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

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

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

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

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

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

The economic factor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

International space commitments

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

The necessity of cable repair capability

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

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

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

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

What is available today?

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

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

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

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

The sovereign fleet solution?

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

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

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

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

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

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

The personnel factor

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who threatens Britain?

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

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

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

The case for abolition taken seriously

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

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

What abolition would actually save

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

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

Why the threats still justify retention

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

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

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

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

The insurance Britain should buy

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

A targeting web is also a strategic network

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

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

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

Dependence through interoperability

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

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

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

Layers beyond Britain

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

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

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

The necessity of visible national authority

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

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

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

Coalition resilience: The harder test

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Firm but informal foundations

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

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

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

Towards a broader bilateral defence relationship

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Objections to the C7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Transforming the JEF

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

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

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

Naval posture in the Wider North

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

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

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

Operationalising warfighting capabilities

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

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

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

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

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

Building preparedness in the Wider North

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The limits of routine resilience

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

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

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

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

Making repair capacity dependable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

On land, drones favour defence

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

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

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

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

At sea, drones favour offence

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

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

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

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

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

Rebalancing defence and offence

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

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

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

Swallowing the new reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eroding international order

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

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

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

Economic statecraft and strategic leverage

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

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

The implications of deepening geopolitical competition

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

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

The 2021 Integrated Review asserted:

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

In turn, the 2025 Strategic Defence Review suggested:

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

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

Capability gaps: Allocating resources

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

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

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

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

The future of British strategic influence

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

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

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

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

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

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The United Kingdom’s (UK) migration to post-quantum cryptography is now on a timetable. The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has set three milestones: by 2028, organisations should have a migration plan covering their full estate; by 2031, their highest-priority services should be migrated; and by 2035, migration should be complete. The next two years therefore put discovery and planning at the centre of the national effort.

The strategic choice underneath that timetable is unusually clear. The NCSC will not support Quantum Key Distribution (QKD) for government or military applications, and describes Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) as the best mitigation against the quantum threat to cryptography. Its latest quantum-networking guidance goes further: a QKD implementation alone is insufficient evidence that data in transit is secure under the Cyber Assessment Framework.

That distinction should become an acquisition discipline. Choosing an algorithm answers a cryptographic question. Assuring a deployed system requires evidence about authentication, key lifecycle, control software, timing, relays, fallback behaviour, operator interfaces, and the way that these elements fail together. The NCSC roadmap understandably concentrates on discovery, planning, and migration. A programme-level artefact that assembles those wider claims into one end-to-end assurance case would make migration more governable without changing the underlying cryptographic policy.

The NCSC’s own migration guidance points to the same systems problem. It describes algorithm standards as building blocks from which protocols, products, and services still have to be constructed, and identifies difficult areas such as industrial-control protocols and the Web Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), where migration cannot be reduced to swapping one cryptographic primitive – the ‘building block’ of cryptographic programs – for another. Here is precisely where an assurance case adds value: it makes the surrounding dependencies and failure behaviour visible before an approved algorithm is mistaken for an approved system.

Why QKD still matters to Britain

The UK has good reason to retain the ability to judge technologies it has chosen not to deploy for governmental and military use. The 2023 National Quantum Strategy committed £2.5 billion of public funding from 2024 over ten years and set an ambition for Britain to become a leading quantum-enabled economy. Using the example of quantum sensing, it has been argued that the UK should prioritise in areas where it already leads. The strategic principle applies here as well: leadership includes the ability to evaluate claims made by domestic suppliers, allies, and competitors alike.

British networks will encounter those claims. BT and Toshiba operate a quantum-secured metropolitan network in London, while the European Union is building the European Quantum Communication Infrastructure (EuroQCI) – a terrestrial and satellite quantum-communications infrastructure that uses QKD and now includes dedicated testing and evaluation work aimed at certification. British forces, departments, and companies may therefore encounter products or allied systems described as quantum-secured even while the NCSC maintains a different procurement position for government and defence.

The ‘quantum-secured’ label itself is becoming less useful as architectures diversify. A vendor may use it for QKD, PQC, or a hybrid design that combines quantum and classical mechanisms. As these systems can have very different trust assumptions and failure modes, procurement therefore needs to translate the label into a specific claim: what is protected, against what threat, under what operating conditions, and with what dependencies inside the assurance boundary.

The physics provides a strong but bounded claim. In an ideal QKD protocol, interception disturbs quantum states in ways that the endpoints can detect, while the implemented system still depends on devices, calibration, classical authentication, key management, and control mechanisms. The United States (US) National Security Agency lists the consequences plainly: QKD does not authenticate the transmission source, requires special-purpose equipment, may rely on trusted relays, presents significant implementation assurance challenges, and carries denial-of-service risk.

Those limitations expose two linked attack surfaces. The first is classical and operational: authentication services and credentials, key-management software, trusted relay facilities, network orchestration, operator consoles, and the systems that decide what happens when a link degrades. The second lies in the quantum implementation: detector behaviour, source imperfections, calibration, timing side channels, and optical injection. Experimental work by the US National Security Agency has demonstrated attacks on commercial QKD equipment, including detector-blinding and timing attacks.

A security claim fails if either surface falls outside the evidence. A commander could therefore be told, accurately, that the quantum link is secure, while the conversation as a whole remains vulnerable elsewhere in the system. The US Department of War’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Quantum-Augmented Network programme illustrates why the boundary matters: it explicitly integrates quantum and classical communications infrastructure, placing the seam between them within the engineering problem.

The same logic applies to the PQC route that the UK has chosen. A cryptographic inventory can identify which algorithms and protocols are present, but it cannot establish whether key management is compromised, whether a transitional hybrid connection falls back into an unexpected mode, whether an operator is warned when protection changes, or whether an implementation behaves safely under denial. Algorithm approval and system assurance are therefore separate evidence problems, even when the algorithm choice is sound.

Goals before 2028

Britain can turn this distinction into a practical acquisition artefact. Before a system is described operationally as quantum-secured, and as departments assemble evidence for PQC migration, programmes should produce a quantum communications assurance case with four parts.

Firstly, the security claim and the trust boundary should be stated. Documents should say which property the cryptography provides; where authentication comes from; who manages keys through their lifecycle; which relay nodes or infrastructure components are trusted; and whether timing, calibration, control software, and operator displays sit inside the assessed boundary.

Secondly, classical and quantum dependencies should be named and tested together. QKD systems should demonstrate robust quantum-resistant authentication alongside the quantum channel, using mechanisms consistent with NCSC guidance or appropriately managed pre-placed symmetric keys. PQC systems should identify the protocol, implementation, and key-management dependencies around standardised algorithms. In both cases, the evidence should continue from the cryptographic primitive through to the system built around it.

Thirdly, denial and downgrade behaviour should be specified before deployment. If a quantum channel is interrupted, or a transitional connection cannot negotiate its intended protection, the system should have a pre-approved response: halt, fail over to a defined mode, or continue under an explicitly accepted risk. The operator display should show which state is active and who accepted the residual risk.

Finally, the whole system should be adversarially evaluated. Link-level measurements such as key rate, quantum bit-error rate, photon loss, or entanglement fidelity establish technical performance where they are relevant. Security evaluation should also attack authentication, key management, control software, trusted nodes, timing and calibration paths, detectors and optical interfaces, fallback logic, and the consoles that report system state.

These requirements preserve research and migration while adding an evidence gate for operational security claims. Security credit follows only when both the classical and quantum dependencies are inside one evidence package and have been tested as a system. The approach also matches the NCSC’s own judgement that a QKD label cannot serve as a substitute for evidence of data-in-transit security.

