UK to expand submarine fleet in shift to 'warfighting readiness'

Britain will expand its nuclear-powered attack submarine fleet as part of a defence review to be published on Monday designed to prepare the country to fight a modern war and counter the threat from Russia.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer, like other European leaders, is racing to rebuild the UK's military capabilities after US President Donald Trump told the continent it needed to take more responsibility for its own security.

Monday's Strategic Defence Review will call for Britain's armed forces to move to a state of “warfighting readiness” and reverse its post-Cold War military decline.

“The moment has arrived to transform how we defend ourselves,” Starmer told workers at BAE Systems' Govan shipbuilding site in Scotland, saying he would “end the hollowing out of our armed forces”.

“When we are being directly threatened by states with advanced military forces, the most effective way to deter them is to be ready.”

Despite cuts to the military budget in recent years, Britain still ranks with France as one of Europe's leading military powers, with its army helping to protect Nato's eastern flank and its navy maintaining a presence in the Indo-Pacific.

But the army, with 70,860 full-time trained soldiers, is the smallest since the Napoleonic era and the government has said it must rebuild given the growing strategic threats.

Elected last July, Starmer has already cut the aid budget to fund an increase in defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, from 2.3%, with an ambition to get to 3% over the longer-term.

Starmer has sought to cast the higher defence spending as a way to create jobs and wealth, as he juggles severely strained public finances, a slow-growing economy and declining popularity among an increasingly dissatisfied electorate.

The authors of the defence review, led by the former Nato boss George Robertson and a former Russia adviser to the White House, Fiona Hill, said the higher spending had enabled them to set out a 10-year military programme.

Among the report's 62 recommendations that will be accepted by government, Britain will build at least six new munitions plants, procure up to 7,000 British-made long-range weapons and launch new communication systems for the battlefield.

A Cyber and Electromagnetic Command will lead defensive and offensive cyber capabilities, after UK military networks faced more than 90,000 “sub-threshold” attacks in the past two years.

Britain will also build up to 12 of its next-generation attack submarines — which are nuclear-powered but carry conventional non-nuclear weapons — to replace the fleet of seven from the late 2030s, developed by the UK, US and Australia under a security partnership known as AUKUS.

Britain also put a price for the first time on the replacement of the nuclear warheads on a separate fleet of submarines, with the pre-existing programme set to cost £15bn (R363.77bn) before the next election due in 2029.

“With new state-of-the-art submarines patrolling international waters and our own nuclear warhead programme on British shores we are making Britain secure at home and strong abroad,” defence secretary John Healey said.

The announcement about new submarines helped lift the share prices of defence groups Babcock, BAE and Rolls-Royce.

Reuters