales to Taipei).

The distinction is a fine one, and a change of wording would not have altered anything on the ground: Taiwan would have remained independent. But had Trump opted to utter ‘we oppose Taiwan independence’, Beijing’s efforts to shift the blame for cross-strait instability onto Taipei would have been bolstered, and unwarranted legitimacy would have been lent to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) expansionist territorial claims.

Indeed, many countries in Africa and Asia have put on record their opposition to Taiwanese independence (and given a green light for a Chinese war to annex the island). Yet, the US to one side, Taiwan’s other partners – including the United Kingdom (UK) – are not publicly pressed to alter their wording and ‘oppose’ Taiwanese independence. His Majesty’s (HM) Government standard line is:

We consider the Taiwan issue one to be settled peacefully by the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait through constructive dialogue, without the threat or use of force or coercion. We do not support any unilateral attempts to change the status quo.

Without reading too deeply between the lines, it can be inferred that HM Government does ‘not support’ Taiwan independence – that is an act, such as revising the Republic of China’s constitution, that would make Taiwan de jure independent – because such action would have to be unilateral in practice. Beijing would never acquiesce to it.

Yet, at the same time, HM Government does not appear, in principle, to be opposed. Rather, with the emphasis on a final settlement being arrived at ‘peacefully’ the point does not seem to be the outcome, whether independence or unification, but on the process.

In 2022, Ben Wallace, then Defence Secretary, muddied the waters when he told the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee that ‘it is in China’s plan to reunify Taiwan to mainland China...[and] Britain wants a peaceful process towards that.’

Wallace quickly rowed back these words, in a letter to the committee’s Chair, and repeated HM Government’s familiar formulation that ‘the contested status of Taiwan must be resolved peacefully’. He wrote ‘My position is most emphatically not, as you believe my remarks suggested, that “Taiwan must expect to be absorbed into the PRC and, inter alia, has no independent legitimacy”.’ Yet, a few paragraphs further down, Wallace also spoke of the UK’s longstanding and unchanging policy on Taiwan being ‘reflected in the Cairo Declaration’…

This declaration – that, in 1943, pledged to restore Taiwan to China from Japanese rule – has, however, been noticeably absent from modern HM Government statements. In neither its 2000 submission nor its 2024 response to the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee did the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) mention this wartime commitment in exposition on Britain’s Taiwan policy.

Long may this remain so. The UK should not be in the business of carving up territory with little to no regard for the people living there. The signing over of Poland at Yalta, another Second World War deal of this kind, is rightly regarded as a highly embarrassing and regrettable episode in British diplomatic history. Moreover, any invocation of the Cairo Declaration today stands at odds with HM Government’s belief that cross-strait differences ‘be settled peacefully…without the threat or use of force or coercion.’

If the stipulation is that neither force nor coercion should be used, then is it not the position of HM Government that any fundamental change to the cross-strait status quo must be one that has the consent of the Taiwanese people? Indeed, they may (as polls consistently suggest) never opt for unification, but instead stick with maintaining Taiwan’s de facto independence indefinitely.

Going forward, the UK – definitively ditching the Cairo Declaration (lest Beijing seize on any regurgitated reference to this pledge) – should make this point clear: that it is ultimately up to the people of Taiwan, living as they do in a democracy, to decide their future.

While often unsaid, the will of the Taiwanese populace has long been a concern of British governments. On 11th May 1951, when pushed on how a settlement across the Taiwan Strait might be brought about, Herbert Morrison, then Foreign Secretary, told Parliament: ‘I think it is clearly desirable that the wishes of the inhabitants of Formosa [Taiwan] should be taken into account’.

Articulating such a view now would help to counter Beijing’s intensifying efforts to dictate the global narrative in which Taiwan is presented as an ‘internal matter’, the rights of the people there erased, and unification established as a historical inevitability. Such lines, if unchallenged, will only breed fatalism in Taiwan, aiding the CCP’s efforts to break the psychological will of the Taiwanese people and secure victory without a fight. Meanwhile, if this narrative takes hold, the costs of a conflict for Beijing will have been lowered – with an act of annexation unlikely to invoke the same global disdain as Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Fully articulating this point, about the wishes of the Taiwanese, is also a good reminder to the world that Taiwan is not a mere ‘problem’ or ‘issue’ (or, indeed, a bargaining chip) but a country of 24 million people.

At a time when the leader of the free world cannot be relied upon to articulate the rights and wrongs of an international dispute, it falls upon Britain and like-minded nations to step up and do so. The UK can continue not to support any unilateral alterations to the status quo. However, going forward, HM Government should assert that cross-strait differences must be settled peacefully, without the threat or use of force or coercion – and with the explicit democratic consent of the people of Taiwan.

Gray Sergeant is Research Fellow in Indo-Pacific Geopolitics at the Council on Geostrategy.

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Since the commencement of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the High North has become a primary theatre of strategic competition. This is a shift that the United Kingdom (UK) has responded to by declaring its intention to expand its regional presence, among other moves. However, Britain’s dependence on intelligence infrastructure provided by the United States (US) for its most sensitive maritime surveillance functions is a significant vulnerability that any serious Arctic strategy from His Majesty’s (HM) Government will need to address.

With the Trump administration no longer considering Russia an existential threat, and demonstrating a willingness to instrumentalise alliance relationships more specifically, continued reliance by the UK on US infrastructure means accepting a degree of American strategic discretion over British security decisions that may no longer be deemed desirable or tolerable.

It follows then that a key missing element of the UK’s Arctic strategy is the absence of an independent intelligent autonomous underwater surveillance capability capable of operating throughout the water column across the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) gap and the wider High North maritime space. A trilateral co-production partnership with Sweden and Ukraine centred on the joint development of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled autonomous underwater surveillance systems for the High North and its undersea infrastructures could begin to address that deficit while also serving broader strategic objectives beyond capability alone.