The UK has an advantage in setting that standard. It possesses a clear national cryptographic position, a large quantum research and industrial base, and a national strategy that explicitly seeks leadership in quantum standards. Indeed, it has recently been argued that domestic or tightly allied control of next-generation technologies including quantum computing is a fundamental British interest. Assurance is one way to exercise that control while allowing allies to retain different technological choices.

A British assurance standard could travel across procurement, allied interoperability, and vendor evaluation, even where the underlying architectures differ. The 2028 milestone should therefore produce more than a complete map of algorithms and migration plans: it should also establish what evidence a system must present before anyone can label it quantum-secured.

The UK has already made the difficult choice about cryptography. The next task is to make the security claim auditable.

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

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Russian activity in the High North demonstrates why data matters. Sub-threshold ‘grey zone’ actions extend to matters as seemingly innocent as fishing and research, with Russian vessels operating near military training areas, energy installations, and undersea infrastructure while retaining the protections of civilian activity. Unusual tracks, gaps in automatic identification system transmissions, or non-standard surveillance equipment may indicate intelligence collection, coercive signalling, or nothing hostile at all. The uncertainty is itself strategically useful.

The United Kingdom (UK) therefore faces a problem of discrimination as much as detection. It is not enough simply to know that a vessel passed over a cable or that a sonar has found an object. Decision-makers must determine whether something has genuinely changed; how confident they are in that assessment; and whether the evidence justifies inspection, attribution, or a military response.

Survey turns data into evidence

Gen. Sir Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord, has presented the ‘Hybrid Navy’ as a force in which crewed and uncrewed systems increase the Royal Navy’s mass, reach, and survivability. Atlantic Bastion, its North Atlantic expression, envisages a layered network of vehicles and sensors detecting hostile sub-surface activity. This is a sensible response to a distributed threat: a frigate cannot guard every cable, pipeline, or offshore installation.

The difficult step comes after collection: recognising a new object, anchor scar, disturbed sediment, or exposed cable. This requires a correctly positioned baseline collected to a hydrographic standard. Repeat data must be sufficiently comparable to distinguish real change from errors in navigation, sensor geometry, sound velocity, tides, seabed mobility, or processing. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can flag anomalies, but it cannot make poorly controlled surveys comparable or explain uncertainty to an operational commander.

Hydrography is therefore a crucial component of the Hybrid Navy’s decision architecture, not just a supporting service. A nation able to detect, document, and communicate seabed interference reduces the advantage an adversary gains from ambiguity. Surveying does not eliminate plausible deniability, but it narrows the space in which deniable action can operate.

Capacity without surrendering judgement

In Britain, the maritime industry is assembling the platforms, navigation, sensors, autonomy, and processing needed for this task. The proposed acquisition of Exail by Thales offers a conspicuous example of the consolidation of this undersea survey stack. Project CABOT’s proposed ‘Contractor Owned, Contractor Operated, Naval Oversight’ model could similarly bring commercial vessels, autonomous systems, and experienced operators into Atlantic Bastion more quickly than the Royal Navy could generate them alone.

Contracting, however, must not hollow out the state’s intelligent-customer function. Naval oversight cannot mean simply receiving a processed contact report. His Majesty’s (HM) Government should retain the competence to set survey standards, audit algorithms, assess uncertainty, protect data, and recognise when a commercial task has become an inherently military one. This is especially important as the UK’s marine-geospatial skills pipeline remains fragile. Indeed, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors has warned that shortages and inadequate educational provision constrain the protection of undersea infrastructure.

A specialist seabed reserve

The required expertise for undersea surveying already exists, but much of it sits outside defence: in the UK Hydrographic Office, universities, ports, offshore energy companies, equipment manufacturers, and survey contractors. A Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR)-style hydrographic reserve could connect that civilian community to naval operations.

The historical reference needs care. Established in 1903, the RNVR trained civilians for naval service before merging with the Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) in 1958. The useful principle is not the recreation of a separate ‘Wavy Navy’, but the deliberate recruitment of civilian expertise for defined naval tasks. In practice, this could be a specialist branch or capability within today’s RNR, consistent with defence’s wider ambition to integrate reservists, regulars, and civilian skills.

This branch could include hydrographic surveyors, geodesists, oceanographers, acoustic data specialists, marine robotics experts, and geospatial analysts. Membership should recognise verified professional competence, while naval rank and authority should reflect military responsibility rather than mirror civilian seniority. A small permanent force would maintain the training pipeline, security clearances, mobilisation roster, and links to operational commands.

Training would combine naval orientation and operational planning with secure information handling, defence data standards, and repeated exercises using representative autonomous survey data. Reservists would need to practise as teams under the naval chain of command rather than exist as a directory of experts assembled after an incident. Employer agreements, liability, availability, and conflicts of interest would have to be settled before a crisis.

In routine service, this proposed reserve could assure nationally important seabed baselines, test change-detection workflows, and scrutinise contractor outputs. During an incident, it could provide rapid survey planning, processing, and uncertainty assessment. In crisis or mobilisation, it could reinforce shore-based intelligence cells and advise commanders on what data can and cannot prove. Not every contributor would require the same service liability; volunteer and sponsored reservists could form a uniformed core supported by pre-cleared civilian specialists. Inherently military decisions would remain under uniformed command.

Societies such as the Hydrographic Society UK and Ireland could help to convene industry and academia, map competence, and develop common exercises. However, these should not command the reserve or become a recruiting agency; their value would lie in providing a neutral professional bridge to a community that defence does not routinely reach.

Conclusion

The Royal Navy already has hydrographic and meteorological specialists, and a reserve as described in this article must augment rather than displace them. Its purpose would be to give the Hybrid Navy sovereign surge capacity and an enduring ability to challenge the outputs of machines and contractors.

Uncrewed vehicles can prolong underwater presence, and commercial partners can provide scale. Reliable AI can accelerate analysis. However, these cannot independently decide whether two datasets are genuinely comparable, which anomaly matters, or what action the evidence justifies. In the sub-threshold contest over the undersea domain, data supplies the evidence, but it is people who turn the evidence into operations.

Liam Flood is a hydrographic survey professional working for Kongsberg Discovery and Honorary Secretary of the Hydrographic Society UK and Ireland. He writes here in a personal capacity.

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For the first time in a generation, the United Kingdom’s (UK) political class agrees that the British Armed Forces need to grow. What it has not agreed upon is how to pay for that growth, or how to keep the public paying for it over a decade rather than a single spending review. The debate so far has been almost entirely about levers: borrowing, taxation, and spending cuts. It has barely been about consent.

That is a mistake. Every past British rearmament that survived, from the shadow factories of the 1930s to the Cold War buildup of the 1980s, paired money with a deliberate effort to keep the country onside. Where that effort was skipped, the funding proved fragile.

The scale now under discussion is not small. A credible warfighting posture is not what has been discussed by any of the major political parties – although it has by defence think tanks. Meeting the UK’s North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) commitment and basic self-defence needs would require an army of around 100,000-110,000 regulars, a Royal Navy of 24-26 escorts and nine or ten attack submarines, and a Royal Air Force (RAF) of 12-14 fast-jet squadrons.

This would take core defence spending to roughly 4.3%-4.4% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by the mid-2030s, or around £115-£130 billion per year in 2026 prices. That figure sits well above the 3.5% NATO core pledge that Britain has already signed up to for 2035; itself a lower target that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) costs at roughly £40 billion a year in additional spending.

John Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned as Secretary of State for Defence in June 2026 specifically because His Majesty’s (HM) Treasury would not fund even that smaller ambition. The dispute preceded a change of government; Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, has since adopted a fiscal framework requiring day-to-day spending to be matched by revenue within three years, with debt falling as a share of GDP by 2029-2030.

