UK weapon built for Ukraine could join British arsenal

The low-cost strike weapon developed for Ukraine under Project Brakestop could enter service with the British armed forces, the UK Defence Journal understands.

Asked whether the project would feed into UK capability as well as supplying Ukraine, a defence official said the question went to the heart of the Defence Investment Plan’s approach to munitions. “The answer on Brakestop is yes, it very well could be in our inventory very soon,” the official said, while noting that decisions on specifics have not yet been made.

Brakestop is one of the rapid programmes under which the UK has developed low-cost, long-range strike weapons for Ukraine. Weapons in this category, often described as one-way effectors or low-cost cruise missiles, trade the exquisite performance of systems such as Storm Shadow for affordability and volume. They typically use simple airframes, commercial or automotive-grade components and satellite navigation rather than expensive military-specification seekers, allowing them to be produced quickly, at scale and at a fraction of the cost of a conventional cruise missile. Ukraine’s own long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, airfields and logistics has demonstrated the effect such weapons can achieve in numbers, and both sides in the war now expend them by the thousand.

The official said the project is exactly the kind of pivot the Defence Investment Plan is trying to make across all three domains. “It’s just not good enough for us to be sitting on small stockpiles of exquisite weapons,” the official said, adding that while high-end capabilities such as bunker-busting remain important, “there’s a lot more to operations than that.”

Many of the companies the department has been talking to since the Strategic Defence Review were largely unknown a year ago and are now, in the official’s words, bursting onto the market, though the department has to be discerning about which to back given the volume of choice on display at events such as DSEI. The official pointed to the potential for Brakestop-type projects to be produced in the UK and scaled up for export into Europe.

The defence official said too great a proportion of the munitions budget had been going on high-end complex weapons that are very capable but held in low numbers, and that the plan redresses the balance towards munitions that can be produced quickly in the UK.

The department is restarting and sustaining production lines for weapons including CAMM, ASRAAM and the Stingray torpedo, and beginning sovereign production of critical energetics and explosives, with the always-on production lines due to be up and running this parliament.