New British cruise missile enters firing trials

The Ministry of Defence has confirmed that Project Brakestop, a new UK cruise missile programme designed for rapid production and scale, has entered live firing trials, as senior defence officials set out a shift toward faster, more flexible weapons procurement.

Giving evidence to the Defence Committee, Lieutenant General Anna-Lee Reilly revealed that the first firing of Brakestop had taken place this week, just 12 months after the programme was launched. She described the project as a deliberate move away from slow, bespoke acquisition cycles toward a model built around speed, simplicity and industrial scale.

Explaining the approach, Reilly told MPs that, “Brakestop is a cruise missile with five incredibly simple requirements: range, cost, payload, production quantity, can you ramp up, and being transportable in an ISO container.”

She contrasted the programme with long-established precision weapons such as Storm Shadow, noting that high-end capabilities inevitably take years to deliver. “If you take an exquisite capability like a Storm Shadow missile, you know it will take a long time to procure,” she said.

Brakestop, by contrast, is being delivered through the Ministry of Defence’s Kindred procurement framework, which Reilly described as enabling a rapid buy-test-scale cycle. “The idea is that you buy, you try and you scale. We have the ability to trial in the UK and then take it out to Ukraine. That has been within 12 months, with 27 companies,” she said, adding, “The first firing of Brakestop was yesterday.”

The programme is intended to complement, rather than replace, existing high-end weapons. Reilly told the committee that the Army’s future structure would rely on a mix of “the exquisite capabilities and then the more disposable capabilities off the back end of it,” with Brakestop sitting firmly in the latter category.

Pressed on concerns that the UK would struggle to sustain losses in a peer-on-peer conflict similar to Ukraine, Reilly framed Brakestop within a broader effort to harden defence supply chains. “From my perspective, sitting where I do, this is about supply chains,” she said, quoting a senior US defence official who warned that “our supply chains are at war. We just don’t know it yet.”

She said the lessons from Ukraine were already shaping procurement priorities. “That is what you see with the strategy on munitions, what you saw in the strategic defence review, and what you will see in the defence investment plan. It is about being ready as quickly as possible and being able to respond.”

National Armaments Director Rupert Pearce supported that assessment, telling MPs that the challenge was twofold. “We have to be readier, and we have to be undertaking a transformation over the top of that as well, in a very small number of years.”

In recent written parliamentary answers, Defence Minister Luke Pollard confirmed that no final decision has yet been taken on the number of Brakestop one-way effectors to be purchased. He said figures would depend on the outcome of ongoing flight trials, industrial capacity and final system costs. Pollard also confirmed that multiple prototype contracts have already been placed and that builds are at an advanced stage.