This is not a comfortable fiscal moment to make the case for more spending. Public sector net debt stood at 94.9% of GDP in mid-2026, close to levels last seen in the early 1960s, and the OBR’s ‘Fiscal Risks and Sustainability’ report from July 2026 found that in almost all of its modelled scenarios, debt moves onto an unsustainable path from the 2040s onward. Simply stabilising debt at its current level would require a permanent fiscal tightening equivalent to the entire education budget. Any credible funding plan for rearmament has to work within that constraint – not pretend that it does not exist.

The public will pay, but only one way

Polling suggests the difficulty is not the principle of spending more on defence, but the mechanism chosen to fund it. YouGov tested 12 ways of raising the money in mid-2026; only three commanded net public support. A rise in the additional rate of income tax scored 30 points of net support: the strongest of any option tested, at 56% in favour against 26% opposed. Raising the higher rate of income tax and trimming out-of-work benefits both scored narrow positive margins.

Everything else tested – cutting the National Health Service (NHS), the schools budget, the state pension, or disability spending – scored deeply negatively, and increased borrowing specifically for defence was opposed by 52% of respondents. The lesson here is blunt: the public will pay, but only if the burden visibly falls on the wealthiest, and only if the protected services stay protected.

No single lever closes a funding gap of this size, so a workable package has to draw on several streams at once. An additional and higher rate income tax rise could raise £8-£12 billion per year. A targeted wealth tax on households worth more than £100 million would affect only around 1,000 households, having been modelled at roughly £10 billion in 2026.

Disciplined growth caps on unprotected departmental budgets and one-off ‘defence bonds’ – i.e., war bonds – to front-load capital investment in shipyards and munitions plants could supply the rest of the required funding. Indeed, defence bonds are already under serious discussion in Whitehall, championed by Andy Haldane, an adviser to Burnham, and raised by the Liberal Democrats in Parliament 25 times in 2026 thus far. Individually, none of these levers are sufficient. Together, and sequenced across three phases running to the mid-2030s, they are.

The harder half of the problem

Getting the sums to add up on paper is the easy part. The harder part is making the package survive contact with an electorate that Focaldata finds is one of the most polarised on this issue of any it has tested, even before such a scale of ambition is on the table. A government that raises taxes for defence without first securing durable consent is setting up exactly the reversal risk that should worry it most.

This is where the debate needs to change: public consent should be treated as a costed line item, not left to the Ministry of Defence’s (MOD) press office. Four measures deserve a place on the balance sheet.

First is a funded recruitment-legitimacy programme. Muslims, for example, make up only around 0.5% of the UK’s regular forces against roughly 6.5% of the population, and government-linked reporting found only around 30 recruits from over 2,000 applications by British-born Muslims completed training between 2016 and 2018. Faster security vetting, guaranteed provision for religious observance, and recruitment campaigns fronted by serving minority personnel would help to ease a personnel shortage and demonstrate that armed forces expansion is a national project, not a sectional one.

The second measure is an honest public information campaign grounded in the OBR’s own findings rather than governmental spin, fronted by credible non-partisan messengers such as serving personnel and veterans rather than ministers. Richard Hughes, Chairman of the OBR, has already told a public briefing that ‘the UK cannot afford the array of promises that are displayed to the public if you leave those unchanged, based on a reasonable assumption about growth rates in the economy and in tax revenues’. That argument deserves a wider audience than a select committee hearing.

Third is a British equivalent of Sweden’s household preparedness brochure ‘In case of crisis or war’, sent most recently to 5.2 million homes in 2024. This would convert abstract anxiety into practical agency for a cost of low tens of millions of pounds.

The fourth measure, most durable of all, is a statutory cross-party funding lock, modelled on the aid-spending law. That would raise the political cost of any future government trying to unwind the settlement.

Conclusion

The UK has repeatedly announced ambitious defence spending increases without sustaining the follow-through needed to fund them beyond a single spending review. The Defence Investment Plan allocated £15 billion over four years largely through departmental reprioritisation – a proof of concept for one funding lever at moderate scale, not a template that scales on its own. Scaling that mechanism, alongside the tax measures above and a properly funded consent effort, is achievable.

What is not achievable is a rearmament programme funded by stealth, sustained by hope, and abandoned at the next election. The persuasion budget is a rounding error against the military programme it protects. It may also be the difference between a rearmament that lasts and one that does not.

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

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The wider European defence development and production landscape faces widely acknowledged challenges related to scale and fragmentation. The most effective means of overcoming these challenges is multilateral collaboration, but this is hard to push through with so many decision-making centres involved.

As the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) two largest European defence spenders, and building on their long history of close collaboration, the United Kingdom (UK) and Germany can not only deepen their own relationship but also act as continental leaders, bringing in other countries and overcoming over-duplication. The follow-through on the Trinity House Agreement represents a timely opportunity for London and Berlin to overcome existing barriers and requirement differences to identify how and where they can catalyse shared defence industrial objectives.

A shared threat assessment

Unlike some European NATO countries further from the alliance’s borders, Britain and Germany currently have a largely similar understanding of the threats faced on the eastern flank. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has since been accompanied by a continent-wide campaign of sub-threshold warfare, which shows no signs of slowing. The two countries also face the rising threat of the influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and increased Russian and Chinese coordination, creating the possibility of a multifront conflict. Given the impact this is having on the global military posture of the United States (US), the need for a multifront mindset continues to grow.

Historically, both Berlin and London have had deep ties to Washington: the UK with its ‘special relationship’ and Germany as the host of the majority of US forces in Europe. Both are also deeply intertwined with the American defence industrial base which, should a multifront crisis erupt, Washington will mobilise towards meeting the demands of war in the Western Pacific.

This is already being seen with changes that the US has forced in the prioritisation of weapons order deliveries, delaying European countries’ orders as a result of the conflict against Iran. The UK and Germany have the potential to fill this gap in order for European NATO to ensure it has the necessary productive capacity to show the Kremlin that it could sustain a continental peer conflict. To do this, however, requires both countries to overcome outstanding barriers and, where they exist, compromise on existing requirement divergences.

Differing senses of urgency

It is clear that Berlin has now developed a greater sense of urgency than London. If Britain does not follow suit, it risks being left behind. Projected German defence spending is now set to consume one third of the federal budget by 2027. Germany is even changing its debt rules it has stood by so steadfastly for years to allow for more investment in defence. In comparison, under the 2026 Defence Investment Plan (DIP), the UK plans to spend £79.1 billion in 2029-2030, while Germany plans to spend around €184 billion (£157 billion) in 2030.

Additionally the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) provides a timeline to 2035. Many of the capability investments outlined in the two documents will come well into the 2030s. However, numerous estimates – apparently including NATO’s own – assume that the Kremlin will be able to mount a serious challenge by 2029-2030. A similar sluggish attitude has been taken in the UK towards increased defence spending: the DIP was delayed by almost a year, having initially been planned for release in the autumn of 2025. The plan is also not comprehensive: it leaves a £5 billion shortfall.

These urgency differences are not insurmountable, nor a reason against closer cooperation, but they are a hindrance. Unless Britain is willing to deliver more of a frontloaded increase in defence investment, it will miss out on near-term collaboration opportunities with European NATO’s largest defence spender. This divergent sense of urgency will also undermine both countries’ ability to bring together allies behind them. If this can be overcome, and it is ‘simply’ a matter of political choice and public diplomacy in Westminster, there are abundant opportunities for deeper collaboration.

Accelerating procurement

It is not enough to build an efficient multilateral rearmament effort; rearmament efforts need to deliver capability faster. ‘Peacetime’ timelines of multiple years from development to operational status and prolonged construction times for equipment needs to be reduced. This will necessitate a move towards investing more in lower-cost programmes and ‘80% solutions’ that can be delivered more quickly. Both the UK and Germany have experience in developing such capabilities – for example, the Raven air defence system for Ukraine.

