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.
He was great In Titanic.
OT. George and the team have done an amazing job this last week covering so much of the DIP.
Have we had so many articles in such a short period before?
I don’t recall.
Well done UKDJ. 👍
Let’s hope this means more Typhoons recive ECRS MK2. Not just the 40 T3s
It’s worth noting that the F-35’s radar system may be converted to a weapon.
At a US Senate hearing last week it was revealed that the new F-35 radar needs 2-3 times more cooling power – many analysts feel that this points to a directed-energy attack mode that could reach 120+ miles
The APG-85, Northrop Grumman’s next gen AESA radar, needs extra cooling capacity to jump from 30kW to as much as 80kW. This is not just a sensor upgrade, it’s a power signature pointing straight at a high-power microwave attack mode
The Pentagon has chased this idea for over a decade; a 2012 missile test called CHAMP proved that a single sortie could fry multiple electronic targets at once. But the tech was too bulky and expensive to field. A radar based version, built into a jet that’s already flying, changes the calculation entirely
Gallium nitride tech means the radar can hit a wider frequency band – ideal for disabling different RF targets, not just one threat type
The UK’s ECRS Mk2 and GCAP’s ISANKE suite suggests we are converging on the same non-kinetic future
High Power Microwave could solve the “magazine depth” problem for drones such as the MQ-28 Ghost Bat – striking with a weapon limited only by fuel, not missile count
If fighter radars double as directed-energy weapons, that is an enormous technological change that directly challenges current Chinese developments in the field
Who are you and what have you done with David ?
(asking for a friend called Jim) 🫡
Halfwit would appear to have had one too many 🍻🍻
Tea total Lee.
Damn… Well we all have problems mate 😁
The current APG-81 in the F35B has electronic attack modes. But the APG-85 takes it to another level. Same with ECRS MK2.
The RAF is only installing this radar on its newer Tranche 3 Typhoon aircraft. When these jets were originally built, engineers anticipated future upgrades. They specifically designed them with extra space, enhanced electrical piping, and the necessary baseline cooling capacity to handle an advanced AESA radar.
If the RAF wanted to put this radar on older Tranche 2 Typhoons, the jets would require massive, expensive, heavy modifications to rebuild the internal bulkheads and add entirely new cooling systems. This difficulty is why older jets are not getting the radar, which sometimes gets misreported as a design flaw or delay for the whole project
Donald trump stopped all military aid to Ukraine after his infamous attempt to bully and humiliate Vladimir Zelenskyy in the Oval Office
On July 4, 2026, Trump spoke with the war criminal Putin to discuss his mediating an end to the Ukraine conflict, shortly before a critical NATO summit in Ankara. During the 90-minute “very good” call, Putin provided a purported battlefield update, discussed regional issues like Iran, and engaged on potential diplomatic solutions with Trump. Trump has regular phone calls with Putin and does not release transcripts of their conversations
According to OSINT reports, Trump and Putin’s phone call apparently included Trump offering to help mediate a resolution to the Ukraine war based on renewed attempts to force Ukraine to accept Russian territorial demands and proposed – yet again – sending his real estate envoys Witkopf and Kushner (both with strong records of failure in peace negotiations) to Moscow. For the 9th time. While Kremlin aide Yuri Ushakov noted Russia’s desire for a diplomatic settlement, the conversation included conflicting claims regarding recent non-existent Russian territorial advances, which Western intelligence agencies have refuted
Trump and his administration of sycophants have consistently taken the Russian side in the war and have – repeatedly – attempted to appease Putin by pressurising Ukraine into capitulating to Russian maximalist demands. Expect fireworks at the Ankara NATO summit when Trump announces that America will withdraw another 10,000 American troops because of their “horrible” refusal to join in the bombing of Iran