Publications

Show column
Analysis

Modernising British Defence: Advanced & Emerging Technologies and the Transformation of Military Strategy

Picture of Tahir Azad

Tahir Azad

Analysis Series

Analysis/0047/July/2026/London-Dialogue. 13 July 2026

Warfare has always been reshaped by technology, but rarely at the velocity now confronting Whitehall. Hypersonic missiles, resilient satellite navigation, layered missile defence, offensive and defensive cyber, uncrewed systems, artificial intelligence and quantum sensing are not incremental upgrades to an existing way of fighting. They are recasting the character of conflict itself and, with it, the doctrine, force design and professional education on which the British armed forces have relied for a generation. The Strategic Defence Review 2025, published on 2 June 2025 and independently led by Lord Robertson, captured the point bluntly: emerging technologies are already changing how war is fought more profoundly than at any point in human history, and low-cost weapons can now damage or exhaust expensive military capabilities. The government accepted all 62 of the Review’s recommendations, framing the outcome as a shift to warfighting readiness underpinned by innovation at a wartime pace.

This analysis examines what the United Kingdom is actually building, how it is paying for it, whether it intends to build alone or in coalition, and whether the empirical record supports the proposition that British defence is moving toward genuine indigenous capability rather than continued dependence on allies.

From Strategy to Spending: the Fiscal Turn

Ambition is meaningless without money, and here the trajectory is unambiguous. According to the House of Commons Library, the UK spent roughly £60 billion on defence in 2024/25, equivalent to about 2.3 per cent of GDP under the NATO definition. The Institute for Government records the sequence of commitments that followed: 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027, then 3 per cent in the next Parliament as fiscal conditions allow, and finally the largest step of all at the NATO summit.

At the Hague summit in June 2025, all 32 allies bar Spain committed to spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence and security by 2035, split into at least 3.5 per cent on core defence requirements and up to 1.5 per cent on wider resilience such as critical infrastructure, network defence and the industrial base. For Britain this is a structural change, not a rounding adjustment. The Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated the 3.5 per cent core target alone as roughly £40 billion of additional annual spending in today’s prices. The Defence Investment Plan, which replaces the old Equipment Plan, confirms spending rising to 2.7 per cent of GDP from 2027/28, the highest share since the 1990s.

Crucially, the money is being pointed deliberately at emerging technology rather than left to legacy programmes. The Defence Investment Plan ringfences £1.6 billion for the new UK Defence Innovation body to 2030, sustaining the SDR’s commitment of at least £400 million a year, allocates £580 million to the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory to expand research infrastructure, and reserves a further £100 million for a Rapid AI Delivery Taskforce. Chatham House analysts who worked on the Review singled out the decision to ringfence 10 per cent of the equipment budget for novel technologies as a genuine first: a formal, protected line for tomorrow’s capability rather than yesterday’s platforms. Whether that protection survives contact with the Treasury over a decade is the open question, but the intent is explicit.

Smart Defence as the Organising Priority

The Review’s central conceptual move is to treat advantage as emerging from the combination of capabilities rather than any single breakthrough. Nowhere is this clearer than in the digital targeting web the Army is directed to field by 2027, connecting sensors, deciders and effectors across all domains so that data from satellites, drones, ships and cyber sensors can be fused to strike at speed. This is the practical expression of the ambition to make the British Army ten times more lethal, a figure the Review measures against a conventional armoured brigade and delivers through precision fires, surveillance, autonomy and connectivity rather than mass alone.

Artificial intelligence and autonomy run through every service. The Royal Navy’s hybrid carrier airwings, the RAF’s Future Combat Air System and the Army’s Recce-Strike model all depend on AI for targeting, logistics and decision support. Specific investment is flowing into land command and control, underwater surveillance and, through Project Frontier, transformational AI. The Chief of the Defence Staff used a June 2026 speech to announce the Rapid AI Delivery Task Force, signalling that adoption, not experimentation, is now the objective.