Focusing on the bigger picture is also key to cutting through technical deliberations, preventing partners from getting lost in smaller – although important – technical and political debates over workshare and capability requirements, as seen in the delays and eventual cancellation of the French-German-Spanish next-generation fighter component of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS).

A deeper British-German relationship is critical to prevent recurring technical and political debates. More effective bilateral processes have already been established, but much remains to be done regarding unnecessarily complex regulatory systems that reduce speed through duplication, a lack of testing, and increased bureaucracy. Both countries need to work together to mitigate these issues and prioritise speed. Ultimately, overcoming potential technical and workshare disagreements will require top-down compromise from politicians in both countries.

Deep precision strike

British-German defence capability collaboration has already made headway into concrete capabilities such as Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), armoured mobility such as the Boxer, and increasingly on deep precision strike. Conversations between British and German teams have built the human and communications infrastructure to work towards milestones such as developing a 2,000+ kilometre range for deep precision strike. Looking forward, the UK will lead on producing a new long-range missile based on mature technologies, entering service around 2030, and invest in Hypersonic Glide Vehicle (HGV) technology, which Germany is taking the lead on.

Despite these strong foundations and positive steps, there are still potential barriers to the delivery of these systems, as they cannot necessarily be delivered at speed (noting the 2030 delivery estimate), nor are they immediately interoperable – requiring integration with launch platforms for example. These complex systems require survivability, manoeuvre at speed, and stealth – all of which have long lead times, pushing back delivery beyond 2030.

Deep precision strike is an expensive business; one European countries have long been reluctant to fund and over-reliant upon the US for. One of the keys to reinforcing the work underway will be to unlock more funding, either in-country or through joint funding mechanisms. When Security Action For Europe (SAFE) negotiations reopen again, reasonable access terms for Britain would go a long way in unlocking further funding for shared deep precision strike programmes.

Additional capability areas

Nuclear capabilities and the space domain represent further areas for potential British-German collaboration, specifically where dependency on the US is currently excessive. Consider space capabilities as a case in point: with both the PRC and Russia taking steps to challenge the space domain, the UK and Germany should adapt, integrating space into their strategic thinking as previously done with drones and cyber warfare.

Likewise, as Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) increasingly becomes the backbone of all military domains, closing space-based ISR gaps is critical to European NATO’s ability to operate at scale in the event that US forces and enablers are focused elsewhere. Discussions are happening with Germany on joining ODIN’S EYE, a missile early warning system funded through the European Union’s (EU) European Defence Fund.

Like deep precision strike, one of the biggest barriers to space-based capabilities is cost. Duplicating the suite of American capabilities that European NATO relies on would be prohibitively expensive, but building in a targeted selection of multilateral space-based capabilities would bolster overall alliance space posture and act as a hedge against American distraction. Germany has committed €35 billion (£30 billion) over several years but Britain is lagging behind: the DIP only committed £3.2 billion over the next four years.

Conclusion

There is a great deal of alignment between London and Berlin on national security conversations, both domestically and bilaterally. Yet, despite these similar threat assessments and the shared acknowledgement of the worsening Euro-Atlantic security environment, a divergence has emerged.

Germany clearly now has a far greater sense of urgency, as demonstrated by its fiscal and political actions. The Trinity House Agreement outlines where both countries intend to work closer together and plenty of good work has already been started, but much remains to be done. Current and future efforts would be aided greatly if the UK were to develop the same sense of urgency. Through both wider and deeper cooperation on capabilities, Britain and Germany can lead European NATO in preparing deterrence before the point of potential crisis comes.

Ellie Drake is Operations Officer at the Council on Geostrategy.

William Freer is Research Fellow (National Security) at the Council on Geostrategy.

This article is the result of a half-day conference held on 15th July 2026 in partnership with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) UK and Ireland. This was the third 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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The contemporary geostrategic environment has never been more volatile and uncertain. The international system is under sustained pressure from the self-interested actions of the states possessing the world’s three largest nuclear arsenals, and the maritime domain – the indispensable global commons – is more important than ever.

Against this backdrop, and the increased risk of North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) conflict with Russia, how can the Royal Navy exercise sea control in the North Atlantic at the moment where its size reaches a historical nadir? By any metric, it requires a huge increase in the number of platforms capable of delivering military effect at, under, and above the sea. However, the prospect of any significant increase in the sum (or share) of British taxpayers’ money allocated to conventional maritime forces seems slim.

The cost of building large, complex warships in Europe is now in the region of £2-£2.5 billion per hull, and the cost of maritime strike aircraft and specialised naval helicopters are now approaching £100 million per airframe (e.g., the F-35B Lighting II Joint Combat Aircraft and next-generation Merlin AW101). The imperative to break the vicious cycle of ever fewer numbers of ever more expensive platforms has never been clearer.

In June 2025, the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) revealed the Royal Navy’s answer to this question: a ‘New Hybrid Navy’ in which highly capable crewed submarines, warships, and aircraft are augmented with far larger numbers of remotely operated and autonomous uncrewed systems in every warfighting domain. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) in June 2026 fleshed out the ambition: a fleet of ‘state-of-the-art crewed ships networked with uncrewed surface and undersea craft’, all connected and orchestrated by a secure, high-speed ‘Maritime Fighting Web’. One eye-catching announcement was the unveiling of the plan for ‘at least six’ flexible, lower-cost Common Combat Vessels (CCVs), replacing previous proposals for a small number of highly specialised, very expensive Type 83 destroyers.

In the air domain, programmes were announced for fixed wing (Project VANQUISH) and rotary wing (Project PANTHEON) Autonomous Collaborative Platforms (ACPs), to work alongside existing Fleet Air Arm crewed aircraft as a ‘Hybrid Air Wing’. Overall, at least £1.5 billion has been profiled over the next four years to unlock this vision, as part of the £5 billion allocated for advanced uncrewed systems across defence in the DIP.

Evolution or revolution?

Executing such a major shift in maritime doctrine while simultaneously introducing untested and fast-moving technology is far from straightforward. The principle ‘crewed where necessary, uncrewed wherever possible, and integrated always’ is laudable, but much harder in its execution than it is in its design.

At its heart, this new way of warfare represents both continuity and rupture. Continuity lies in the problem set: North Atlantic sea control, protection of the United Kingdom’s (UK) nuclear deterrent, seabed infrastructure security, integrated air and missile defence, and protection of NATO’s northern flank. Rupture is the message sent by the cessation on any further work on the Type 83 destroyer – although in reality, Type 83 was never a programme to be cancelled, but merely a proposal that might have delivered the Future Air Dominance System (FADS) requirements.

This move away from ‘a small number of large, expensive ships’ is not just because of cost per hull, but also because of the necessity of increasing single points of presence vastly; to use the language of a ‘system of systems’ approach, functions once stacked on one complex platform – sense, decide, effect – are now to be spread across far more interconnected assets.

Risks and opportunities

History, however, teaches temperance of technological enthusiasm. Battleships ceded primacy to aircraft carriers only after navies (and air forces) developed doctrine and tactics, built aircrew pipelines, perfected aircraft launch and recovery procedures, and built a viable industrial base. Nuclear submarines transformed underwater endurance and reach, but required new safety cultures, shore infrastructure, and specialist crews that took four decades to build. What lessons can be drawn from these transitions?

In each case, the platform was the visible element of a deeper change in command, logistics, infrastructure, and training. Those experimenting and innovating with these transformational technologies were bold, knew the sea and the perils of operating in the middle of a huge ocean, and were not afraid to fail in order to succeed on the next try. That is the culture that will succeed in the 21st century.

However, the siren call of armchair admirals, populist podcasters, and energetic politicians with limited maritime knowledge, extrapolating lessons directly from the Black Sea to the North Atlantic, is already being seen. This is a major category error. Cheap, massed, and precise systems matter, but Britain must protect oceanic trade routes, nuclear-power ballistic missile submarine (SSBN) bastions, and NATO strike groups operating far from friendly ports. Ukraine’s success has been sea denial in an enclosed sea with small expendable craft, not the sea control that the UK requires for a massive ocean. The Hybrid Navy must remain centred on high-end crewed platforms, with uncrewed assets expanding sensing, effect, and presence.