The capability case for this specific combination rests on three complementary and documented strengths. Sweden’s Saab Autonomous Ocean Drone (AOD) is a seven-metre long uncrewed undersea vehicle optimised for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) in the demanding, ice-affected maritime environment that the Arctic and the GIUK gap represent. Saab has designed the platform around an explicitly open autonomy stack, treating capability development ‘like applications in an app store’ with standardised interfaces that allow allied navies to develop and integrate their own classified mission software without disclosing it back to industry. This architecture makes the AOD a natural platform for multinational co-development.

Ukraine’s involvement is grounded in combat-validated expertise that most North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) allies currently do not possess in comparable form. The six-metre seabed-loitering Marichka exemplifies an autonomous underwater capability developed and refined under live operational conditions. The doctrinal and engineering knowledge embedded in the programme, including how autonomous underwater systems locate, position, and persist in hostile environments, fits neatly into the Arctic surveillance requirements that the proposed trilateral partnership is designed to address.

Britain’s own contribution centres on AI-enabled acoustic intelligence. Helsing’s SG-1 Fathom, manufactured in Plymouth, pairs an endurance submarine-hunter drone with the Lura maritime AI platform; a large model designed to interpret acoustic signals from sea vessels and submarines, and differentiate between individual vessels within the same class. This addresses one of NATO’s core surveillance problems in the High North, enabling the alliance not just merely to detect submarine presence, but also to attribute and track specific Russian vessels across transit routes from the Barents Sea to the Atlantic.

The proposed co-production arrangement is therefore one of integrated systems development rather than simply joint manufacturing. The Saab AOD would serve as the host platform, Ukraine’s contribution would operate at the level of mission logic and seabed deployment protocols, and Helsing’s Lura acoustic AI would supply the cognitive layer. Saab’s design philosophy – standardised interfaces allowing partners to integrate classified mission software independently – makes this division of labour technically feasible without requiring full disclosure of each partner country’s most sensitive Intellectual Property (IP).

The Ukraine dimension, moreover, adds another crucial layer of strategic logic at a time when formal NATO accession remains politically frozen. The good news, however, is that alliance integration has never been reducible to a single joining event. Sweden and Finland’s accession processes demonstrate that membership is built through accumulated industrial interdependence, shared doctrine, and interoperable systems developed well ahead of formal entry.

Although Ukraine’s situation is categorically different from both the Finnish and Swedish experiences, co-production would institutionalise its role as a security producer within the European order, with direct consequences for its longer-term trajectory within the continental security architecture. For the UK, anchoring Ukraine’s defence industrial base within a NATO architecture is both a strategic investment and a statement about what kind of European security order it intends to help build.

Notwithstanding the coherence of the strategic case, the frictions involved in pursuing such an initiative are significant. First and foremost is the potential American reaction, which may simply not welcome a British-led effort aimed at reducing Washington’s privileged position in the Arctic’s surveillance architecture. Technology transfer and classification constraints constitute another major hurdle that requires careful deliberation. Navigating the protocols governing acoustic intelligence and submarine-tracking data with Ukraine as a non-NATO partner will require a dedicated legal framework that currently does not exist. Last but not least, Ukraine’s battlefield agility sits in tension with the certification, standardisation, and long procurement cycles prevalent in the UK, Sweden, and indeed NATO. Closing this gap will require institutional investment, which needs to be planned for.

Ultimately, should the challenges outlined above be mitigated, a British-Swedish-Ukrainian co-production partnership constitutes a practical response to a documented strategic capability gap in the High North. An arrangement built around the Saab AOD as host platform, Helsing’s Lura acoustic AI as the cognitive layer, and Ukrainian seabed deployment expertise could begin to address this deficit in concrete and deployable terms, while simultaneously anchoring Ukraine’s defence industrial base within both wider European and NATO defence security architecture.

Nima Khorrami is a Research Associate at The Arctic Institute – Centre for Circumpolar Security Studies. His main area of interest and research lies at the intersection of geopolitics, critical infrastructure, and emerging technologies.

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On 13th October 2025, the container vessel Istanbul Bridge pulled into Felixstowe, the United Kingdom’s (UK) principal container hub, loaded with nearly 5,000 containers of Chinese goods. On the face of it, the arrival would appear unremarkable; just one among thousands of ships arriving in British ports each year from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Yet, the voyage marked a meaningful shift: rather than following traditional trade lanes, Istanbul Bridge had traversed the Northern Sea Route (NSR). Skirting the Arctic coast of Russia, this is an emerging corridor that promises to change global shipping and trade.

With global economic pressures and shipping frequently restricted in the Red Sea, the temptations of the NSR as a shortcut to Europe will only become stronger. It is generally 30-40% quicker than sailing from East Asia to Europe via the Suez Canal, and even more so than sailing south around the Cape. To illustrate this, the voyage of Istanbul Bridge took just 20 days, compared to the traditional Suez route of approximately 40-50 days.

Sailing towards Britain and Europe, the NSR starts at the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska, and travels across the top of Siberia via several natural chokepoints before arriving at the narrow waters of the Kara Strait to enter the Barents Sea. From there, Europe is just around the tip of Norway.

The potential similarities between what Iran can do to the Strait of Hormuz and what Russia can do to these chokepoints, particularly the Kara Strait, cannot be understated. The UK, and its allies and partners in Europe, cannot afford to normalise the transit of merchant ships to and from its ports sailing via the NSR. Doing so poses a strategic risk which could play out against Britain in future.

Geography of the NSR

The NSR is typically navigable from July to November, with the best ‘open water’ conditions (when there is essentially no ice on the route) in September and October. While climate change is making the route more viable, yearly variance remains.

The entirety of the NSR can be viewed as restricted due to the requirement for icebreaking and its several natural chokepoints as it passes between islands and the mainland. However, the Kara Strait at its western end poses a particular problem. This narrow channel is formed by the gap between the large and barely populated island of Novaya Zemlya and Vaygach Island – which lies mere kilometres (km) from the Russian mainland across the Yugorsky Strait – and connects the Kara Sea in the east to the Barents Sea in the west. It is just 56km wide and only about 100 metres deep in most places.

