Defence Plan for the UK – ‘hybrid navy plus drones – no details on specific defences for ‘renewables or an ‘iron dome for major cities and infrastructure
No sign of using AI to create an autonomous ‘robot army’ either!
PETER HALLIGAN
First, this how Brave AI sums up the plan:
“The UK Defence Investment Plan (DIP), unveiled by Prime Minister Keir Starmer on June 30, 2026, commits £298 billion in investment over the next four years to transform the Armed Forces. This package includes a £15 billion funding uplift, bringing total annual defence spending to nearly £80 billion (2.7% of GDP) by 2029, with a long-term goal of reaching 3.5% by 2035.
Key allocations and strategic shifts include:
- Nuclear Deterrent: Over £63 billion to strengthen the UK’s nuclear deterrent, funding Dreadnought and SSN-AUKUS submarines, a new warhead, and the purchase of 12 F35A jets.
- Technology & Drones: More than £5 billion for a “drone transformation” and over £8 billion for the Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) to develop next-generation stealth fighters with Japan and Italy.
- Munitions & Readiness: £11 billion to replenish stockpiles and build new energetics factories, alongside £2 billion for a Digital Targeting Web powered by AI.
- Efficiencies & Cuts: To fund these increases, the government is cutting investment budgets in other departments by 1% and implementing £11 billion in MoD efficiency savings by 2030, including workforce reductions. This has led to the early retirement of Storm Shadow missiles, Wildcat helicopters, and older Type 23 frigates.
The plan aims to create nearly 60,000 new UK industry jobs and support a £50 billion defence export facility, positioning the UK to meet NATO targets and adapt to modern warfare characterized by autonomous systems and AI.
Sounds better than nothing but the UK government has committed to spending5% of GDP to NATO by 2035. This works out at a cumulative commitment of close to one trillion pounds in the next ten years and 150 billion pounds a year thereafter.
It is equivalent to equipping half an army to fight a foe (Russia or China – but not the EU or US) that is ten times the size.
Regular readers will recall my hare-brained idea of building a nuclear powered fleet of warship in each of the ports in the British Isle with two nuclear powered ships per port that could either provide clean energy to lcal residents or be ‘at sea on patrol.
Of course, the use of drones to take out enemy planes, submarines and ships is a pre-requisite so ‘hats off’ for this part of the plan. There is no mention of a ‘robot army or’the multiple ‘iron domes’ necessaryto protect vital infrastructure and key cities. Ukraine is wreaking havoc on Russias energy infrastructure, whilst Russia is continuing to turn Ukraine into a ‘land of rubble’.
So, the UK is either saying ‘go ahead to an enemy or is prepared to accept horrific losses.
It is a little concerning that there are no plans to combat hypersonic missiles and hostile autonomous robot armies. Britain has some fine brains that could focus on eliminating these threats though an Oreshnik would be tricky to shoot down!
The cost to consumers over a decade – of building two ships per UK port would be less than the money wasted on building plantations of solar panels and forests of wind turbine AND they would provide FREE energy from their nuclear reactors!
“The Oreshnik is a Russian intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) characterized by hypersonic speeds exceeding Mach 10 and the ability to carry six multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs).
Key Technical Capabilities
- Range: Classified as an IRBM with an estimated operational range of 3,000 to 5,500 kilometers, allowing it to strike targets across Europe and deep into operational rear areas.
- Speed and Altitude: It travels at hypersonic speeds (Mach 10+) during its terminal phase and flies at suborbital altitudes (up to 100+ km), making it extremely difficult for current air defense systems to detect and intercept.
- Warhead Options: The missile is nuclear-capable but can also be equipped with conventional kinetic warheads or submunitions; each MIRV unit is estimated to weigh between 100–1,500 kg, delivering massive kinetic energy upon impact.
- Design: It is a two-stage, solid-fueled missile derived from the RS-26 Rubezh program, launched from a mobile Transporter-Erector-Launcher (TEL) for rapid deployment and concealment.
Operational Context
- Interception Difficulty: Its MIRV payload and hypersonic trajectory allow it to penetrate modern ballistic missile defenses, a capability that modern interceptors like Israel’s Arrow 3 or the U.S. SM-3 Block 2A are specifically designed to counter.
