The Ministry of Defence will not proceed with a planned mid-life upgrade of the Meteor air-to-air missile, with investment instead directed towards the Future Air Superiority Effectors programme, the UK Defence Journal understands.
Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry Luke Pollard confirmed the decision, listing it among a series of choices to move on from older systems in favour of their successors. “We’re not continuing with the midlife upgrade of the Meteor,” the minister said, with the department “investing in the new capability,” FASE, instead. “We want to invest in next generation of capabilities faster than the previous generation of capabilities.”
Meteor, developed by MBDA, is a ramjet-powered beyond-visual-range air-to-air missile in service on Royal Air Force Typhoons since 2018, with integration onto the F-35B planned under the eventual Block 4 upgrade. Its throttleable ducted rocket motor sustains thrust into the terminal phase of an engagement, giving the weapon what MBDA describes as the largest no-escape zone of any missile in its class.
FASE is intended to deliver next-generation air-to-air effectors able to engage a broad range of targets from multiple platforms, including future crewed and uncrewed aircraft. Pollard told Parliament in September last year that the programme was in its pre-concept phase, with work under way to establish a concept phase. The decision also follows the memorandum of understanding signed by the UK and France on 1 April to conduct a 12-month joint study into a Meteor successor, a deliverable of the Lancaster House 2.0 treaty that will assess the future threat environment, identify candidate technologies and set a development roadmap, overseen by a new joint Complex Weapons Portfolio Office.
The minister drew a direct parallel with Storm Shadow, where the plan similarly declines to restart production of the existing weapon in favour of its replacement. “Storm Shadow’s an incredible missile that has delivered exceptional service,” Pollard said, but the department needed to step up to bigger capabilities delivered by the next generation. The Defence Investment Plan allocates £1.4 billion over the next four years to MBDA’s Stratus family of cruise and anti-ship missiles, being developed with France and Italy as the Storm Shadow successor.
The Meteor decision sits alongside other retirements set out in the same answer, including the withdrawal of the Shadow R1 surveillance aircraft, a decision not to proceed with the Skynet 6 narrowband satellite, and the retirement of 34 Wildcat battlefield reconnaissance helicopters from 2027, with uncrewed systems taking on the forward reconnaissance role. An MOD official told the briefing that too much of the munitions budget had been going on “high end complex munitions, very capable but low numbers,” and that the plan rebalances spending towards weapons that can be produced quickly and at scale, restarting UK production lines for CAMM, ASRAAM and the Stingray torpedo alongside sovereign manufacture of energetics and explosives.
Sensible move and we have an excellent track record with MBDA and France in developing missiles so I’m sure this will be great.
There is a major discussion to be had about ramjet powered munitions. They are highly capable yet expensive. However if this missile is to have double the range of Meteor then it suggests to me a ram jet powered missile but using something similar to the latest generation of soldiers propellants being used on AIM 260.
It’s also worth noting that the UK developed Meteor specifically because the Eurofighter was not stealthy and the rationale was this could be over come with a massive radar and very long range missile.
Tempest GCAP won’t have the same limitations so perhaps its primary missile doesn’t need to be as capable as meteor was and can be larger for longer range given the larger bays on Tempest. The same logic might not work for France though as they still have no plan for a fifth gen fighter much less a 6th gen fighter.
Can you explain how a non linear ramjet uses solid fuel?
I’m not sure this is great news TBH – both should have been funded.
I agree, Meteor is in service right now, FASE is in pre-concept phase and may never actually come to be. Our people need the very best kit to be able to fight in the here and now, not years away. Why are our dozy politicians blind to thar?
The only way we will see FASE operational before 2038 is if we work jointly with the Japanese.
That’s like saying why are we developing Meteor when we have AMRAAM in service now. Meteor is very capable, and will be for many years to come. But replacements are always around the corner
I’m not saying we shouldn’t look to the future, that’s fine providing we upgrade Meteor to fulfil its potential until such time as FASE actually materialises!
But the money probably isn’t available to do both.