The Yugorsky Strait, parallel to the Kara Strait but further south, is an even narrower passage. It is only 3km wide in places, and even shallower – between 13 and 36 metres deep. It is ice-covered most of the year and, to the extent that it can be used as an alternative to the Kara Strait for smaller vessels, it has all the same downsides.

During the height of summer, some vessels may attempt to bypass the Kara Strait by rounding the northern tip of Novaya Zemlya. This offers only limited strategic advantages, however, as the route extends far deeper into the Arctic, exposes shipping to substantially harsher ice conditions – and remains no less vulnerable to Russian surveillance and interdiction.

Last year, just over 100 vessels transited the NSR, with 52 passages from east to west, and 51 going the other way. Virtually all the traffic was between Russian ports (including Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg) and the PRC and South Korea, with the voyage of Istanbul Bridge being an anomaly.

Vulnerability of the NSR

As the strangulation of the Strait of Hormuz and the Houthi disruption of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait show, international shipping is particularly vulnerable to bad actors if it must sail through constricted waters. As the world sails away from global norms, the idea of a rules-based order, and freedom of navigation, shipping lanes which pass close to regional powers can be placed at their mercy. These chokepoints are devilishly easy to shut with the mere threat of military force, and fiendishly difficult to reopen.

Russia could, under circumstances of its choosing, throttle or block the NSR if European nations become addicted to cheap imports via this route, and the cost savings are quickly priced into their economies. Subsequent moves to constrict the flow of goods would have an immediate economic impact that would be felt by consumers.

More concerning still, any ships which were at that moment sailing across the top of Siberia would become hostages, trapped in the inhospitable and sparsely populated north where they could not realistically be rescued. The sense of urgency would grow as winter approached, forcing sailors to seek shelter in the handful of Russian ports on the Siberian coast.

Russia’s options in the NSR

Like the Strait of Hormuz, the Kara Strait is naturally vulnerable to naval mines and, as seen with Hormuz, very few mines would need to be sown. Additionally, any ship in the Kara Strait is within easy reach of Russian missiles and aircraft. While North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) assets could operate in the Barents Sea, geography would not be on the alliance’s side in trying to keep the Kara Strait open; it is over 1,000km from the nearest Norwegian port.

Russia could exert pressure via the Kara Strait even in peacetime. The legal arguments for Russian sovereignty over the NSR are already in place. There have been several declarations by the Kremlin regarding the route, including 2020’s ‘The Rules of Navigation’ which insist, among other things, that ships request a permit to be allowed to use the NSR. In Russia’s mind, the route is its private waterway, technically regarded as an ‘inland waterway’ in the same way as the network of rivers and canals which criss-cross the western side of the country.

The UK and other free and open nations should – and do – dispute this on legal grounds. However, it does present Russia with justifications which can be used to exert leverage over east-west trade using the NSR, regardless of whether they have any legal merit.

With the NSR, Russia could, in the near future, be given an easy point of leverage over British and European foreign policy – for example, in a scenario in which it was placing pressure on the Baltic states, Moldova, or elsewhere. A calibrated disruption, such as a partial closure of the Kara Strait or the detention of select vessels, could serve as a coercive signal, diverting attention and imposing economic friction while constraining operational freedom at a critical moment.

Risks for Britain

Speaking at the Defence Committee inquiring to defence in the High North, Dr Marc De Vore of the University of St. Andrews’ School of International Relations noted that ‘under those situations, Russia’s interest in the High North and North Atlantic is putting us in a position where we cannot react, and where we cannot support our Eastern European allies.’ As the UK looks to an uncertain future – but one where Russia is likely to remain a threat or potential threat for some time – handing the Kremlin such an advantage would be a grave error.

The Kara Strait is not the only lever available, but it represents a novel one, enabled by shifting trade patterns and the gradual normalisation of Arctic transit. Free and open nations could thus find themselves outmanoeuvred in new ways only possible by circumstances of their own making. Britain has a choice, but it must find ways to avoid becoming dependent on purely short-term economic interests arising from a situation that will be hard to retreat from.

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.

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

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Defence spending is surging. Investment opportunities abound, as conflict and geopolitics have catalysed a surge of interest in the sector. Private equity funds, sovereign investors, and venture capital are increasingly drawn to defence and dual-use opportunities, attracted by long-term demand signals, government backing, and geopolitical urgency. However, beneath this momentum lies a persistent disconnect: investor assumptions about defence businesses often diverge sharply from how procurement and delivery function in practice.

The gap between procurement reality and investment expectation is a primary driver of underperformance. Successfully navigating the complex terrain is becoming an essential skill for an increasing number of funds making their initial defence investments.

We will always need defence, right?

Today’s geopolitics makes defence look like a uniquely attractive investment. It shows demand stability (underpinned by expanding government budgets), multi-year programme announcements, and strengthening political and social consensus around rearmament. This narrative of predictable, long-duration revenue streams is bringing interest from many investors. However, the reality of military procurement is far less certain.

Defence demand is not simply a function of budget allocation; it is mediated through complex requirement-setting processes, shifting strategic priorities, and iterative programme design. Requirements evolve, often materially, over the life cycle of a programme. What begins as a clearly defined capability can become an over-specified, technologically ambitious system that is difficult to deliver at scale. History offers many notable examples in this respect, from the TSR2 supersonic low-level strike aircraft of the 1960s to the recent Ajax armoured fighting vehicle.

This is a novel risk for investors. Headline demand does not translate cleanly into executable contracts.

Have you got it in black?

The United Kingdom’s (UK) defence is not unique in its persistent pursuit of ‘exquisite’ requirements, with little attention paid to industrial feasibility. Programmes are frequently designed to deliver cutting-edge capability, with narrow specifications and high-performance thresholds. While arguably militarily desirable, this approach often overlooks the realities of manufacturing capacity and supply chain resilience.

