The Defence Investment Plan published on Tuesday is written in two languages: there is the language of ambition, of commitments, billions and contested frontlines, and there is the language of deferral, of extend, explore and consider.
The ambition is the better part of it, with more than £5bn going to drones and autonomous systems, and the plan is franker than any before it about what these things run on, saying that space is the central nervous system of high-intensity warfare. Yet having named the dependency, the plan spends heavily on the limbs and hesitates over the spine, funding a force that lives or dies by our capability in orbit without fully deciding whether that capability should be ours.
The previous baseline for space ran to roughly £6.4bn over ten years, whereas the new plan commits £3.2bn over four, a materially higher annual rate and, by our analysis, the most Britain has ever put up for defence in orbit. What it buys, and who ends up controlling it, is what the plan leaves open.
The MOD will not proceed with the Skynet 6 narrowband satellite system, and will extend the ageing Skynet 5 while it weighs allied and commercial alternatives. Skynet is our sovereign satellite backbone, so this looks like a retreat, but I read it differently: it is a shift from a single exquisite, expensive programme towards proliferation and a mixed model, some systems we own, some allied, some commercial, wherever each is faster or cheaper.
Whether it was the right route to sovereign control is a fair, unsettled argument, but competition here is healthy, and the MOD should want more of it, away from the comfortable legacy primes and towards firms that move.
Of that £3.2bn, £880m goes to space control and ISR, space control being the ability to keep your satellites working while someone is trying to stop them, and it begins with knowing what is overhead, and knowing when a foreign satellite quietly shifts its orbit to slide up alongside one of yours and sit there, watching, within reach.
It ends with being able to do something about it, to defend against jamming, spoofing and lasers meant to blind a sensor, and to deny an adversary the same freedom in return, which is the difference between occupying orbit and holding it.
None of this is theoretical, because the head of UK Space Command has said British satellites are stalked and jammed weekly, and something up there follows something of ours around, and until recently the honest answer to what we do about it was watch and hope. That is what those drones and uncrewed vessels now sit on top of, and we have already watched a commercial satellite operator decide, mid-war, how much of its network a combatant was allowed to use.
It has taken too long to get here, and that uncertainty has made it harder for companies, suppliers and investors to build in the UK. There is also still a lot to resolve, including how the next Prime Minister makes the numbers work and how the UK gets to 3 per cent of GDP on defence, but for companies trying to invest, hire and build capability here, a plan in writing is a meaningful step forward.
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War /defence stuff is a hobby for me. I have no vested interestm
Thought I should say so because I get some comments on my posts that seem to assume otherwise.
War is mostly unlikely but has been treated and is being treated as an opportunity for unfair/undemocratic profiteering.
To cut a long story short it is not possible to find shareholders profits without raising taxes.
The question you should be asking is who should be paying those extra taxes?