If it is built with Tempest in mind it can probably be bigger, most reports say Tempest will be pretty massive by fighter standards. A bigger plane means a bigger weapons bay, Meteor was limited by size to fit the F-35 weapons bay, along with easy integration onto other aircraft; it’s not a coincidence that its dimensions are almost identical to the AMRAAM.
It raises a number of interesting questions, if we go for a larger missile, it suggests to me that our F35B and incoming A fleets will likely switch to US AA weapons permanently.
I can see them simply cancelling Meteor integration as another cut.
Given the supposed urgency to re-equip for a possible Russian attack on NATO by 2030 this seems a short-sighted move. Reopening production lines and upgrades should be the priority.
Given how Russian TU-22s, TU-160s and Beriev A-50s operate from Russian airspace instead of entering Ukrainian airspace, long-range missiles like Meteor are the obvious solution.
Stop with the Russian phantom already, they can’t handle Ukraine and they’re going to attack NATO. Here they say Russia only has junk and on the other hand you say it’s going to attack all of NATO, don’t you realize how pathetic it is?
Do you honestly believe all wars start because one side or the other wants an all-out war. Do you think Putin wanted what he got in Ukraine? If the war stops in Ukraine, Putin will have to restore his country’s economy to a peacetime footing. Have you any idea how hard that will be, reintegrating hundreds of thousands of veterans with no civilian jobs available? Will he personally survive the attempt?
There’s every chance he’ll use the opportunity of having half a million troops under arms to prod at the Baltics, just as he did Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine, this time in an attempt to split NATO and unify Russia all in the same action. He won’t want war. He’ll want Trump to split from NATO and the rest of NATO to break up over deciding whether to respond to a mostly greyzone attack on Latvia or wherever.
He may well be right. The JEF countries will pile in expecting the rest of NATO to follow, only to look around and ask where is everyone else? Can Russia handle the JEF alone? He may well think so. On the other hand he might get an all out war and will rely on the threat of nukes to protect the Motherland.
There’s always one vatnik lurking about.
Putin doesn’t plan to “attack all of NATO”. He plans to destroy NATO by making Article V a false-promise. The easiest way to do that is to attack a small, nearby, member such as Estonia. Do you really think Trump is going to lead the USA into an all-out direct conflict with Russia just to save Estonia…?
If so, I have a bridge to sell you.
If you was Russian. Why wait 5 years to attack and give NATO 5 years to build up capability. If they are serious, why not do it now.
Err… because they’re a bit busy with Ukraine.
2030 is the date being bandied about by NATO etc.
If Putin wants to break-up NATO he has to end the Ukraine War and then move on, say Estonia, while Trump is still in power.
Investing in a mid-life upgrade would have been a medium-term move at best. If the concern is about the Russian threat as it exists over the next ~5 years, then this is likely a sensible move, as any upgrades would likely take that long to develop and field at scale.
Rather than trading off the short term for the long term, it seems the DIP is focusing on immediate results *or* long-term benefit, and ditched anything that doesn’t fall into one of those categories. Meteor as it exists today is competitive, and a mid-life upgrade would take time and cost money to develop, so better to put those resources into buying more of the current spec and building towards a true next-gen successor
Meteor as it exists now is competitive.
But competitive edges disappear over time.
Will it still be competitive in 5 years?
Wouldn’t it be cheaper to upgrade existing Meteor stockpiles rather than buy completely new missiles? Or is money not an issue anymore?
It would and wouldn’t be cheaper.
On the one hand, a mid-life upgrade of an existing missile would be fairly cheap in relative terms, but on the other hand that only buys you a few years before you have to buy a new missile anyway, and you can either do that by making a new one (meaning spending money on development) or buying off-the-shelf (meaning few jobs and no export sales).
Missiles are something we’re very good at so HMG would rather invest money in keeping MBDA at the cutting edge, thus gaining money from tax receipts and export sales as well as keeping good jobs in the UK. A new missile is a cheaper way of doing that than a new missile and an MLU.
It might be cheaper, it might not be. I think the driving concern is when that capability will be delivered.
A mid-life upgrade program won’t deliver anything for, say, 5 years, then a gradual bump in capability as the MKii is rolled out, followed by another tail-off as that then ages until being replaced in, say, 2040.