To see true success, defence must change its delivery culture. One recent article laid down nine decision points which, in the delivery of the Hybrid Navy, necessitate ‘conscious trade-offs…each balancing the four forces that pull against each other in every choice: cost, crew, capability, and cadence’. It is difficult to argue with the logic here, as the choices described – of quality versus quantity to at-sea versus alongside maintenance – are at the heart of ensuring success.

This risk can only be mitigated by conducting the Hybrid Navy acquisition process using subject matter experts, not rusticated to delivery teams in a remote location. Now is not the time for generic programme delivery professionals, but the moment for maverick, free-thinking mariners who know the domain and will make the right calls.

Conditions for successful delivery

If the aforementioned risks are appropriately sentenced, and the ‘Defence Lines of Development’ (Training, Equipment, People, Infrastructure, Doctrine and concepts, Organisation, Information, and Logistics; alongside Safety and Security) – as unglamorous but decisive as they are – are considered accordingly, there are therefore two main areas where the conditions for successful delivery need to be set: regulatory permissions, and the culture of feedback.

Today, the safety, regulatory and policy permissions needed to operate Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USVs) larger than 24 metres routinely in British waters do not yet exist. No uncrewed vessel of this size has received either civilian (MCA) or defence (DMR) operating clearance; neither civilian classification societies nor the Naval Authority and Technical Group have yet approved a USV design. Stories abound of Kafkaesque restrictions and illogical conditions being applied to USVs, which prevents even the most benign of activities at sea, with the siren call of ‘more safety’ missing the very reason as to why these vessels exist.

This culture cannot be solved through tweaking paperwork nor attempting to convince (well-meaning and hard-working) maritime regulators to take more risk. The first condition that must therefore be set is to maximise the freedom that defence already has in legislation to allow the Hybrid Navy to learn by doing, with operators given the freedom to fail safely without worrying about interminable paperwork and shoreside meddling from people incentivised to say ‘no’.

Secondly, a lesson from Ukraine that is relevant to the Hybrid Navy is the power of the feedback loop. Against Russia’s full-scale invasion, defence technology companies equipping the Armed Forces of Ukraine aim for the ‘rule of six’: six hours to get operator feedback to the manufacturer, six days to get any required software update applied in the field, six weeks to get hardware changes deployed back to the front line, and six months to replace any given system completely. By comparison, feedback cycles on most British defence programmes are often measured in months or years. Software and hardware upgrades can take years, if they happen at all.

The Hybrid Navy must adopt the former model, embedding an evergreen feedback loop into the system from the outset, using closed messaging groups, informal channels of communications, and incentivised manufacturers.

Will it work?

The benefits of successfully delivering a Hybrid Navy are numerous and easy to elucidate: distributed UK sensors and persistent uncrewed presence can offset crewed hull availability shortfalls, and increased mass without proportional crew growth eases the frontline people recruitment and retention problems.

In testing the hypothesis, hybrid war games are claimed to have delivered a substantial uplift in combat mass and roughly threefold missile capacity for a North Atlantic contest. There seems little other route by which Britain can sharpen its conventional deterrence and introduce a genuine wartime level of physical presence at sea, but history’s lesson is blunt. Naval revolutions (many of which were the UK’s to trigger) reward those who are bold and confident in their planning, but it is imperative to learn from their failures.

R. Adm. (rtd.) James Parkin CB CBE served in the Royal Navy for 28 years, primarily at sea as a frontline warfare officer. From 2021 to 2025, he worked in Navy Command HQ as Director Develop.

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

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The United Kingdom’s (UK) defence capability is approaching breaking point. Successive cuts to defence spending since the end of the Cold War mean that Britain’s strategic ambitions are outpacing capabilities. The Royal Air Force (RAF) has fewer jets than it did a decade ago, the Royal Navy is struggling to keep the nuclear Continuous At-Sea Deterrent (CASD) operable, and the British Army is at its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars.

Gen. Sir Richard Barrons, co-author of the 2025 Strategic Defence Review (SDR), warned as far back as 2023 that the UK only has enough munitions stockpiled to sustain a high-intensity conflict for about a week. What is more, Prof. John Bew, former Foreign Policy Adviser to 10 Downing Street, has recently warned that Andy Burnham, Prime Minister, could face a major international military crisis within a matter of weeks.

The case for rearmament has never been stronger. The Defence Investment Plan (DIP) is a step in the right direction, and news that the Burnham administration intends to meet the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) spending target of 3.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2035 is certainly welcome. Much of this new investment will (quite rightly) be focused on rebuilding Britain’s depleted weapons stockpiles, purchasing new equipment, and investing in future technologies that will be crucial to winning the next conflict. However, while the political rhetoric is positive, it is not aligning with reality.

Innovation nation?

The UK has a long history of being at the forefront of defence innovation. As seen during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, successfully leveraging new technologies such as drones and Artificial Intelligence (AI) often translates into success on the battlefield.

Despite the examples of Ukraine and its historical pedigree, Britain is not sufficiently investing in future defence technology at the scale and pace needed. A report from data analysis firm Beauhurst suggests that while overall investment into British defence companies has increased since the commencement of the Kremlin’s invasion, funding into innovative ‘defence tech’ companies has actually fallen, from 55 deals worth £313 million in 2022 to 41 worth £91 million in 2025 – a drop of 71%.

This is not just a case of investors getting cold feet. Non-dilutive public sector grant funding for defence tech firms has also fallen. While the value of grant funding into defence tech firms doubled in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from £49.2 million in 2022 to £101 million in 2024, funding dried up in 2025, with Beauhurst reporting a 74% drop in year-on-year funding into the sector valued at only £25.9 million. This marked the lowest level of grant funding into British defence tech firms since 2016’s £11.7 million.

Why does this matter? For defence tech businesses, developing a promising product is only the beginning. The real challenge is surviving long enough to turn that technology into a dependable contract. Major defence platform contracts take an average of six years to award, while even modular technology upgrades typically require around three years. For smaller companies with limited reserves and little recurring revenue, this creates a prolonged gap between building a working prototype and generating meaningful commercial income.

Nor does winning a place on a defence programme guarantee timely delivery. A National Audit Office (NAO) review found cumulative delays on Ministry of Defence (MOD) projects were equivalent to more than 21 years in 2021 alone. More recently, only two of the MOD’s 49 major projects were assessed as both on time and within budget. This is a longstanding problem: a review of defence procurement in 2009 found 40% of projects overran cost expectations and 80% were delivered late.

These delays are inconvenient for major contractors, but potentially existential for emerging defence tech firms. Most Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) do not sell directly to the MOD, instead entering the market through supply chains controlled by large prime contractors. This weakens their visibility over future contracts, delays revenue and increases the amount of working capital needed before a product reaches deployment.

This helps to explain why falling equity and grant funding matter so much. Defence tech firms are being asked to finance years of research, testing, regulatory compliance, and procurement uncertainty at the same time that the capital available to span that period is retreating. Without patient funding, otherwise viable companies may abandon military applications, concentrate on civilian customers, or move overseas in search of clearer demand.

Growing dependence on foreign capital

The retreat of capital from British defence tech companies is not without consequences. Beyond the immediate impact on the economic and innovative opportunity cost of businesses not receiving much needed scaling capital, it has also left the UK uniquely reliant on foreign capital to finance the technology which could serve as the guarantor of sovereignty in the years ahead.