Uncrewed systems are being embedded structurally rather than bolted on. The SDR envisages a high-low mix in which cheap, attritable drones complement exquisite platforms: land drone swarms for the Army, autonomous vessels and uncrewed aviation for the Navy, and carriers reconfigured into Europe’s first hybrid air wing combining fast jets, long-range weapons and drones. The lessons of Ukraine, where a sensor or loitering munition that becomes obsolete in months is treated as normal rather than a procurement failure, are explicit in the design.

Directed energy offers the sharpest illustration of how the cost curve of war is being rewritten. In November 2025 the Ministry of Defence awarded MBDA UK a £316 million contract to deliver the DragonFire laser directed-energy weapon, developed with QinetiQ and Leonardo. DragonFire will be fitted to Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers from 2027, roughly five years ahead of the original schedule, making Britain the first European nation to field an operational shipborne laser. Trials at the Hebrides range in October 2025 destroyed drones travelling at up to 650 km/h. At roughly £10 of electrical energy per shot against interceptor missiles costing hundreds of thousands of pounds, the weapon does not replace missiles so much as change the arithmetic of saturation attacks, preserving expensive magazines for strategic threats. The SDR backed directed energy with close to £1 billion for the current parliamentary term.

Hypersonics are treated as a sovereign strike priority. In April 2025 a UK-US team led by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory completed 233 static engine tests at NASA’s Langley Research Center, validating an air-breathing propulsion concept across the supersonic-to-hypersonic range. The Team Hypersonics (UK) programme is working toward a weapon technology demonstrator by 2030. In February 2026 the MOD awarded an Industry Mission Partner contract to Amentum UK, with SME partners Ebeni and Synthetik, to mature the missile design toward flight testing. Since July 2024 the programme has issued 22 contracts to 124 suppliers, more than half of them small and medium enterprises, worth some £48 million, a deliberate attempt to widen the industrial base rather than concentrate it in the primes.

Cyber and electromagnetic warfare received institutional weight through the new CyberEM Command established within Strategic Command, tasked with domain coherence across cyber operations, electromagnetic warfare and information operations, with initial operating capability targeted by the end of 2025. Up to £1 billion was committed to homeland air and missile defence alongside it.

Quantum and assured navigation address one of the most consequential vulnerabilities of modern forces: dependence on jammable satellite signals. In January 2025 the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory trialled a UK-built quantum atomic clock outside the laboratory for the first time, a device accurate to less than a second over billions of years and intended to provide sovereign position, navigation and timing independent of GNSS. Backed by more than £28 million and developed with Infleqtion, Aquark Technologies and Imperial College London, it is being miniaturised for vehicles and aircraft over roughly five years, with industry partners noting applications from missile guidance to countering drone swarms.

Alone or in Coalition? The Doctrine of Calibrated Sovereignty

The framing of indigenous versus dependent is where the strategy is most interesting, because the answer the UK has chosen is deliberately both. The SDR sets out a NATO-first posture in which the armed forces must be able to fight as part of the Alliance, lead or contribute to a coalition, and, when required, operate alone as an integrated sovereign force. These are presented not as alternatives but as a spectrum the same force must span.

Coalition remains indispensable for the most demanding technologies. Hypersonics advance under AUKUS Pillar II, with shared test infrastructure and the trilateral Hypersonic Flight Test and Experimentation arrangement. Sixth-generation air power is being developed with Italy and Japan under the Global Combat Air Programme. The nuclear deterrent, submarine propulsion and the F-35 enterprise remain deeply intertwined with the United States, and the Defence Investment Plan confirms the purchase of F-35A aircraft to join the NATO nuclear sharing mission. Space, which the Review recognises as a strategic cornerstone rather than an afterthought, is inherently collaborative.