- Combat Use: The missile has been used in combat against Ukraine, with notable strikes on Dnipro (November 2024), Lviv (January 2026), and a large-scale attack on Kyiv (May 2026).
- Accuracy: While accurate enough for nuclear payloads, experts note that its conventional accuracy (CEP) is less certain, potentially mitigated by the use of submunitions to saturate large-area targets.
Perhap amies of drones autonomous robots and air forces of drones can be disable with targeted EMP to disable navigational controls?
Lets hope it doesn’t end up like this?
The Matrix Revolutions – Zion Machine Invasion – Zion Battle UHD
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On the Defence Investment Plan, the hole at the heart of it, and a Prime Minister who wants to be bound for NATO
GAWAIN TOWLER
When Turner painted The Fighting Temeraire, in 1838 it was as a eulogy to t he end of one aspect of Britain’s sea power. The rest of the title sums that up. The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up, but in the little steam tug, nostalgia was overturned with a recognition that the future was going to be fine. Sadly today’s defence announcement has no tug.
After two years of delay, the Defence Investment Plan has finally arrived, and it tells you almost all you need to know that it was unveiled by a Prime Minister on his way out of the door, as a sort of leaving present to himself, and that the man who until a fortnight ago was his Defence Secretary had already resigned rather than put his name to it. A plan for the defence of the realm that the Defence Secretary will not sign is not a plan. It is a confession with a cover price.
Begin, as the authors rather hoped you would not, with the arithmetic, because the whole quarrel lives there. The Chief of the Defence Staff, the professional head of our Armed Forces, put a figure on what it would cost to deliver the Government’s own Strategic Defence Review, the review this same Government commissioned and accepted in full.
The figure was twenty-eight billion pounds over four years. Not a wish list. The bill for the thing ministers had already decided to do. Against that twenty-eight billion, the Defence Investment Plan offers an increase in the Ministry of Defence’s spending power of fifteen billion. Roughly half.
Even that half is softer than it looks, because part of it is conjured from selling off Ministry land and a Treasury accounting shuffle, and of the new money, only ten billion or so has actually been found. The remaining four point seven billion is not money at all but a promise, to be confirmed at a Budget this autumn by a Government that, by then, will be under new management. A departing Prime Minister has written an IOU for nearly five billion pounds and left it on the desk for his successor to honour. The same amount he couldn’t cut from the increase in the welfare budget due to his ultramontard leftists on his back benches. The King of the North will have fun squaring that particular circle from whichever postcode he chooses to operate from.
This is the heart of it, and no amount of decoration hides it. The chiefs said the floor was twenty-eight. They have been handed half, and invited to be grateful. John Healey, who is no firebrand, secured thirteen and a half billion in his version of the plan, worked out that it came to a rise of eight hundredths of one per cent of national income by 2030, and resigned.
His Armed Forces Minister, Al Carns, a Royal Marine with rather more direct experience of being shot at than the average occupant of the green benches, went with him, saying the plan was not transformative enough for the danger we are in. The final document is barely a pound richer than the one they walked out over. The Shadow Defence Secretary called it not worth the paper it is written on, and the Prime Minister in name only, and for once the partisan line and the plain truth turned out to be the same sentence. Two ministers and the professional head of the Armed Forces, all saying the same thing at once, in public, on the record. You would have to work quite hard to miss the message. But this benighted Government has managed it. Sadly his Majesties enemies will not have.
That being said the plan is not nothing, and it would be dishonest to pretend so. There is a headline of two hundred and ninety-eight billion pounds of defence investment over four years, a rise to two point seven per cent of national income by the end of the decade, the proud boast of being NATO’s third-largest spender in hard cash.
There is five billion for drones and autonomy, eight and a half billion for the air combat programme we are building with Italy and Japan, eleven billion to refill our empty munitions stores, sixty-four billion to renew the nuclear deterrent. Set out in a glossy document, the thing fairly gleams.
But read it for its tells, and the gleam comes off. To find the money for the weapons of the future, the Government has scrapped its plans for a new generation of destroyers, in favour of what it calls a hybrid navy, which is to say vessels that exist to be floating command posts for drones.