Beauhurst data shows that investment into innovative British defence technology companies is becoming increasingly internationalised. In 2015, around two thirds of investment came from UK-based investors. By 2025, that figure had fallen to around one third, with growing participation from Commonwealth and NATO-aligned investors, particularly those based in the United States (US).

This is particularly apparent for some of Britain’s most promising and strategically important defence tech firms. In June 2026, London-based maritime drone manufacturer Kraken Technology Group (KTG) secured £130 million through a major equity deal. This deal transformed KTG into the UK’s latest tech unicorn, but it would not have been possible without foreign investment: of the ten investors in KTG, only two were British funds.

Part of the problem lies in the structural barriers facing defence investors: slow and uncertain procurement cycles; Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) funding restrictions; and a shortage of late-stage capital across Europe. These weaknesses have left the UK increasingly dependent on overseas investors to finance technologies, with direct implications for its future security.

This dependence is most pronounced in relation to the US. American investors are not always the most frequent backers of British defence tech companies, but when they do invest, they tend to write much larger cheques. The average deal involving a US-based funder is significantly larger than one backed by European Union (EU)-based investors, and almost four times the size of a domestically funded round.

American capital has undoubtedly helped British companies to develop and scale technologies that might otherwise have struggled to secure funding. However, relying on it so heavily carries strategic risks. Investment can influence where companies expand, where intellectual property is held, and ultimately which country captures the economic and military value created by British innovation. The answer is not necessarily to turn away from US investors, but to rebuild the UK’s own capacity to finance strategically important companies.

Conclusion

Britain cannot rebuild its military strength through headline spending commitments alone. The technologies shaping modern warfare need patient capital, predictable grant funding, and a procurement system capable of moving promising products from prototype to deployment before their developers run out of money. Overseas investment, particularly from trusted allies, will remain valuable, but it should complement rather than substitute British capacity for financing important companies.

The DIP offers an opportunity for the UK to close this gap, but only if funding reaches beyond established primes and into the emerging businesses driving innovation. Otherwise, Britain risks entering the next crisis with the ideas to compete but neither the capital nor commercial pathways needed to get them into the field.

Callum Newton is an Associate Director at Beauhurst Insights, where he leads the team’s work with public sector organisations and institutional investors. He specialises in analysing the financial, fundraising, and innovation activity of private companies, with a particular focus on the UK’s defence tech landscape.

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Since February 2022, the strategic centre of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has moved decisively eastward. The Madrid and Vilnius summit declarations, the accessions of Finland and Sweden, the Permanent Structured Cooperation arrangements, and the forward-deployed brigades in the Baltic states represent the alliance’s most significant reorganisation since the end of the Cold War. Each step has been necessary, and proportionate to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

The corollary has been less visible. NATO’s attention to its southern flank has quietly diminished. No coherent doctrine for the eastern Mediterranean has emerged from recent summits, with the most recent one in Ankara settling this point. The strategic terrain in the region is shifting in ways that the alliance is barely tracking, and the United Kingdom (UK), whose most enduring forward presence sits in that theatre via the Royal Air Force (RAF) air stations on Cyprus, has not articulated a contribution to closing the gap, despite the Sovereign Base Areas giving it a permanent operational stake in the region that no other alliance member matches.

Post-Brexit, Britain has bilateral flexibility in the region that European Union (EU) member states do not, being able to develop relationships without European-level coordination. The UK-Greece Strategic Bilateral Framework and bilateral engagement with Egypt indicate that this flexibility is being used. What has not yet been built is the strategic framework that would unify these relationships into a coherent regional posture.

The Turkish factor

Türkiye’s autonomous strategic posture means that NATO planning cannot assume Ankara’s alignment on regional issues. For years, tension was expressed in the air, with airspace violations over the Aegean and periodic simulated dogfights between Greek and Turkish aircraft. However, the 2023 Athens Declaration on Friendly Relations and Good-Neighbourliness established a bilateral framework for managing disputes, and the reduction in incidents since has been marked. The improvement is real, but also bilateral, resting on the political will of two administrations and unaccompanied by any alliance-level mechanism. The underlying disagreements over the continental shelf, Cyprus, and hydrocarbon rights remain unresolved, and NATO has developed no means of addressing them should the present détente falter.

This autonomy should not be mistaken for distance from Washington. Turkish bilateral standing with the United States (US) is presently rising rather than falling. That is a reasonable return for a state which has carried significant alliance burdens in Syria and acted as mediator in Gaza and Iran, but it carries a structural consequence: a Türkiye whose interests are well served bilaterally has correspondingly less incentive to invest in multilateral southern flank frameworks. The task is therefore to make such frameworks worth Türkiye’s participation, rather than to lament their absence.

Britain’s tripartite contribution

A British contribution to the southern strategy missing from NATO doctrine would have three pillars. The first is a UK-led trilateral with Egypt and Greece on Suez-Red Sea maritime security. Egypt holds the Suez Canal; Greece holds the EU’s southeastern maritime frontier and the partnership with Cyprus; and Britain holds the Sovereign Base Areas and operational naval capacity demonstrated through recent Red Sea deployments. A formal annual trilateral summit, permanent working group on maritime security, and joint exercises drawing on each nation’s naval and air assets would bind these three states into a regional security architecture that none of them can build alone.

Such a framework must also reckon with the Turkish Straits. Türkiye controls the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles, and exercises that control under the 1936 Montreux Convention, affording Ankara a legally recognised custodial role over Black Sea access. It exercised that authority in 2022, determining that Article 19 of the Convention was engaged by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and restricting the transit of belligerent warships accordingly.

A trilateral treating Turkish cooperation as incidental would be attempting basin-wide maritime security while disregarding one of its two principal gateways. Sequencing matters more than initial membership: a working UK-Egypt-Greece format that demonstrates value, and to which Turkish participation on Straits and wider maritime security is subsequently extended, is more achievable than a four-way negotiation begun cold. Britain is uniquely well-placed to manage that sequence.

The second contribution is deeper naval cooperation with the Greek and Cypriot navies. This would encompass joint exercises building on the existing UK-Greece Strategic Bilateral Framework, intelligence sharing on Russian and Chinese naval movements in the basin, and formalised basing access. Bilateral defence relationships already exist. What is missing is the operational tempo that turns bilateral cooperation into regional deterrence.

The third British contribution is treating the eastern Mediterranean energy axis as a strategic concern, not a commercial one. The natural gas politics of the eastern basin involve EU member states, an alliance member excluded from the consortium and contesting its maritime legal basis (Türkiye), and Israeli onshore infrastructure that is increasingly subject to threat. A British role in convening East Mediterranean Gas Forum security discussions, and in deploying Royal Navy capability to protect undersea infrastructure, would extend NATO’s southern flank doctrine into a domain where the alliance has had no operational role. The precedent already exists in the BALTIC SENTRY mission, established in January 2025 after a sequence of cable-cutting incidents in the Baltic Sea. The Mediterranean equivalent has not yet been built.

The southern flank after Ankara

The Ankara summit’s outcomes bear directly on the argument presented in this article. The six-paragraph Ankara Summit Declaration reaffirms Article 5 and the 360-degree approach to deterrence. It records 2025’s defence investment commitment from The Hague, announces more than US$50 billion (£37.5 billion) in new procurement, and pledges €70 billion (£59.8 billion) in military support to Ukraine for 2026. It states that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon, and calls for freedom of navigation to be respected in the Strait of Hormuz. It does not mention the eastern Mediterranean.

The omission is all the more striking considering where the summit was held. Ankara is the capital of NATO’s principal Mediterranean power, and the Declaration’s only maritime security commitment concerns the Strait of Hormuz rather than the basin in which two alliance members contest each other’s continental shelf. NATO has found language for freedom of navigation in the Gulf, but none for the waters in which its own members dispute maritime boundaries.