Buying more MkIs now and ploughing the rest into the next gen gives a more immediate boost to capability, but then becomes relatively less and less competitive after 5 years until overtaking again when the new missile debuts in, say, 2038 with the additional funding.
So if you think the greatest relative threat from Russia is going to come in the next 5 years or after 2038, ditching the mid-life upgrade makes sense. If you think the threat is going to peak between 2030 and 2038 instead, then pursuing it makes the most sense.
Obviously those dates are entirely illustrative, but you get the idea. The same amount of resources are being spent, it’s when and how each approach takes risk that’s the key issue.
Stratus has already moved out of concept whereas FASE is still in pre-concept. We probably won’t see Stratus LO in operation for 5 more years and Stratus RS longer still. FASE is many years behind this timescale. It is a glint in a Minister’s eye at best. Cutting Storm Shadow is premature, cutting Meteor, still NATO’s best in class, is at best foolish. If the military truly believe there a chance of war by 2030, replacing currently attainable capability for far-future promises, doesn’t match up.
This is just another cut, dressed with a pretty FASE sticker.
Especially foolish given the government just signed a further multimillion pound contract for integration work of Meteor onto the F35 🤦🏻♂️
Unlike Storm Shadow, Meteor is not being phased out as a capability, it’s just the MLU that’s been binned. Presumably Meteor will remain is service as-is.
Yes, thank God. As we’ve lost our marbles if otherwise.
Yes and no.
A meteor midlife upgrade would likely not be fielded at any significant scale before 2030, and the missile has it currently exists remains competitive. If the minister truly believes that the threat from Russia is going to be most acute over the next 5 years, then that would be an arguement for just buying more of the current spec missile, and focusing more development resources to the next gen successor.
It’s very similar to the logic that drove the decision to up the budget for GCAP over ordering more late-run typhoons. That wasn’t a cut in capability, but a rebalancing of when new capability would arrive.
Does anyone know who owns Meteor’s IP. Specifically does the UK own it? I’m trying to sofk out IP wise if working with Frsnce is a good thing here. They didnt purchase many Meteor.
From memory meteor is ~40% UK, including the special sauce air breathing bit.
The benefit for working with France for the UK is less on the IP side (though they are valuable in that area too), and more their stable political and financial backing. France will never back out of developing a domestic system, and the UK will be less likely to back out of one if it means having to abandon an international consortium. Working with France allows us to borrow some of their backbone for our own political fights 🙂
More jam tomorrow
but more than that we seem to be throwing away yesterday’s jam to make room for tomorrow’s
Restarting CAMM production? Had it finished? It’s a new system or are the moving onto CAMM MR?
What deficiency was the planned midlife upgrade intended to address? If production of the existing missile can be continued or restarted, the announcement seems only to mean that development funds will be switched to a successor.
I presume that the other users of Meteor are content with this decision?
– Upgraded Datalinks, giving increase communication range, coverage, and resistance to enemy jamming.
– Advanced Seeker Tech, adding an AESA seeker.
– Upgraded propulsion, with adaptive air intakes to sustain its high-speed (Mach 4+)
– Added GPS integration to give the air-to-air missile a secondary ground-attack capability.
Whatever reason might we have for carrying a 150 mile Mach 4 stand-off ground attack missile, the Treasury would never have authorised its launch.
Loving the new spin words on cuts.
“Retirements.”
All the retirements lark reminds me of the trick HMG pulled in 2008.
No more T45s now, we’ll “accelerete” the T26 programme.
Which still hasn’t arrived, and in numbers far less than originally envisaged.
But years down the line most won’t notice or remember.
On the MLU on Meteor, at least the current capability remains.
Latest reports say the Grippens for Ukraine will be supplied with meteor by Sweden next year.
TBF to HMG (bleugh, I know), the funding was set aside in 2009 for the T26 order, and had that plan been followed through they would have come on stream earlier as promised.
The fact they didn’t is more because one plan was replaced by another by the new incoming government, not because the original plan was disingenuous or unfunded.
OK … But if it turns out that we finish up with another capability gap where one system is gone while it’s successor is either still on the drawing board or delayed…