Yet alongside this, the sovereign line is drawn more firmly than at any point since the Cold War. The Review commits £15 billion to a sovereign nuclear warhead programme, guarantees continuous submarine production through investment at Barrow and Raynesway, and directs at least six new munitions and energetics factories with £6 billion for munitions in the current Parliament, including a £1.5 billion always-on production pipeline. The logic is resilience: a state that cannot manufacture its own warstocks cannot sustain a protracted fight, as Ukraine has demonstrated.

The Industrial Thesis: Defence as an Engine for Growth

The clearest statement of indigenous intent is the Defence Industrial Strategy, published on 8 September 2025 under the banner ‘Making Defence an Engine for Growth’. It reframes defence spending as productive economic investment, citing a base that supports over 460,000 jobs and more than 24,000 apprenticeships, and it seeks to onshore key assets, prioritise UK-based suppliers, and introduce for the first time an offset policy so that purchases from allies return jobs and technology to the UK economy. Regional Defence and Security Clusters, Defence Technical Excellence Colleges, a Defence Exports Office and new SME action mechanisms all point in the same direction: building industrial depth as a strategic asset in its own right.

Empirically, the direction of travel supports the proposition that Britain is investing in indigenous capability with real seriousness. The strategy specifies that the UK should be able to design, produce, maintain and support combat air, shipbuilding, ground combat systems, complex weapons and munitions domestically, extending the sovereign category well beyond the traditional core of the deterrent, submarines and cryptography. DragonFire, the quantum clock and the hypersonics supply chain are being built substantially on UK science and UK SMEs. This is a genuine attempt to convert dependence into capability.

Analytical honesty, however, requires noting the limits of the claim, and this is where London Dialogue would counsel caution against overstatement. As the Council on Geostrategy observed, the strategy is stronger on metrics and institutions than any predecessor, but almost all its targets are calibrated to 2035, and its execution rests on the still-unproven National Armaments Director model. More pointedly, independent commentary has flagged that the definition of sovereignty has quietly shifted from UK-owned to UK-based, opening the door to foreign-owned primes operating on British soil. The Amentum hypersonics award drew scrutiny precisely because much of the firm’s relevant expertise sits in the United States. F-35A procurement, AUKUS and GCAP all confirm that the most advanced ends of the portfolio remain collaborative by necessity.

The accurate reading, therefore, is not autarky but calibrated sovereignty: Britain is deliberately deepening indigenous industrial capacity as insurance against an era in which even close allies may prove unreliable, while retaining coalition access to capabilities it cannot affordably produce alone. The Chatham House team that helped write the Review was candid that Washington is now a potentially less certain partner, which is itself the strategic rationale for onshoring.

Assessment

The UK has done the difficult early work. It has published a coherent strategy, committed to the steepest sustained spending increase since the Cold War, protected innovation budgets, and moved several flagship technologies, DragonFire above all, from demonstrator to contract at genuinely faster pace. The intellectual architecture, an integrated force built on AI, autonomy, directed energy, hypersonics, cyber and quantum, is sound and broadly aligned with allies pursuing the same transformation.

The risks are three: execution, coherence and time. The Defence Investment Plan defers most hard capability choices, the 5 per cent target has no funded pathway beyond 2029, and procurement reform remains the single greatest obstacle between ambition and delivery. Emerging technology also demands a parallel transformation in doctrine, training and professional military education that budgets alone cannot buy. Britain is not going it entirely alone, and prudently so. But the empirical record does support the core proposition that the direction is toward indigenous strength, sovereign warstocks, a widened supplier base, and a defence industry treated as a strategic national asset rather than a cost. The decisive test will not be the strategy documents, which are now written, but whether Whitehall can sustain the money and reform the machinery long enough to convert intent into fielded, sovereign capability.

Picture of Tahir Azad

Tahir Azad

Newer
From Air Force to Aerospace Force: The Case for Pakistan’s Space Command
Back to list
Older Post-War Middle East Security: Assessing Iraq’s Proposal for a New Regional Security Architecture

Related posts