That said, the southern flank was not absent from Ankara, being present in a different form. The most consequential southern flank business conducted at the summit was bilateral: Donald Trump, President of the US, signalled serious consideration of an F-35 Lightning II Joint Combat Aircraft sale to Türkiye, although the transfer remains blocked by a legislative requirement that America certifies Türkiye no longer possesses the Russian S-400 missile system. Additionally, both Greece and Israel have voiced objections, and can be expected to press them in the US Congress.

This mechanism deserves attention. A question bearing directly on the Aegean military balance was raised between Washington and Ankara, and the NATO states most immediately affected by it have no forum in which to be heard other than Congress. An alliance member lobbying American legislators against a weapons transfer to another NATO country is not evidence of a functioning southern flank architecture. It is evidence that no such architecture exists, and that in its absence the smaller Mediterranean allies are reduced to working through Washington rather than through NATO itself.

This is not to say that the southern flank is unimportant to NATO. Rather, it is handled bilaterally and transactionally, and remains unarticulated at the level of collective commitment. The 360-degree formula has been alliance language since 2016, and still carries very little operational content south of the Bosphorus.

Here is where the British position is genuinely distinctive. EU engagement with Ankara is constrained by the vetoes available to Greece and Cyprus as member states, and American engagement is bilateral and transactional by habit. The UK is bound by neither. It is a guarantor power under the 1960 Treaty of Guarantee, maintains functional relationships with Athens and Ankara simultaneously, and sits outside the institutional machinery that makes Turkish participation so difficult to arrange.

Convening across the Greek-Turkish divide is not a British aspiration as much as a British comparative advantage. No other ally holds the same combination, although when a drone struck RAF Akrotiri on 1st March 2026, France responded by deploying anti-drone systems to Cyprus and Greece – publicly committing to their defence. On 8th June 2026, France and Cyprus formalised this cooperation by signing a Status of Forces Agreement, establishing the legal framework for a French military presence on the island. France has built this framework from a standing start. The UK, which has held the Sovereign Base Areas and its presence in Akrotiri for decades, has yet to do equivalent strategic work with Cyprus, Greece, or Egypt, and from a far stronger institutional base.

The eastern Mediterranean is where NATO’s next decade will be tested. Ankara has confirmed that the test will not be met by declaration. Britain has the standing to shape it, and now has rather clearer evidence that no one else intends to do so.

Ethan Gallant is an open-source intelligence analyst working on sanctions networks, corporate ownership, and strategic infrastructure. He publishes methodology-led investigative casework at ethangallantosint.substack.com and is a member of Chatham House and RUSI.

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The past decade has witnessed a growing number of incidents in space that would once have seemed extraordinary. Russian satellites have conducted increasingly sophisticated rendezvous and proximity operations, most recently against an ICEYE Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Earth observation satellite allegedly used by Ukraine. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has also demonstrated comparable capabilities while notably expanding its counterspace portfolio. Electronic interference with satellite navigation and communications has not only become more frequent, but it has also become endemic in some parts of the world, such as in the Baltic region and the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, cyber operations against commercial and government space systems have become a routine feature of international competition.

Collectively, these activities are commonly described as examples of ‘grey zone’ warfare; hostile actions deliberately calibrated to remain below the threshold of conventional armed conflict. The phrase has become part of the contemporary strategic lexicon, particularly in discussions of space, where outright military confrontation carries enormous risks of escalation.

Yet, the growing popularity of the term raises an uncomfortable question. What if grey zone warfare is not the problem at all? What if it is simply the latest expression of something far older?

The United Kingdom’s (UK) challenge is not that Russia and the PRC have discovered a revolutionary new way of competing. Nor is it that Britain lacks capable armed forces, intelligence agencies, or commercial space companies. Rather, the greater danger is political. After more than three decades in which many assumed that major power rivalry had become increasingly constrained by globalisation, international institutions, and economic interdependence, the UK risks misinterpreting the normal condition of international politics. Space merely exposes that misunderstanding perhaps more clearly than other domains.

The idea that strategic competition exists somewhere between peace and war is itself somewhat misleading. History offers remarkably few examples of prolonged periods in which great powers simply coexisted without persistent rivalry. Throughout the 19th century, the Cold War, and indeed much of recorded history, states continuously sought to advance their interests through diplomacy, intelligence, economic pressure, technological competition, proxy conflicts, and military signalling. Open warfare was only one manifestation of a broader strategic contest.

If anything, the historical anomaly was the three decades following the end of the Cold War. The overwhelming predominance of the United States (US), combined with expanding global markets and international institutions, encouraged the erroneous belief that geopolitical competition had become progressively less central to international affairs. The expectation emerged – sometimes explicitly, often implicitly – that strategy itself had become less important than economic integration and crisis management.

As the late Colin S. Gray often reminded us about strategic affairs, bad times have an unfortunate habit of returning. Space illustrates this return with unusual clarity because it has become indispensable to modern civilisation. Military operations, financial markets, global communications, navigation, weather forecasting, and Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) all depend upon space-based services. At the same time, these systems remain deeply interconnected. The destruction of satellites risks generating debris that threatens all space users, while attacks on strategic space assets carry profound implications for conventional military operations and potentially nuclear deterrence.

Britain’s adversaries therefore increasingly seek political advantage without provoking outright war. Cyber operations, electronic warfare, co-orbital satellite manoeuvres, growing commercial dependency, legal ambiguities, and intelligence collection offer opportunities to influence an adversary’s behaviour while managing escalation risks. This is not evidence that the character of strategy has fundamentally changed. Rather, it reflects the enduring logic of competition adapting to a domain in which the costs of direct military confrontation are exceptionally high.

Most analyses of these developments focus upon satellites, launch vehicles, or counterspace capabilities. Important though these are, they are not the true object of strategic competition. The real target is political judgement.

Persistent competition in space rarely seeks immediate military victory. Instead, it seeks to influence how political leaders interpret risk, assess escalation, and exercise strategic choice. A co-orbital satellite manoeuvre may reveal technical capability, but it also tests political resolve. Electronic interference with navigation systems imposes practical costs, but it also normalises behaviour that might previously have been considered unacceptable. Ambiguous actions create uncertainty not simply within a military headquarters, but within governments themselves.

Viewed individually, such incidents often appear too limited to justify a significant response. Viewed collectively, they reveal something rather different: a sustained strategic campaign designed to shape political decision-making over time.

This distinction matters because the UK does not principally suffer from a deficit of military capability. British military and intelligence organisations possess an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the challenges posed by adversarial space operations. Moreover, commercial space innovation is accelerating and, in turn, increases the attack surfaces by which adversaries might compete. Indeed, the UK has recognised space as a critical operational domain within the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) and is planning to invest accordingly.

The more difficult question lies at the political level, where there appears to be a persistent tendency to interpret strategically coherent campaigns as isolated tactical incidents. The instinctive response has often been one of restraint: to avoid unnecessary escalation, to preserve diplomatic space, to take what might be described as the strategic high road.

Restraint is not in itself a weakness. Indeed, it is often a hallmark of responsible statecraft. The difficulty arises, however, when it is not accompanied by an equally coherent strategy for shaping an adversary’s behaviour. Adversaries probe, responses remain cautious, political thresholds become clearer, and further probing follows. Over time, the cumulative effect is not dramatic defeat but something considerably more subtle: the gradual erosion of strategic freedom of manoeuvre.

This process extends well beyond space. It is visible in cyberspace, maritime coercion, economic statecraft, information operations, and technological competition. Space simply provides perhaps the clearest illustration because the political consequences of apparently minor technical actions are often immediate and globally palpable.

The objective of persistent strategic competition is therefore not necessarily to compel surrender or achieve decisive military victory. It is the progressive narrowing of an opponent’s range of politically acceptable choices while preserving one’s own. Success is measured not by territory captured or forces destroyed, but by the gradual reduction of strategic freedom.

