Leonardo has welcomed the government’s Defence Investment Plan and set out where it believes its technology fits across the RAF, Royal Navy and British Army, in a statement issued the day after the plan was published, the company said.
The chair and chief executive of Leonardo UK, Clive Higgins, said he welcomed “the clarity and direction that the UK Defence Investment Plan gives” to strategically important programmes such as GCAP, and that the company and its UK supply chain would continue to strengthen their partnership with government. Leonardo said it employs almost 10,000 people across ten UK sites, and presented the plan as a chance to invest in skills and national resilience as well as in capability.
Much of the company’s interest sits in combat air, the area the plan funds most heavily, as Leonardo supplies the sensors for the Typhoon’s Long-Term Evolution, the upgrade the plan backs with £1.1 billion to keep the aircraft flying into the 2040s, and its European Common Radar System Mk2, an electronically scanned array, is central to the new electronic-warfare capability that upgrade is meant to deliver. The company also pointed to its availability contract for the fleet, which it says has cut the cost of operating Typhoon by more than a third. On the next generation, Leonardo is a founding member of Team Tempest and a partner in the Global Combat Air Programme, the trinational effort with Japan and Italy that the plan funds with £8.6 billion and expects to place its next contract for shortly.
“I welcome the clarity and direction that the UK Defence Investment Plan gives to strategically important programmes such as GCAP. Leonardo and our diverse UK supply chain continue to work and strengthen our partnership with Government to transform future defence investment to help keep the UK safe both at home and abroad.” – Clive Higgins, Chair & CEO, Leonardo UK Ltd
The plan’s push on autonomy gives Leonardo several further openings, as the company makes the BriteStorm electronic-warfare payload carried by StormShroud, the RAF’s new uncrewed platform designed to fly alongside crewed fighters and jam and deceive enemy air defences, part of the wider move towards collaborative combat aircraft that the plan is funding. It also builds Proteus, described in the plan itself as the UK’s first full-size autonomous helicopter, a Royal Navy anti-submarine project built at Leonardo’s Yeovil site under the £60 million Spearhead programme and folded into the Atlantic Bastion effort to secure the North Atlantic. Leonardo added that its Sovereign Hunter trials, run with British small firms, are testing swarms of drones able to act with a degree of independence.
For the Royal Navy’s shift to a hybrid fleet of crewed and uncrewed vessels, another central plank of the plan, Leonardo pointed to its work integrating sensors, including a recent pairing of its systems with the MARS uncrewed surface vessel built by the British company SubSea Craft to detect submarines and speed up decisions at sea. The same autonomy, the company said, underpins what Proteus has already shown it can do.
In weapons, Leonardo is part of the consortium behind DragonFire, the ship-mounted laser led by MBDA with QinetiQ also involved, and supplies the beam director that points the weapon at incoming drones and missiles. The plan commits £490 million to directed-energy weapons and says DragonFire will begin arriving on the Royal Navy’s Type 45 destroyers from 2027, the date Leonardo repeated in its statement.
None of this makes Leonardo the sole beneficiary of the plan, and the company was careful to place its contributions inside larger efforts. GCAP is a partnership in which BAE Systems leads the UK industrial work alongside Leonardo and firms in Japan and Italy, and the DragonFire programme is run by MBDA. The plan is also a statement of intent whose figures the government calls indicative and subject to approval, so the value of any one company’s role will depend on how the individual programmes are contracted. Leonardo’s Yeovil plant stands to gain elsewhere in the plan as well, through the £680 million set aside to start building the Army’s New Medium Helicopter, which the company did not mention but which the plan links to thousands of jobs at the site.
Leonardo’s response is one of several from major suppliers now working through a plan that reshapes how the UK intends to buy and build military equipment over the coming decade. For a company whose UK business runs across combat air, helicopters, sensors and lasers, the document sets a direction for much of the work it already has under way.