We are abolishing the warship and betting the fleet on uncrewed systems that the analysts, choosing their words kindly, describe as untested and immature. Military housing, the very black-mould, broken-boiler housing this Government made such a parade of rescuing, is now to be de-prioritised, which is Whitehall for left to rot. The air combat programme is being quietly pushed to the right, the oldest trick in the procurement book, by which a thing you cannot afford this year becomes a thing you solemnly intend to afford in some year safely beyond the next election.
Ben Wallace, who held the post under the last lot, put it most plainly. The Treasury, he said, will let the Ministry have its submarines, or its new fighter, or an army of a decent size, but never all three. What we are watching is the classic fudge, and the fudge always ends in the same place, which is a two-tier force of a few real platforms propped up by gadgets that may or may not work, hollowed out behind an impressive brochure. That being said, I don’t think the Tories have much to crow about, much of the depletion of our armed forces took place under their watch.
The timing would be comic if it were not frightening. Just as the High North and the Arctic emerge as the strategic cockpit of the coming decade, just as the alliance frets over the Greenland-Iceland-UK gap through which the Russian submarines must pass, we have managed to make an entire department of state fall apart in public, its Secretary gone, his deputy gone, its own military chief warning that deployments and training must now be dialled back. We are choosing this moment, of all moments, to come up short.
And here is where the brochure meets the sea. This bet on a navy of drone-tending hybrids is being placed by the very service that, only this spring, could scrape exactly one real destroyer to sea to defend a British base under fire in Cyprus, having found that neither of its aircraft carriers could go.
That ship, HMS Dragon, was rushed out of port with six days of preparation where weeks were needed, reached the eastern Mediterranean, and promptly broke down, taken into dock by a fault in her own water system while the Ministry insisted she remained at very high readiness, which is precisely what one says about a ship at the moment it cannot move. We cannot keep one destroyer running. So we are scrapping destroyers. The phantom fleet has now been written into the plan as policy.
Money, of course, is only ever scarce for some things. The same Government that can find but half of what its own chiefs call the minimum has contrived to find a great deal with which to give a strategic ocean base away, agreeing under the Chagos deal to hand the islands to Mauritius and then pay billions for the privilege of leasing back our own facility at Diego Garcia, an arrangement even Donald Trump, no sentimentalist about this country, called an act of great stupidity.
It has raided the foreign aid budget, cutting it from seven tenths of one per cent of income to three, to help fund a defence plan that still ends up some thirteen billion short of the floor. We will beggar the aid programme and surrender the Indian Ocean, and still not reach the number the Chief of the Defence Staff laid down. That is not a country with no money. It is a country with no priorities.
Which brings us, as these things must, to the author of the plan, and to the detail that lifts the whole affair from the merely dispiriting into the genuinely absurd. Having unveiled this half-funded document and pronounced it the discharge of the first duty of government, Sir Keir Starmer will fly to the NATO summit in Ankara on the seventh of July, and he is reliably reported to want, when the post falls vacant in 2028, to become Secretary General of NATO.
Read that again slowly. The man whose defence plan his own Defence Secretary would not sign, who could fund barely half of what his own military chief called the bare minimum, who himself warned the country that Russia might come for the Alliance by 2030 and then declined to pay for the means of stopping it, would like to be put in charge of the Alliance. He would need the unanimous consent of all thirty-two members, the United States among them, whose President has already pronounced him no Winston Churchill. He would need the sustained backing of the British Government he is leaving in chaos, the very one that will shortly have to find the five billion pounds he promised and did not provide. The captain who could not keep the ship fuelled is filling in his application to run the fleet.
A defence plan is not judged by its cover, nor by the size of the number printed on the front, but by one test only. Does it meet the threat the Government itself has named? This Government named the threat. It told us the Russians might move against NATO by 2030. And then it produced a plan that funds half of what its own chiefs said was needed to be ready, defers a third of even that to a Budget it will not be present to deliver, scraps its warships for drones it has not built, and lets the soldiers’ houses rot to pay the difference.
Twenty-eight billion was the number. They have offered fourteen. The gap between those two figures is not an accounting matter. It is the exact measure of how unserious a serious country has decided to be, and no amount of gleaming paper, and no comfortable billet in Brussels for the man who signed it, will ever close it.
