New report warns Britain’s deterrent is being hollowed out

A new paper published by the 878 Institute argues that the UK’s ability to deter a peer adversary is being eroded by armoured vehicle delays, a shrinking tank fleet, the cancellation of a key military satellite programme and a naval recapitalisation plan that leaves the Royal Navy without destroyers after 2038.

Britain’s Military Deterrence Gaps, written by Robert Clark, who heads defence research at 878, is published with a foreword by General The Lord Dannatt, the former Chief of the General Staff. It lands three weeks after the Defence Investment Plan (DIP) set the direction for defence spending, and days into a new government in which Andy Burnham is Prime Minister, former Defence Secretary John Healey has moved to the Treasury, and Wes Streeting has taken over at the Ministry of Defence.

The paper’s central contention is that last year’s Strategic Defence Review produced sixty-two recommendations and a clear read of the threat, but that the DIP did not fund the implementation of them.

Lord Dannatt is blunt about the consequences in his foreword, writing that the country remains at severe risk and that “neither our enemies nor our allies can quite believe” how relaxed the Government appears about British security. He closes with a direct message to the new Prime Minister: “Priorities, Prime Minister, that is your job, not wishful thinking.”

The report is derived from written evidence Clark submitted to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy in July.

Land manoeuvre: the 3rd Division problem

The paper’s longest section deals with the British Army’s principal warfighting formation. NATO has assigned the UK-led Strategic Reserve Corps the job of retaking ground, and 3rd (UK) Division is the point of that spear. Lord Dannatt’s assessment of what it has to do that job with is a single word: its equipment shortfalls, he writes, are “woeful”.

On armour, the arithmetic is set out plainly. Three tank regiments sit under the division’s brigades, the Queen’s Royal Hussars, the Royal Tank Regiment and the King’s Royal Hussars, each fielding 56 main battle tanks, or 168 in total. Adding the 22 tanks held at the Armour Centre and other training estates gives a requirement of 190. The Challenger 3 programme will deliver 148. As the paper puts it, “at current force levels the 3rd Division will be under-strength by 42 MBTs”, with Initial Operating Capability scheduled for 2027 and the full fleet not expected in service until the end of 2030.

The report devotes more space to Ajax. The programme is now nine years past its original 2017 in-service date, with 245 ISTAR variants and 93 Ares support vehicles intended to form the backbone of the Deep Recce Strike and Armoured Brigade Combat Teams. Trials were paused again in late 2025 after 35 soldiers were made ill by noise and vibration, and the then Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard, was obliged to reverse the declaration of Initial Operating Capability in early 2026. The paper notes flatly that “there has been no update on the Ajax IOC since then”. This summer’s DIP guaranteed the programme’s funding, but Clark questions the value of what would eventually turn up, warning that “if Ajax ever enters service it may be outdated” and in need of extensive uplift to stay competitive.

The most immediate risk the report identifies is the gap between Warrior and Boxer. Warrior is due to leave service in 2027 and units are already decommissioning theirs. Boxer missed its Q4 2025 IOC on supply chain grounds, and only 100 of 623 platforms had been delivered for unit trials by June 2026, with no revised date for the remainder. That, the paper argues, “will leave a significant capability gap” for the Army’s four armoured infantry battalions, with knock-on risk to the 72 howitzers planned for the Royal Artillery from 2028.

The cumulative effect, Clark writes, is to leave serious doubt over the Army’s ability to conduct combined arms manoeuvre with a digitalised force, “severely limiting the UK’s ability to achieve (conventional) deterrence by punishment”.

Space: the SKYNET 6 cancellation

The DIP’s cancellation of the narrowband Ultra High Frequency element of SKYNET 6 is a further focus of the paper. Lord Dannatt calls the reinstatement of the UHF system “essential for connecting sensor to shooter”, and the report notes that the 6A and 6EC programmes were designed to deliver around three and a half times the capacity of Skynet 5 with improved anti-jamming protection.