Thus, for many companies positioned to benefit from increased defence spending, the habit of adding cost to programmes to build new manufacturing may cause them to struggle to convert the opportunity properly. Investors may assume that increased engineering complexity means larger margins. However, in defence, additional requirements frequently do not come with additional funds. The result is either eroded margins or fewer final systems delivered.

Those close to the money benefit from being close to the design and development process. In practical terms, the more advanced the requirement, the less predictable the commercial outcome.

Knowing how and knowing why

All this being said, cross-industry synergies are being found, particularly in firms with expertise in mass manufacturing. Companies grappling properly with the tension between requirements and technology are designing to match manufacturing capacity, rather than building new machinery to match designs. They are resisting the pressure to augment every component, funding extensive in-house Research and Development (R&D), and offering solutions prior to any official requirement set. This means that those who understand several industries will have novel opportunities.

Everybody’s problem: The supply chain

A further divergence between procurement and investment assumptions lies in the defence supply chain. Investors often assess target companies based on their position within a programme: whether prime, Tier 1 supplier, or niche capability provider. However, this linear view can obscure the supply chain fragility that affects the entire nation.

Defence supply chains are not currently configured for rapid scaling. They rely on specialised components, limited suppliers, and long lead times. Efforts to increase production volumes, particularly in response to geopolitical shocks, have exposed bottlenecks that were previously invisible. Rare earths are perhaps the most visible manifestation of this, but so are specialty alloys, substances used in explosives, and other industrial chemicals.

This introduces second-order risks to investments: revenue growth can be highly constrained by upstream limitations and cost pressures driven by scarce suppliers. A company’s ability to capitalise on demand is often not determined by its own capacity, but by the resilience of its ecosystem.

Security is not a dirty word

Nobody is surprised that security is a constraint when working in defence. A business must be sharp on its own physical and cyber security, and have an excellent understanding of its own supply chains and its employees. Vulnerabilities can repel customer interest or fatally damage the prospect of a contract.

In addition, the security assessments to do business are usually controlled not by the customer, but by a separate vetting agency within His Majesty’s (HM) Government. This bureaucracy must be navigated, but companies can make this easier or harder for themselves with thoughtful choices of employees and suppliers.

Finally, anyone close to defence operating commercially across borders will be familiar with the term ‘ITAR’ – the United States’ (US) International Traffic in Arms Regulations. Every country has its own version, and they can be highly constraining for defence businesses operating across borders. Most investors understand regulatory risk; this is defence’s additional dimension.

Overseas market access can be limited, as the regulations can cover controlled components, technical data, and services. Needless to say, these rules can limit and complicate exit options.

What the heck is TEPIDOIL?

A further complication, but also an opportunity, is the depth and breadth of support the customer expects. Governments have learned – albeit imperfectly – that it is rarely enough to procure just the equipment. A ‘capability’ needs people trained, software updated, infrastructure built, and the logistics serviced throughout its life.

The British acronym for these elements is TEPIDOIL.* America uses the less mnemonic DOTMLPF-P.** Technology aggregators, or defence primes, are excellent at packaging these aspects; investors must understand where their companies fit in this ecosystem and the associated costs.

* Training, Equipment, People, Infrastructure, Doctrine, Organisation, Information, Logistics
** Doctrine, Organisations, Training, Materiel, Leader development, Personnel, Facilities, Policy

Procurement timelines versus investment horizons

Perhaps the most fundamental misalignment is temporal. Private capital typically operates on investment horizons of 3-7 years for private equity, or up to a decade for infrastructure or sovereign funds. Defence procurement, by contrast, can operate on timelines that can extend well beyond a decade.

This creates a tension where investors seek exit pathways, but procurement processes work to long, uncertain development cycles. Even when contracts are secured, revenue realisation may be back-loaded, contingent on milestones, or subject to renegotiation. For funds operating under time constraints, this can materially impact returns.

So, investors need a different mindset for defence. Traditional private equity playbooks, focused on rapid value creation and exit, require informed application in this sector.

Ever-shifting goalposts

The political cliché that ‘there are no votes in defence’ is losing its power, while the social cliché that military activity is inherently unethical is shifting. There have even been suggestions to add an ‘S’ for ‘Security’ to the framework of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), although this might be more a red herring than coherent plan. Dual-use technology is valuable to watch as leading in this space, especially as the line separating single-use from dual-use blurs further. These aspects are changing for investors, and should be factored in when building investment strategies and their narratives.

Not a bridge too far

The apparent disconnect between procurement and investment assumptions can appear profound. However, with the right communication, the incentives of HM Government, the British Armed Forces, and investors can be highly aligned. Investors who can see past the undulations of security, tolerate the jargon, and think deeper than budget announcements or programme headlines will be rewarded.

Compelling macro energy drives the current wave of defence investment. The broadening appeal and necessity of defence investments for a balanced portfolio will further increase the premium on those investors adept in this terrain.

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

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

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On Thursday, 23rd April, the Council on Geostrategy celebrated its five-year anniversary at the Locarno Suite in the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO). This article provides an amended transcript of the speech given by James Rogers, Co-founder (Research) at the Council, to outline the organisation’s intellectual framework.

I would like to say a few words about the intellectual framework we have sought to develop and promote over the past five years at the Council on Geostrategy. This is at the foundation of what we do – and what we intend to do in the future. Perhaps uniquely among British think tanks, we have an intellectual mission, and we have had it ever since we mobilised just over five years ago. That mission is to help regenerate applied geopolitics – otherwise known as geostrategy – in the United Kingdom (UK).

But what does that mean in practice? It means moving beyond post-national idealism and focusing on the foundational realities of national power, including geography, resources, technology, and state capability. Our work is rooted in the belief that you cannot shape the world of tomorrow if you do not understand the enduring physical constraints and the changing strategic realities of today.

For that reason, our ontology has been driven by three lodestars.

