LONDON — Britain is announcing one of the biggest shake-ups of its armed forces in decades, and it’s using the experience of the war in Ukraine as a model.
The Defence Investment Plan, set to be published on Tuesday by Prime Minister Keir Starmer in one of his last acts before stepping down, shows the U.K. is copying Ukraine’s successful playbook to focus on “cheap systems destroying high-value targets and innovation cycles measured in weeks, not years,” the Ministry of Defence said on Monday.
The move indicates how the government intends to meet the goals of last year’s Strategic Defence Review, which warned that “state conflict has returned to Europe,” after a funding crunch that prompted former Defence Secretary John Healey unexpectedly quit earlier this month.
For decades, much of the U.K.’s military strength has rested on sea power, with large, expensive warships like aircraft carriers and submarines able to launch nuclear missiles forming a central part of what Britain can bring to bear in peace and war.
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has upended the old model for European defense. It exposed the vulnerability of expensive systems, underlined the need for large supplies of cheap drones and munitions, and accelerated the shift toward autonomous systems, AI-enabled targeting and quick battlefield innovation.
‘Leaner and meaner’
One of the most eye-catching policies in the DIP is an announcement that there will be no new money for up to eight Type 83 guided missile destroyers and Type 32 frigates — projects that had been a key part of rebuilding the size of the Royal Navy in the 2030s.
Instead, the U.K. will invest in at least six new Common Combat Vessels which will act as control ships for uncrewed systems which include Type 93 underwater anti-submarine vessels, Type 91 uncrewed missile platforms and Type 92 and Type 94 unmanned sensor platforms for the sky and sea — notable because, despite having no navy, Ukraine defeated Russia’s Black Sea Fleet with a combination of sea and air drones and missiles.
The unmanned shift extends to Britain’s Royal Air Force, with officials on Monday night teasing the investment of a “national Collaborative Combat Air program” which will produce autonomous jets to fly alongside their crewed counterparts — something that is part of the British-Italian-Japanese Global Combat Air Programme to develop a sixth-generation fighter jet.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey, a senior associate fellow at the RUSI defense think tank, noted that although Britain needs to retain a large navy as a global trading power, the U.K. needs to shift its focus away from major projects to become “much leaner and meaner.”
Doubling down on drones
While the release of the much-delayed DIP meets a key demand from allies and the U.K.’s military-industrial complex, the implementation will rely on Andy Burnham, who is expected to take over as prime minister later this summer.
Under the plan, the U.K. will get some of the way to meeting NATO’s new target of spending 3.5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035, but Britain’s spending is off the pace of other allies like Germany, France and Poland and it has yet to set out a clear funding pathway to hitting that target. The new investment plan is set to add about £15 billion, the Financial Times reported, over the £270 billion defense budget over this parliament.
That includes £5 billion the government announced it is spending on a drone transformation, with the Ministry of Defence pointing to the 200,000 drones which are used each month by Ukraine as an example of the approach that needs to be copied.
“Technology on the battlefield is changing at lightning speed. The clear lesson from Ukraine tells us that drones have changed the character of warfare,” said Ross Exley, vice president of defense strategy at Hadean, a U.K.-based tech company which sits on the government’s Defence Industrial Joint Council.
The DIP will now fund Europe’s biggest drone testing center, which will work alongside a new task force to “continuously scale production” to get drones into the hands of British forces.
Willasey-Wilsey said it was “slightly ironic that Britain started training the Ukrainians back in 2022, and now they could be very much training us — they are showing us how war should be fought these days.”
“It’s warfare we couldn’t do. We wouldn’t last more than a few weeks,” he said.