Britain is operating a “Swiss cheese” military which urgently needs to close gaps in its capabilities – ranging from threadbare munitions stockpiles to rebuilding the Royal Navy – if it is to be able to confront Vladimir Putin by 2030 and beyond, according to defence insiders.
In his incendiary resignation letter, outgoing defence secretary John Healey force-fed Sir Keir Starmer his own words by citing a warning delivered this month by the Prime Minister that Russia could attack NATO “as soon as 2030”. It is a doomsday deadline, which Healey strongly implied the UK was in danger of not being able to meet.
The details of the troubled and troublesome Defence Investment Plan (DIP), the 10-year blueprint which will outline what and how the UK intends to spend to overhaul the armed forces, remain under wraps as wrangling continues at the highest levels of Whitehall over just what the UK needs to protect itself and what it can afford to do so. In the meantime, Washington is pressing ahead with reducing the US military presence in Europe.
Experts and insiders have outlined a list of priorities, and delayed projects in pressing need of a green light, which they say are vital if Britain is to be able to offer a coherent – rather than what one defence source described as a “dangerously piecemeal” – response to the threat posed by a bellicose Russia.
As the source put it: “We want to tell ourselves we have a Swiss army knife military with the tools to punch above our weight. The truth is that right now it more resembles a Swiss cheese.
“There are capability gaps, some of them quite basic, which mean there is a risk our ability to defend against a Russian attack [on Nato] would be dangerously piecemeal. We need to address that very quickly now.”
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) insisted that the DIP, currently being scrutinised by Healey’s successor, Dan Jarvis, will ensure UK forces have the weaponry they need. A spokesperson said: “The Defence Investment Plan will be crucial to ensuring our personnel have the kit and technology they require. The Defence Secretary is working through the detail now so that the plan meets the needs of our Armed Forces.”
Munitions factories
Any doubt that there is considerable nervousness in the upper reaches of both Government and the armed forces about the depth of Britain’s war-fighting ability has been discomfortingly dispelled.
In 2024, John Spellar, a former Labour defence minister, disclosed an American estimate that the British Army would run out of munitions after just 10 days of entering a war.
Just three months ago, General Sir Richard Barrons, a former senior commander and a co-author of last year’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), said the army was so depleted that the limit of its capabilities would be to “seize a small market town on a good day”.
In military parlance, the UK is suffering from a lack of “magazine depth”, and it is a shortfall which the Government has already recognised.
Upon publication last June of the SDR – the key document designed to act as a template for just how the UK should confront a world of geopolitical uncertainty and sharply rising threat – ministers committed themselves to spending £1.5bn on six new “energetics and munitions” factories. They also set a target of building a stockpile of 7,000 long-range munitions such as cruise missiles and precision artillery rounds for use in a time of war.
The problem, according to experts, is that there is insufficient evidence that the required industrial capacity will be in place any time soon. As the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) think-tank put it this week: “New missile and munition production remains an aspiration.”
The Government has announced a series of “investment windows”, starting in August this year, whereby companies can bid for up to £45m at a time to build munitions plants. But, to date, none of the six new facilities promised last June is out of the ground and questions about the scale of production remain.
The opening of a separate new facility in Glascoed, Monmouthshire, for producing artillery shells has been delayed after a decision to double its capacity. Once in production, the automated factory owned by defence giant BAE Systems will churn out some 80,000 shells a year – a 16-fold increase on current levels.
But this is considerably less than the 1.1 million annual capacity of a new plant being opened in Germany by arms manufacturer Rheinmetall next year.
When the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was challenged last week on progress in building its stockpile of 7,000 missiles and projectiles, it said only that the DIP would address the matter.
6G fighter jets – and drones
Japan, along with Italy, are partners with the UK in the Global Combat Aircraft Programme (GCAP), the project to build a so-called sixth-generation fighter jet to replace the RAF’s increasingly ageing fleet of Eurofighter Typhoons by the mid-2030s.
The new aircraft, to be called Tempest in the UK, promises much. It will have a bigger range, carry more weaponry and be fully stealthy compared to its Eurofighter predecessor. It is also highly likely to have the capability to operate with swarms of drones to provide air superiority at depth. The RAF is projected to acquire somewhere between 50 and 70 Tempests.
Described as a ‘6G’ supersonic stealth fighter, the Tempest is set to join the RAF fleet from 2035, replacing the Typhoon (Photo: BAE Systems/SWNS)The issue is that with a joint bill put as high as £100bn, it is not entirely clear whether Britain has decided it can afford such an “exquisite” piece of kit and this is creating disquiet among London’s partners. Douglas Barrie, a military aviation specialist at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said: “Delays in London’s release of further funding for the programme have already unnerved Tokyo.”
The MoD insisted that GCAP remained firmly part of the UK’s procurement plans, with Starmer and his Japanese opposite Sanae Takaichi expected to confirm their shared commitment after meeting over the weekend.
Separately, combat drone manufacturers who have set up shop in the UK, in particular around a new defence cluster in Swindon, have expressed increasing concern at delays in receiving orders that would be needed to provide British forces with adequate supplies to confront a battle-hardened adversary like Russia.