This should concern Britain because strategic freedom should be one of its greatest national assets. The UK’s influence has historically rested not only upon military capability but upon the ability to combine diplomacy, intelligence, commerce, alliances, and technological innovation into coherent statecraft. The challenge posed by contemporary strategic competition is not that these instruments have disappeared, but that they risk being employed reactively rather than proactively.

The language of grey zone warfare is therefore useful only up to a point. It describes certain activities, but it risks obscuring the larger strategic reality. The challenge facing Britain is not to prepare for an occasional category of conflict that sits somewhere between peace and war. Rather, it is to recognise that persistent strategic competition has always been the historical norm, and that space is simply the latest arena in which this enduring logic is being expressed.

The UK does not need to rediscover strategic thinking because space has become contested. It needs to rediscover strategic thinking because bad times – history – have returned.

The greatest danger is not that Britain’s competitors have developed a revolutionary new form of warfare. It is that they have remained students of strategy while the UK has, at times, behaved as though sustained geopolitical competition were an interruption to normal, benign international politics rather than its enduring competitive condition. The most immediate task is therefore not to develop a new vocabulary for competition, but to recover an older strategic understanding: that rivalry among major powers is continuous, that political judgement remains the decisive instrument of statecraft, and that the ultimate purpose of strategy is to preserve a state’s freedom to choose its own course in an increasingly contested world.

Dr John B. Sheldon is a Founding Partner of AstroAnalytica Ltd., a boutique space strategy consultancy headquartered in London.

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

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On 28th July, the Pentagon launched a six-month review of the United States’ (US) military footprint in Europe. This is likely to be the most consequential reassessment of American force posture on the continent for a generation. Although the Trump administration has stated that Europe remains ‘strategically and culturally vital to the United States’, this does not mean that the current force posture will endure. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, Commander US European Command (EUCOM), has already warned allies to expect force reductions.

Washington is trying to resolve a key strategic dilemma: how to maintain credible deterrence against Russia while reallocating military resources to prevent Chinese military dominance in the Indo-Pacific, but without undermining the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s (NATO) political cohesion – its centre of gravity.

The US has described its preferred end-state as ‘NATO 3.0’, under which European allies assume primary responsibility for their conventional defence while America concentrates on strategic enablers and deterrence, and frees up its forces for employment elsewhere.1 This reflects Washington’s assessment that European allies already possess a substantial conventional military advantage over Russia. Additionally, the US would continue to provide extended nuclear deterrence.

A thorough review may well lead to a more acceptable division of transatlantic labour. However, although Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of War, told the Ankara summit that the review results were not predetermined, he also linked the review to what he characterised as European resistance to unrestricted American access to air stations during operations against Iran. Furthermore, if pledged European military investment fails to keep pace with probable US force reductions, any precipitous American posture change risks weaker deterrence, increased scope for Russian coercion, and a decline of US influence in Europe.

This is not the Trump administration’s first attempt to reduce the US military presence in Europe. In 2020, during his first term, Donald Trump, President of the US, ordered plans to withdraw approximately 12,000 personnel from Germany, although the decision was subsequently reversed by Joe Biden during his presidency. Trump’s current initiative represents less a radical departure from the past than the revival of a longstanding objective, albeit in a markedly different strategic environment. Waiting for Trump’s current term to end in the hope for a change in American direction is unwise; Washington’s shift in focus towards the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is generational and bipartisan.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine prompted the largest reinforcement of US forces in Europe since the end of the Cold War. EUCOM today comprises more than 80,000 military and civilian personnel, divided between around 65,000 permanently based in Europe (mainly in Germany) and the remainder rotated in and out for operations and training. This has decreased from a peak of around 100,000 in the immediate wake of the Kremlin’s commencement of its invasion.

Grynkewich told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he has three priority missions: to secure the strategic approaches to the continental US, in particular the Atlantic and Arctic; to project combat power in and beyond Europe; and to position NATO to defend and deter against external aggression. Each mission is undertaken in conjunction with America’s European allies. His overlapping responsibilities show why the review must extend beyond simplistic arguments about troop numbers. It must determine which of these priority missions, in whole or in part, European allies can assume, and which will continue to require unique US capabilities.

Recent operations against the Russian ‘shadow fleet’, Iranian nuclear facilities, and Daesh affiliates in Africa all relied on American bases in Europe and close cooperation with European allies. The review must consider not only how many troops and facilities are to remain in the European theatre, but also which capabilities must remain there if the US is to continue to project combat power into neighbouring theatres.

Before the review was launched, Washington began adjusting its force posture. A rotational US Army Brigade Combat Team (BCT) returned to the US at the end of 2025 without replacement. The Pentagon cancelled the planned deployment of another BCT to Poland, although Trump reversed that decision. The administration also announced the withdrawal of 5,000 personnel from Germany, a move widely interpreted as a response to Berlin’s criticism of Washington’s operations against Iran. Even more strategically significant was its decision to cancel its previous commitment to deploy long-range missiles to Germany periodically, including ground-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles.

These reductions illustrate a wider problem: European allies are being encouraged to assume greater responsibility for their own defence, but their planning is complicated if US deployments can be announced, cancelled, or reversed with little or no consultation.

Before his re-election, Trump’s officials briefed that as part of a planned radical reorientation of NATO, the US would maintain its existing airpower and bases in the UK, Germany, and Turkey, as well as its naval forces. Any reductions would be focused on land warfare capabilities such as infantry, armour, logistics, and artillery.

The most likely outcome of the review is a leaner American presence based on nuclear deterrence, strategic enablers, intelligence, Command and Control (C2), strategic mobility, rotational deployments, and naval, air, and special forces. This posture would allow the US to contribute to deterrence and surge forces in a crisis while projecting power further afield. The review is therefore likely to reduce those conventional capabilities that European allies can plausibly replace over the next decade while preserving those capabilities that remain uniquely American.

If this logic is followed through, an adapted US force posture would re-balance its capabilities as follows:

However, the axe may go deeper. Before Ankara, Trump mused about cutting troops in Europe by a third before settling on a review. This would reduce force levels to those before Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, as urged by some American think tanks.

There are several strategic risks. Members of Congress have expressed concern about any reduction of a ‘robust’ US troop presence in Europe while the conflict in Ukraine continues and also about the risk of nuclear proliferation by allies due to a perceived weakening of the American commitment to European security. Congress has prohibited use of Department of War funds for reducing troop levels below 76,000, selling or handing back EUCOM sites, or relinquishing the role of Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR). Similar provisions are in the draft 2027 National Defence Authorisation Act, currently stalled in the Senate.

Signalling retrenchment of conventional US support in Europe to incentivise America’s allies to spend more is one thing. However, as David Blagden, Associate Professor of International Security and Strategy at the University of Exeter, has argued, the US has ‘turned actively predatory’. It has issued threats over Greenland, imposed tariffs, insulted allied contributions to US-led operations, and harmed European economic security while simultaneously demanding that its European allies must be subordinate to Washington and continue to buy American equipment. If the US remains predatory and European governments cease to believe American commitments to continental security are credible, they will begin to hedge away from the US – ‘the reaction to belittlement is likely to simply [sic] be more defiance’.

In sum, the central question for the review is not how many American troops remain in Europe, but which military functions the US should continue to perform itself and which Europeans must provide for themselves in the future. If the review produces a coherent division of labour, underpinned by sustained European investment and credible American strategic commitment, NATO can emerge stronger despite a smaller US footprint. If reductions become strategically incoherent or are used to coerce allies politically, however, Washington risks encouraging the strategic hedging away from America that it seeks to avoid.

John Foreman CBE is an independent consultant specialising in Russia, Ukraine, and Euro-Atlantic security. He served as UK Defence Attaché to Kyiv (2008-2011) and Moscow (2019-2022).

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

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