A decision on the full business case for the UK’s Future Cruise Anti-Ship Weapon (FC/ASW) programme is expected during 2026, according to a written parliamentary answer from the Ministry of Defence.
Responding to a question from Conservative MP Ben Obese-Jecty, Defence Minister Luke Pollard said the programme is progressing through the government approval process while work with industry continues.
“The Future Cruise Anti-Ship Weapon programme continues to move towards its Full Business Case approval in 2026,” Pollard said.
The programme is a joint UK-France effort intended to replace existing anti-ship and land-attack missiles used by both countries. It is expected to eventually succeed systems such as the Royal Navy’s Harpoon anti-ship missile and the Storm Shadow cruise missile used by the Royal Air Force.
Pollard said the approval process is structured in a way that allows ongoing industrial activity to continue without interruption while the final business case is considered.
“The schedule for completing the approval process is structured to allow continued delivery of industry work… throughout 2026 without the approval process introducing any delay,” he said.
The FC/ASW programme is being developed through cooperation between the UK and France, primarily involving MBDA, and is intended to deliver next-generation long-range strike capabilities capable of defeating modern air defence systems and high-value naval targets.
The project has taken 9 years to develop a business case…..
Excellent! Right on schedule
Makes you proud to be British 🥲
Two points. Firstly, should already be sorted. More government delays that risk our security. Second… Not sure about France as a partner… they don’t seem to be good team players…
That’s why we went for two versions of Stratus. We wanted subsonic and stealthy, they wanted high supersonic or hypersonic. France said their modelling showed very fast was better than very stealthy. We said, we don’t hold with that fancy modelling nonsense. We know what we need!
The Royal Navy wanted speed, it was the RAF that wanted stealthy.
Well for replacing Storm Shadow a long range cruise missiles is better, but for an AShM it does look like fast and manoeuvrable is the way to go.
There’s certainly pros and cons to both. I’d argue slower and stealthier is the better overall option for an anti-ship missile, with advantages in reliability and accuracy; its the superior option for submarines and fighter jets, and it fits at a higher level of the survivability question (“don’t be seen” as opposed to just “don’t be hit”).
The Japanese ASM-3 will fit in the Tempest weapons bays. I can see the RAF having two options , and the Japanese is specifically designed for the Chinese threat.
Well just hold back there a moment.
RAF Storm Shadow are doing very nicely in UKR.
Slower is cheaper and therefore a larger stockpile. There is sense in having a big pile of something that is effective 85% of the time. Sure there are losses to AAW but nothing is invincible. So I can see a great deal of sense in having a massively updated Storm Shadow NT.
Then for some applications a very fast missile probably has a better chance of getting through. But it will be at the exquisite end of tech and therefore ££m each.
So I can see a lot of sense in forking the project.
I would also guess that it has a degree of modularity built into it so the back end and guidance packages can be swapped around and used with various effectors.
Ok so an answer soon, that means nothing, the DIP will be released soon, like evey thing it will drag on and no one will decide any thing. The MOD useless at just about every thing year after year. The Government great at press statements that say noting. offer nothing and decide nothing. So state normal then, hurry up and wait.
Well good news eh? The DIP will be published by 2028, after the Reeves bailing out of domestic fuel bills caused by Trump there should be a few billion spare. Another question is of course how many to buy? A few should do as we lack any bloody ships to put them on.
May I correct you there?
Reeves will announce that all of the Defence uplift previously announced will have to be reallocated to dealing with the fallout from the Iranian Tangerine Wars. Spending money on [buying votes] by subsidising domestic fuel bills.
The left of the Labour party will be delighted as will the Green and Communist votes. Putin will choke to death laughing at us and Xi will stare on disbelievingly wondering what is really going on.
There FIFY
I’m beginning to wonder whether the issue with the DIP is that a DIP is the wrong thing to be doing. There’s a general move away from old school procurement to more rapid spiral development, in part as things are moving so fast in the drone world. The DIP is an attempt at old school thinking – to produce one overarching plan with lots of subcomponents that is all set in stone at one point in time and then stuck to.
So the DIP is old school thinking, when even the MOD itself is moving on and adopting more rapid and flexible approaches. Maybe there shouldn’t be a DIP then, just a steady series of decisions and purchases, each run on its own timeline. That will feel messy to some (especially the treasury) but maybe it will be better suited to the pace of change in procurement at the moment. In some respects that is also what we are getting – constant smaller announcements of new projects.
You are absolutely right.
The problem is that DIP was pushed down from Treasury to get some discipline into a fully costed plan.
How many times have we heard that a defence black hole has been fixed only for it to appear again even larger like a sink hole?
The thing is that we cannot really say that Treasury is 100% wrong on that is there is a lot of immature wishful thinking and cost concealment going on to get project green light. OK AJAX has been used as the poster child of why but BW also came out and told everyone why the 5 E7 were cut to 3 because of the £1.5Bn of costs that had been kept off books in the program.
So it’s still a paper and PowerPoint
There are scale models too. And don’t forget last year’s renaming.
Actually, I think MBDA are probably getting on with it. CAMM-MR seems to have gone terribly quiet and if there was any announced missile I’d be wondering about, it would be that. There are quite a few other new missiles that could stall in the future, but for now the two Stratus missiles seem to doing okay.
CAMM MR is for Poland and they have not gone quiet about it – it is still a live project.
Given the amount of time that has passed, I would expect the project to be at a working prototypes stage by now,
and the MOD would be draftinglooking at acceptance tests.
At this rate, it looks like our shiny new T26s and T31s will be sailing with empty VLS cells.
Talking of long range missiles of all types, who remembers the grandstanding from HMG and the CDS about “7,000” Cruise Missiles, or “7000” missiles.
Same as the “6 new munitions factories” anyone seen any sight of those? What are these “7000” missiles”?
I always took it to be the usual spin with Stratus and other OWE types, even PRSM and ER MLRS thrown in to boost the figures.