First, the centrality of the nation. As I said at the beginning, we are not just another international affairs think tank that proposes global solutions to global challenges. We put the British national interest at the heart of our work. In a geopolitical age, a strong, resilient and confident country is vital; it is the best vehicle for mobilising the power we need to protect our interests.

Second, a deep respect for geographic reality. We look at the world through the lens of a maritime nation. In our very first paper – entitled ‘A “Crowe Memorandum” for the twenty-first century’, after the famous Memo of Sir Eyre Crowe in 1907 – we explained that the narrow debates of the early 2020s over the relative importance of the Euro-Atlantic versus the Indo-Pacific were outmoded for the simple reason that the two regions were merging together.

We were quickly proven right. Soon after publication came the announcement of AUKUS, the Hiroshima Accord, and, in a different way, Russia’s renewed aggression against Ukraine, which has drawn North Korea, Iran, and the People’s Republic of China – Indo-Pacific states – into a war on European soil.

Third, assertive realism. Not only do we engage at the hard edge of systemic competition; we embrace it. We recognise that upholding a free and open international order requires a willingness to confront authoritarian challengers, analyse their national strategies, and prescribe actionable ways to out-compete them. That is why we have pioneered work on net assessment and strategic advantage, as well as the importance of strengthening our national powerbase, our nuclear deterrent, and the alliances that extend our influence.

This intellectual approach has been described as ‘politely disruptive’ by one serving minister. We challenge policymakers with bold, sometimes uncomfortable truths, replacing standard globalism with rigorous, actionable geostrategy. That is why we have used infographics and geopolitical maps so extensively; they project in a single visualisation what may still not be clear after 10,000 words of text. Our most important piece of work so far is our geopolitical atlas. If you have not seen it yet, then please take a look.

So where does this leave us? Over the past five years, our politely disruptive approach has proven essential. The geopolitical shocks of the 2020s have shown us that we need a different framework if we are to prevail in an increasingly confrontational and transactional world.

If we allow ourselves to weaken, we should be under no illusion: the opponents of openness, democracy, and freedom – what Britain stands for – will merely grow in strength. And we won’t be the first to suffer: our allies and partners, especially those smaller countries nearest to the geopolitical fault lines, will be the first to feel our adversaries’ wrath.

But before I close, I just want to thank our hosts here at the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office, our board members, our generous supporters, and, above all, our brilliant colleagues at the Council who do the hard work – organisational and analytical – every single day.

As we look to the next five years, I want to be clear: the Council on Geostrategy remains committed to generating the bold, rigorous, and unapologetically British strategic thought that this era demands.

Thank you for joining us to celebrate this milestone – and enjoy the rest of the night!

The Council on Geostrategy also received thoughts from three of our associates regarding the Council’s impact on British strategic policy over the past five years:

Richard Ballett

Council on Geostrategy

In its first five years, the Council on Geostrategy has played a key role in renewing British national security policy debates. It has helped to diversify what had become a somewhat stale intellectual ecosystem by injecting fresh perspectives and offering practical solutions rather than merely admiring policy problems. There is not enough space to list all the important contributions the Council has made; but three notable ones include the following:

On nuclear weapons: The Council has made several interventions to ongoing debates about the UK’s future nuclear forces, including options to augment, diversify, and enhance existing capabilities; the pros and cons of different options; and practical steps that should be taken for these to be realised.

On the PRC: The Council’s China Observatory has provided the policy community with realistic assessments of Beijing, and shone a light on some of the serious threats that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pose to British interests.

On sea power: The Council has reinvigorated debates in Whitehall about the future of the UK’s sea power, including practical solutions to rebuild the nation’s shipbuilding industry, augment its maritime forces, and posture these capabilities in an astute fashion to maximise British strategic advantage.

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

Looking back at the last five years, the Council on Geostrategy’s real value has not just been its research; it has been its refusal to let British strategy slide into comfortable complacency. At a time when the global order was being rapidly reshaped, the Council forced a much-needed, and often uncomfortable, conversation about the return of state competition. It is one thing to acknowledge that the world is getting more dangerous; it is another to map out exactly what that means for a country such as the UK.

Its work on the Indo-Pacific ‘tilt’ is the best example of this impact. The Council was among the loudest voices pointing out that the ‘tilt’ is just a slogan unless it is underpinned by a permanent presence and real-world capability. It successfully shifted the framing from political rhetoric to the hard work of delivery, making it clear that British security is now inextricably linked to the stability of distant maritime trade routes and the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

With AUKUS, the Council looked past the noise of the submarine headlines. It reframed the partnership as a generational integration of three maritime powers, emphasising the industrial discipline and focus to achieve it. In a space where strategy often gets lost in buzzwords, the Council on Geostrategy has been at the forefront of discussion, keeping the focus on the unforgiving realities of geography and hard power.

Ben Short

Head, Secretary of State’s Office of Net Assessment and Challenge, Ministry of Defence

From my lens, leading defence’s challenge function, the greatest impact that the Council on Geostrategy has had has been in bringing a fresh set of officials and external thinkers and doers together, with a real focus on policy relevance.

Products like the Big Ask have tackled key policy questions from a range of angles in a digestible format. Whitehall Briefings do a great job of exposing the reality of government roles and thinking to external stakeholders. Key papers, such as ‘What allies want: Appraising Britain’s defence relationships’ and ‘Ten flaws in British strategic thinking’, tackle live departmental issues.

These are critical to delivering the ‘thriving intellectual base’ demanded in the Strategic Defence Review. Surveys suggest that there is a still a significant gap between external expertise and government in culture, approaches, and understanding of key issues. The Council on Geostrategy’s greatest impact thus far is in helping to close that gap.

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The British Overseas Territories are currently receiving an overdue public appraisal. Recent Iranian attacks on the United Kingdom’s (UK) territories in Cyprus and Diego Garcia follow in the wake of a contentious agreement to cede sovereignty over the latter. Critics of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) deal allege the UK’s strategic naivety, succumbing to lawfare and diplomatic statecraft spearheaded by Russia. These events are symptomatic of both a deteriorating global order and intensifying international competition.