The timing concern is that the four Skynet 5 satellites were launched between 2007 and 2012 and have either passed or are approaching the end of their fifteen-year design lives, with Skynet 6A not due in service until 2027. An allied procurement route for a replacement narrowband capability is acknowledged as possible, but the paper argues the details remain scarce and undeveloped, and that the decision will “inhibit the MoD’s aspiration to double, then triple, lethality”. There is also a warning that the UK could quietly demote itself from NATO’s leading European space power if it pursues further integration at the expense of sovereign capability.

The Hybrid Navy and life after the Type 83

On the maritime side the report examines the First Sea Lord’s Atlantic Bastion strategy and the Hybrid Navy concept, backed by at least £1.3bn over four years and intended, in the Royal Navy’s own words, to let the UK “find, track and, if required, act against adversaries”. Lord Dannatt’s verdict on the concept in the foreword sets the tone for the section: the proposals are “catchy to the eye but mask an underlying deficiency”.

Clark accepts the logic of distributed sensing, and concedes that a force of around 30 Large Uncrewed Surface Vessels operating alongside a reduced escort fleet could deliver useful deterrence by denial across a wider area than crewed hulls alone. The objection is to what is being traded away. The Type 83 destroyer has been cancelled in favour of six Common Combat Vessels acting as command ships for four as yet undesigned classes of autonomous platform, all of which must be designed, built, tested and doctrinally proven by 2035 when the Type 45 leaves service. In practice, the report argues, this means “cutting proven (and crucial) crewed platforms for untested and uncrewed ones”, and that “the Navy is currently set to have no destroyers after 2038”.

The paper is also sceptical that uncrewed vessels will be left alone. It argues that Russian forces will probe them and seek to jam the links back to their command vessels, and that “Russian military doctrine would think little to denying, blinding, screening” and in the worst case destroying them. No NATO navy has yet fielded these systems at sufficient scale to test the response. Recent incidents, including the harassment of HMS Prince of Wales in the Norwegian Sea by a Russian maritime patrol aircraft that dropped sonobuoys around the carrier, are cited as evidence of the operating environment. The conclusion is that this should not be an either or proposition: “In short, we must also replenish our conventional fleet.”

Recommendations

The report makes eight recommendations for the next spending review:

1. Halt Warrior decommissioning and fund the previously shelved Warrior Capability Programme, upgrading 380 vehicles with a modified turret and 40mm cannon and extending service life past 2040, at a revised cost of £1.25bn.
2. Set a deadline on Ajax, at which point the Government pays the roughly £1bn remaining on the £5.5bn firm price contract and moves to an off the shelf alternative such as BAE’s CV90, estimated at £4-5bn, or “risk losing combat effectiveness and leaving 3rd Division with no Deep Strike Brigade”.
3. Increase Challenger 3 from 148 to 198, at around £650mn, restoring three full regiments plus training and spare vehicles.
4. Reverse the SKYNET 6 narrowband UHF cancellation, and move policy beyond “achieving space control” towards offensive in-orbit combat capability.
5. Use the Type 31 design as the template for the CCVs, minimising production risk and keeping Rosyth working as the Type 31 run ends in the early 2030s.
6. Extend the Type 45 with a ten-year Capability Sustainment Programme, noting the current updates only complete in 2032, described as “a wasteful upgrade for only three years’ planned use”.
7. Pursue a Denmark agreement on the Type 26, modelled on the Lunna House deal with Norway, to build a shared anti-submarine capability in the North Atlantic.
8. Commit to 3% of GDP by 2030, as a bridge to making the 3.5% commitment for 2035 politically feasible “and not merely aspirational”. The paper’s closing line: “Our nation’s security demands it.”

Background

The paper arrives at a point of change in the defence ministerial team. Andy Burnham became Prime Minister on 20 July, appointing Wes Streeting as Defence Secretary and John Healey, who had resigned as Defence Secretary the previous month over defence spending, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Streeting has not previously held or shadowed the defence brief, and inherits delivery of the Defence Investment Plan published weeks earlier under his predecessor.

Several of the programmes covered by the report have been the subject of previous parliamentary scrutiny, including National Audit Office and House of Commons Library work on Ajax, and the Government has previously ruled out retaining Warrior in service. The Ministry of Defence has not yet responded to the paper. We will update this article if it does.

Britain’s Military Deterrence Gaps by Robert Clark is available in full from the 878 Institute.