Ukraine, which has proved a crucible for the production and deployment of drones in such a way as to enable it to dramatically hobble the advances of Moscow’s numerically superior forces, is currently estimated to have an annual production capacity of as many as eight million.
An executive with one Swindon-based producer told The i Paper earlier this month: “We could provide maybe 20,000 drones a year. It would only be a fraction of what is needed, but still, we are waiting to hear from the MoD about how many they want and when.”
Such bottlenecks are symptomatic of what one leading expert describes as a core conflict at the heart of the Government’s problems in the 12-month delay over revealing its military spending blueprint.
Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at RUSI, said: “Taking a year to do this while the same Government is issuing ever-more strident warnings about the state of the world suggests either those warnings are overblown, or getting the sums to add up is proving harder than expected. Neither is reassuring.”
Ruling the waves and defending the skies
It is probably fair to say that Admiral Horatio Nelson would not be impressed by the current strength and posture of the Royal Navy. Far from Britannia ruling the waves, there is increasing evidence that Britain’s naval forces are these days finding it hard to even set sail on them.
All five of the Royal Navy nuclear hunter-killer Astute-class submarines were this week reported to be tied up at port awaiting maintenance, posing question marks over the security of the UK nuclear deterrent submarines, which the Astutes are supposed to protect.
HMS Artful, an Astute-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, at Faslane naval base (Photo: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty)The issue follows embarrassment caused in March when it took six days to dispatch a Type 45 destroyer – HMS Dragon – to Cyprus to defend against air attacks by Iran and its proxies.
The result is broad recognition that the Royal Navy, which, with 16 surface warships (six Type 45 destroyers, eight frigates, and two aircraft carriers), is at its lowest strength since the English Civil War, is in desperate need of substantial investment.
Within the Royal Navy, there is an aspiration to see the so-called escort fleet of destroyers and frigates increase to 25 vessels, including the acquisition of as many as a dozen advanced new Type 83 destroyers.
While such numbers are fluid, the guiding strategy is that manned ships will increasingly sit alongside a much larger complement of robotic drone vessels and submarines to guard critical infrastructure and carry out offensive operations.
It is, however, uncertain whether the Type 83s, currently in preliminary development, will ever sail the seas. Senior military sources have suggested that the destroyer programme is liable to delay or even cancellation in order for the Government to meet its spending plans.
All of which is potentially bad news for another area where experts say the UK is sorely in need of investment to protect itself in the event of Nato conflict with Russia – the defence of Britain’s skies.
In contrast with systems such as Israel’s “Iron Dome” anti-missile network, the UK does not have an integrated air defence system based on state-of-the-art interceptors.
Instead, Britain is reliant on a “multi-layered” system ranging from RAF Typhoon jets used to intercept incoming cruise missiles or drones, to Type 45 destroyers which carry Sea Viper missiles capable of targeting an incoming ballistic missile. At present, the Type 45s are due to be retired by 2038.
As one defence industry insider put it: “Functionally speaking, the UK has nothing remotely close to a comprehensive air defence system. We can defend effectively against small-scale, targeted attacks and we can ask allies to intercept incoming missiles that track over their territory.
“But we would be in trouble if we faced the sort of assault involving hundreds of Russian drones and missiles that Ukraine has to deal with routinely.”
Back to basics: from recruitment to nukes
A key exhortation among the defence community is to concentrate on basics when it comes to Britain’s most formidable weapon – the highly-trained men and women of its armed forces.
While the UK’s 137,000 regular military personnel are relatively well paid compared to other Western militaries, Britain has an ongoing problem with recruitment. According to one estimate, there is a shortfall of about 8,500 personnel across the three services, equivalent to about six per cent of the total.
Progress has been made in areas such as armed forces housing, where 75 per cent of families say they are satisfied with their accommodation.
But problems remain. Just 42 per cent of servicemen and servicewomen last year said they were satisfied with life in the military, the lowest score since 2018; while nearly 60 per cent also described morale as low. In the navy, just 32 per cent of sailors expressed satisfaction.
At the same time, the UK military continues to suffer from one of its most persistent bugbears – the ability of procurement programmes to balloon far beyond their original costs and timetables.
It emerged last week that an additional £250m is set to be diverted to the calamitous Ajax armoured vehicle programme as it seeks to overcome a litany of problems, including reports of vomiting and hearing loss among soldiers using the machines. Deliveries for the £5.5bn project were originally due to begin in 2017.
Similarly, the bill for the replacement of Britain’s fleet of nuclear deterrent submarines (£31bn) and an overhaul of its nuclear missiles (£15bn) is expected to account for as much as a quarter of the entire defence budget in the coming years.
Experts warn that such deep-seated problems with identifying the UK’s pressing military requirements and how to pay for them lie behind the delays to the DIP.
As Savill put it: “That it has not [been published] suggests the rationale for change, the scale of change or the costs of change have not been agreed across government, which bodes ill for a country attempting to put itself on a ‘war footing’ to deter future conflict.”
Hence then, the article about what uk needs to fight putin but isn t getting from attack drones to missiles was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( What UK needs to fight Putin but isn’t getting – from attack drones to missiles )
Also on site :