Strategic choices

The precedent set through the recognition of Mauritius’ claim to the BIOT could undermine the position of other British territories, including the Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus. Like the BIOT, these airfields were also retained upon the recognition of independence of a former Crown Colony. Unlike the American-operated base on Diego Garcia, however, they are home to British military and intelligence operations, and have performed a key staging role for the UK’s operations in the Middle East for decades.

While the Cyprus bases have been controversial locally for some time, Tehran’s attacks and inadequate British defences have increased their perceived liability to the Cypriot authorities. Nikos Christodoulides, President of Cyprus, labelled the bases a ‘colonial consequence’, requiring ‘frank discussion with the British government’. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron, President of France, wasted no time in visiting the island to emphasise a new French-Cypriot strategic partnership, declaring that the island ‘can count on France’.

In an era of renewed contest between states and an unreliable hegemon in the United States (US), the ability to defend norms, alliances, and claims of sovereignty requires both a reserve of strategic power and the capacity to wield it. Macron backed up his rhetoric with 11 French Navy warships deployed to the eastern Mediterranean and wider Middle East, including the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle. Strategic autonomy extends beyond military power, with France benefiting from a long legacy of policy to develop and guard industrial champions in critical sectors.

The UK is fortunate that its allies – including France, Greece, and the US – were able to assist with the defence of Cyprus. In 2011, Britain deployed a sovereign response group consisting of three amphibious landing ships, a helicopter carrier, a frigate, and two auxiliary supply ships to the island. This exercise served as a demonstration of the UK’s capability at that point to ‘respond at short notice to unforeseen events in an unpredictable and fast-moving world’ as an independent force.

In 2026, additional British aircraft have been deployed to Cyprus, but the struggle to send a single warship to the region illustrates the decline of the Royal Navy. In tasking what few operational ships remain during 2025, His Majesty’s (HM) Government allegedly planned for air defence destroyers HMS Dragon and HMS Duncan to prioritise attendance at North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) exercises in 2026 and 2027. The hard choices now forced on ministers are the inevitable product of decades of defence cuts, and delays to new ship orders during the austerity years.

Constrained military resources may force yet more trade-offs between commitments to NATO allies and the UK’s national priorities in future, with the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published in 2025, appearing to commit to both equally. The SDR is clear that ‘Role 1’ for the British Armed Forces is to defend and protect Britain, its Overseas Territories, and Crown Dependencies, while also adopting a ‘NATO first’ doctrine of commitment to European security in response to the strategic challenge posed by Russia.

Sub-threshold threats and drone proliferation

Both the SDR and National Security Strategy (NSS), also published in June 2025, lack depth in their assessments of the Overseas Territories. Beyond commitments to maintaining a military presence in Gibraltar, Cyprus, and the South Atlantic territories, there is little detail on the evolution of sub-threshold and non-military threats in relevant regions, or capabilities required to respond. In contrast, France’s National Strategic Review 2025 details disinformation, malign foreign influence operations, terrorism, and supply chain weaponisation as particular risks to the stability of its overseas territories.

The contrasting treatment reflects a different constitutional relationship between France and its overseas territories compared to Britain. Some French territories are fully integrated, operating under the same laws as the mainland with political representation at the Assemblée nationale (National Assembly of the French Parliament). Even for those with greater autonomy, policing and internal security remain reserved matters for Paris, with gendarmes deployed overseas. The UK, however, retains responsibility for only the defence and foreign affairs of the British Overseas Territories.

A neat delineation of internal security as an area of local competence, with the UK retaining responsibility for defence, may not be suited to evolving sub-threshold and non-military threats. The SDR identifies improved resilience to these types of sabotage, influence, and disinformation as an integral area for defence, requiring input from ‘industry, the finance sector, civil society, academia, education, and communities’. Enhanced partnerships could be implemented with local agencies in the Overseas Territories to build the same type of ‘whole-of-society’ resilience envisioned for the home islands.

Britain’s Caribbean territories merit a single mention in the SDR (a commitment to humanitarian and disaster relief), while the equivalent French review paints a more concerning picture. On the potential for expansion of geographical areas of conflict, it states French Caribbean territories ‘in strategic areas with high stakes’ are vulnerable to ‘manoeuvres to control international migration routes, organised crime…[and] regional disputes that could be exploited by adversaries’. It notes increasing collusion between criminals, terrorist networks, and state actors. These threats were subject to a UK Foreign Affairs Select Committee inquiry begun in 2024, but work has not resumed since the general election that July.

Iranian drone attacks on Cyprus serve as a harbinger for a new era of proliferation in drone technology. Beyond states, terrorists and cartels are now exploiting drones and tactics learnt from Ukraine to attack security forces, conduct reconnaissance, and transport illicit payloads. Drone sightings near UK military bases have doubled in the last year, while Russia and Iran have turned to criminals recruited online to carry out sabotage. Britain should prepare for these tactics in its Overseas Territories in light of the strategic Russian threat, as well as collusion with local organised crime.

The role of the River class

Given the island geographies of the Overseas Territories, the capability of the Royal Navy remains paramount. The UK relies on five basic Batch II River class Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs) to protect the Overseas Territories, with a small simple gun and no hangar for the Wildcat helicopters recently deployed to Cyprus to shoot down Iranian drones. Three older Batch I River class OPVs patrol British home waters at an increasing tempo in response to heightened activity by Russian naval, intelligence-gathering, and ‘shadow fleet’ shipping. The March 2026 commitment by His Majesty’s (HM) Government to seize shadow fleet ships is illustrative of greater future demands on the Royal Navy in the UK’s home waters.

Maritime and aerial drones can be countered with cost-effective modern medium-calibre guns planned for five new Type 31 frigates. The Type 31s are planned to forward deploy overseas to protect global British interests, but the ‘immediate and pressing threat’ of Russia could derail this. With anti-submarine Type 26 frigates under construction now allocated to Norway, the three Batch I River class vessels decommissioning in 2028, and persistent issues with submarine and destroyer availability, any remaining Royal Navy surface ships will likely need to deploy in accordance with ‘NATO first’ in defence of Europe.

Given limited resources, HM Government should therefore procure smaller, cheaper ships to provide greater global presence and better protection of British interests, as mooted for a potential Type 32 frigate. Beyond the UK’s home waters, this includes protection of military basing and intelligence infrastructure overseas, and maritime security in the Caribbean.

A potential design might include a helicopter hangar, modern anti-drone armament, and hull-mounted sonar for undersea surveillance, as built into the French ‘Patrouilleurs Hauturiers’ programme of ten vessels. Some of these capabilities could be retrofitted to the five newer River class OPVs for use either at home or further afield. In tandem, the Royal Navy should also optimise the Type 31 frigate to offer greater both offensive and defensive capabilities in the Euro-Atlantic area, rather than for a global patrol role.

Robin Potter is Academy Associate with the UK in the World Programme at Chatham House. His research focuses on policy reform and intervention to improve resilience against sub-threshold challenges.

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Recent tensions in the Middle East have exposed a deeper structural dilemma in the United Kingdom’s (UK) defence policy. Operational readiness shortfalls have undermined perceptions of British leadership, while the economic consequences of renewed instability risk further constraining defence spending. A recent research briefing from the House of Commons Library suggests that the ongoing Iran conflict will intensify inflationary pressures, eroding the real value of current defence budgets and complicating the delivery of an ambitious industrial strategy. At the same time, Britain faces a renewed alliance dilemma: a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) that must either adapt to the United States (US) under Donald Trump’s presidency, or for the possibility of no America in the alliance at all.

Despite clear British strategic intent to mobilise industry at wartime pace, defence procurement remains constrained by persistent institutional inertia and fragmentation. In practice, this exposes a tension between intent and implementation.

The UK recognises the need for faster capability generation and greater industrial mobilisation, but it attempts to achieve these objectives through national mechanisms rather than collective ones. Nevertheless, Britain does not need to invent a new procurement model. Rather, it should better employ its existing multinational frameworks.

The Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) provides such a mechanism. A dynamic UK-led coalition of ten high-trust northern European states, it has proven its value through rapid crisis response, interoperability, and credible deterrence in the High North, Baltic, and North Atlantic theatres. It also holds considerably more potential; alongside its flexible operating framework, it is a structured procurement powerhouse. Already well-aligned, the JEF could aggregate demand, and procure primarily through the NATO Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA). This would deliver shared capability at scale, fortify NATO’s northern flank, and cement British leadership in practical terms.

There is little resistance to the idea that faster, harmonious military procurement is urgent. In March 2026, the UK, Finland, and the Netherlands issued a joint statement announcing a new mechanism by 2027 to pool demand, accelerate procurement of critical capabilities such as munitions, and expand industrial capacity. Explicitly open to ‘like-minded partners’, this idea is exactly what the JEF can deliver. NSPA could give it scalable procurement.

Europe is rearming amid rising threats, but fragmented national procurement risks turning higher budgets into duplicated systems, delayed deliveries, and fragile sustainment. The JEF offers a firm basis upon which to build.

The procurement challenge and next phase of the JEF

Defence procurement in Europe suffers from three persistent flaws: duplication, procurement delays, and inadequate through-life support. Allies routinely acquire similar capabilities – e.g., maritime patrol aircraft, air defence systems, anti-submarine sensors, and secure communications – through separate national processes.

NSPA exists to improve this. Such duplication misses opportunities to reduce unit costs, can produce incompatible standards, and leaves sustainment chains fragmented across borders, which ultimately undermines operational readiness. In a contested, complex environment, operating demands seamless integration, and these inefficiencies must be avoided.

The JEF is uniquely positioned to address this. Its ten member states (Britain, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden) share converging threat perceptions and a common strategic geography. The JEF’s very purpose emphasises pooling high-readiness shared resources in support of NATO, creating fertile ground for harmonised requirements.

By identifying shared needs early, say for long-range sensors, missile defence enablers, deployable logistics, or munitions stockpiles, the JEF can aggregate demand, standardise specifications, and leverage collective scale. This turns political cohesion into military effect.

NSPA: Ready-made, already-paid

NSPA provides the ideal mechanism for the JEF. As NATO’s primary acquisition and logistics mechanism, it manages everything from initial procurement and competitive tendering to life-cycle sustainment, fuel supply, airlift, and repair services for allies and partners. All alliance members have access to NSPA by virtue of their NATO fees. It would be wasteful not to maximise its utility.

His Majesty’s (HM) Government guidance explicitly endorses NSPA for multinational projects, noting its ability to balance industrial participation while delivering economies of scale. NSPA’s track record is strong: multinational contracts for Stinger missile extensions, Allied Ground Surveillance (AGS) radar maintenance, and high-ranked repair facilities demonstrate how NSPA aggregates demand into tangible outcomes.

One of NSPA’s recent munitions procurements shows it can operate at scale. US$11 billion (£8.2 billion) was spent on various munitions, including US$5.6 billion (£4.2 billion) for Patriot missiles, which involved building a factory for their production in Germany. This is an organisation able to do the business that NATO members require.

The UK-Finland-Netherlands statement could lead directly to this. It targets joint procurement of munitions and equipment by 2027 to accelerate delivery and boost production capacity. Imagine pooled demand for air defence spares, maritime surveillance networks, digital command systems, or prepositioned logistics modules. These enablers, rather than prestige platforms, are where aggregation can yield impressive returns, resulting in lower costs, faster fielding, and sustainment resilience. NSPA’s competitive processes ensure transparency and value, while its multinational model distributes industrial benefits fairly.

Fortifying NATO’s northern flank

By building within NATO, a JEF-NSPA procurement pipeline would strengthen the alliance. Deterrence rests on interoperable, sustainable forces, capable of rapid reinforcement across domains. However, NATO’s own assessments highlight persistent gaps in demand coordination and industrial surge capacity. With increased coherence on the alliance’s northern flank, the JEF would deliver a more coherent capability package that could activate even before a crisis, from Baltic reinforcement to High North patrols.

This approach aligns seamlessly with NATO’s Defence Production Action Plan and emerging lessons from partnerships with Ukraine, such as drone sustainment and undersea defence. The UK-Finland-Netherlands idea, with its focus on munitions and industrial scaling, fits perfectly as a JEF prototype: by expanding it multilaterally through NSPA, it would create a regional force multiplier that enhances alliance-wide readiness without waiting for 32-nation consensus.

British leadership made concrete and credible

For the UK, this subject is about more than capability; it is about leadership. As the JEF’s framework nation since its inception in 2014, Britain has shaped its strategic identity and hosted key exercises. However, rhetorical leadership alone no longer suffices. The UK-Finland-Netherlands statement exemplifies the concrete action required: by launching a financing tool explicitly open to like-minded partners, Britain has already begun convening procurement cooperation among core JEF members. Folding this into a broader JEF-NSPA framework would elevate that initiative, positioning the UK as the indispensable convener for northern European defence.

This matters politically. Nordic and Baltic partners value not just solidarity, but delivery as well: coherence, shared stockpiles, reliable sustainment, and systems that actually integrate under fire. By championing aggregation from within the JEF and NATO, Britain would deepen that trust, sidestep European Union (EU)-centric funding debates where it prioritises value over access, and reaffirm its role as the continent’s agile security anchor. In an era of American strategic rebalancing and European industrial strain, such leadership would resonate from Tallinn to Tromsø.

A disciplined path forward

Implementation demands focus, not ambition. The JEF should start small, convening a procurement working group to identify achievable priority areas where needs align unequivocally. Munitions, logistics packages, secure communications, air defence enablers, and undersea surveillance could all be areas to build on existing equipment programmes. The next step would be to harmonise requirements through existing JEF channels, then route consolidated demand through NSPA tenders.

Governance would be straightforward: a JEF procurement board for prioritisation and NSPA for execution, with transparency on industrial offsets. Early wins, for instance a shared spares pipeline, build momentum; risks such as bureaucratic inertia or parochial industry lobbying are real, but would be mitigated by the bilateral precedent and NSPA’s proven track record. Over time, this could evolve into a standing JEF capability fund, mirroring the new trilateral mechanism but scaled for the full coalition.

The strategic imperative

Demand aggregation via the NSPA would transform the JEF from a promising minilateral into a European procurement vanguard. It would yield operationally relevant forces, a fortified NATO, and British leadership that delivers enduring value. The JEF has both precedent and momentum. In a continent racing to convert euros into effects, this is how northern Europe leads and wins.

This strategic logic is further reinforced by Canada’s increasing engagement with the JEF. Ottawa has recently increased defence spending to 2% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), while Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, signalled plans at the JEF Leaders’ Summit in March 2026 to deepen collaboration with the group, including on capability development. Canada’s involvement is strategically significant, not only because of mutual interests in High North security, but because it expands the scale of potential demand aggregation.

Together, the JEF and Canada account for a total defence spend of US$226 billion (£168.5 billion), representing a higher average share of GDP than the rest of European NATO. While the absolute figure remains lower than the combined spending of the other 19 European allies – US$333.3 billion (£248.6 billion) – the proportionate investment reflects a coalition of states already demonstrating strong political willingness to prioritise defence.

Such alignment creates favourable conditions for deeper procurement cooperation through NSPA. Canada’s direction for defence procurement and industry is harmonious with the JEF. It can only strengthen the group by increasing the JEF’s economic clout and enhancing its ability to act as a coherent, market-shaping procurement bloc rather than a loose aggregation of national buyers.

You can go your own way

Two further advantages arise from such a framework. First, it would expand the JEF’s capacity to support Ukraine. Aggregated procurement through existing NSPA-Ukraine coordination mechanisms would enable larger and more predictable orders to the defence industry, accelerating production while ensuring sustained delivery at lower marginal cost. The political agility of the JEF as a minilateral framework has already been demonstrated: during the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, its ten members provided security assistance equivalent to Ukraine reaching 1.53% of GDP, exceeding the 0.29% provided by the rest of European NATO. This exemplifies how an NSPA JEF-Canada framework would be uniquely positioned to mobilise higher, faster, and more strategically aligned support for Ukraine.

Second, the framework would mitigate uncertainty surrounding the long-term trajectory of American engagement in European security. Although the US maintains an annual defence budget of US$980 billion (£730.8 billion), its commitments are global in scope. By contrast, the strategic focus of a JEF-Canada grouping is regional, centred on the security of the North Atlantic, Baltic Sea, and High North.

While the US accounts for roughly 60% of total NATO defence spending, research suggests that only a small proportion of this expenditure is directed specifically towards European defence. Estimates indicate that replacing American capabilities in Europe could cost approximately US$1 trillion (£745.7 billion) over a 25 year period, or US$40 billion (£29.8 billion) per year. This scale of potential exposure underscores the strategic logic of deeper regional cooperation.

In this context, a JEF-Canada procurement framework offers a practical mechanism for reducing vulnerability to fluctuations in American commitments. By pooling resources, synchronising procurement cycles, and focusing investment on NATO’s northern and transatlantic flanks, the coalition could assume a greater share of regional security responsibilities without attempting to replicate the global military power of the US. This was the JEF’s original raison d’être at its inception in 2014.

At a moment when the transatlantic security order faces renewed uncertainty, the strategic question for European nations is no longer whether to rearm, but how to do so effectively. The JEF provides a ready-made solution. By transforming a flexible coalition into a coordinated procurement bloc, northern European allies can convert collective resolve into industrial power, and ensure that UK-led defence ambitions are converted into credible military capability.

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

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