At the end of August, Britain's Ministry of Defence announced it was looking to procure a new medium-range ballistic missile capable of striking targets 600 kilometres (375 miles) away with a conventional high-explosive warhead – and that it wanted the first trials to take place as soon as summer.
Britain’s Project Nightfall would represent the first time the UK has built its own ballistic missile since the 1960s – but it is the sheer speed with which the UK government wants the weapons designed and built that is the most unusual thing about the contract.
The UK government also wants its weapons to be cheap – at least in relative terms compared to other missiles. The UK MOD says the price for each rocket should not exceed 500,000 pounds ($680,000). It also wants to conduct the first prototype tests within nine months and to begin production a few months later.
It is a bold task – although at least one manufacturer, European missile conglomerate MBDA, says it intends to bid. But it is also a reminder of just how fast modern European states now believe they must rearm, both to keep Ukraine fighting and to prepare themselves for a potential wider looming conflict.
US President Donald Trump’s administration says it continues to work hard to halt fighting in Ukraine, with the US President also saying he has received an undertaking from Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping that China will not attack Taiwan in the current presidential term.
The reality, however, is that there is a growing expectation fighting will continue in Ukraine, continuing to consume enormous quantities of weaponry. US allies in both Europe and the Pacific continue to worry that Russia or China will launch further land grabs if they believe they can win an easy victory.
The result is a level of arms manufacture unseen in recent years – much of it focused on mass-produced long-range strike systems as well as short-range defensive weapons.
"Speed and scale of manufacture is what governments are looking for," said Mal Crease, founder and CEO of UK maritime drone manufacturer Kraken Technology Group. Kraken says it can produce up to a thousand of its unmanned K3 Scout surface craft a year, and this capacity is set to at least double in 2026 thanks to a deal with German shipbuilder NVL.
This week alone has seen the announcement by Taiwan that it is developing a low-budget long-range cruise missile with US autonomous weapons maker Anduril, which has also just signed a $1.1 billion deal to deliver its “Ghost Shark” underwater drone to Australia.
Last week’s Defence and Security Equipment International arms fair in east London was among the largest in its history, full of firms hoping to take advantage of rising defence spending both in Europe and worldwide.
The event itself and the preceding weeks saw a host of major announcements, including a deal to sell UK-built anti-submarine frigates to Norway. But it also saw complaints from multiple small and mid-size businesses that Britain and other European governments are often too slow in awarding contracts, leaving ambitious start-ups struggling for cash.
In reality, a divide appears to be emerging between those defence firms that can provide weaponry at scale in a hurry and those that offer services judged somewhat less essential.
That does not mean major contracts are not being signed for non-lethal technologies – during the arms fair, tech giant Google and the UK government signed a deal worth 400 million pounds ($540 million) to develop secure cloud computing that would allow better exchange of information with the US and other allies.
But the priority is often building weapons systems that can be scaled up very quickly – and which are cheap enough that they can be used on a large scale without stupendous expense. That includes building a new generation of affordable “interceptor drones” that can bring down other drones and missiles at a much lower cost than systems like the US Patriot air defence missile.
The Patriot, which can cost more than $4 million a missile, is heavily in demand both in Ukraine and to protect US and allied forces around the world. Ukraine, in particular, is focused on finding much cheaper solutions to bring down Russian missiles.
“No one in the world has enough missiles to shoot down all different types of drones," said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy last week after more than a dozen suspected Russian drones entered Polish airspace, some shot down by NATO jets and missiles.
For the most assertive firms, the speed of growth has been dramatic. When it last exhibited at the DSEI London arms fair two years ago, Estonian unmanned ground vehicle company Milrem was still struggling to get European money for its latest project and instead turning to Edge Industries in the United Arab Emirates.
Now, its basic ground vehicle has been embraced by more than a dozen countries – all of which are given access to some of the shared user data from combat in Ukraine. As well as the more expensive foreign-built unmanned vehicles, Ukrainian firms have built whole fleets of much cheaper remote-controlled ground vehicles for more dangerous tasks.
Those include evacuation of casualties, route clearance, resupply of ammunition and a host of other tasks that would otherwise endanger several personnel at once. “We just don’t have the people and we have to make up for it with technology,” one Ukrainian officer said.
For foreign firms not already testing equipment in Ukraine, this has sparked a race to get their systems to the front.
Vehicle manufacturer IDV, meanwhile, is one of several focused on delivering much greater degrees of autonomy: allowing one driver to control several military trucks or enabling a vehicle to find its way back from the front line to a safer base, for example with a casualty.
"We see an appetite across a range of missions from logistics through to route clearance," said IDV Robotics Managing Director Geoff Davis. "These new technologies will revolutionise operational effectiveness and efficiency in modern conflicts." '
The next generation of unmanned ground vehicles already looks to be substantially larger than those being used in Ukraine, evolving beyond simple robot trucks for resupply. A prime example is Milrem’s “Havoc”, which looks like a small unmanned tank that the firm hopes to sell in markets such as the Middle East.
Not everyone, however, is convinced that foreign manufacturers offer as much advantage to Ukraine as they might like. The issue is relatively simple: the sheer volume of weaponry being consumed on Ukraine’s front lines every day is so vast that the cost of using some of the more expensive Western systems could prove catastrophic.
Ukrainian officials and experts describe a 30-kilometre “zone of death” produced largely by unmanned drones across both sides of the front. Any person or vehicle moving in this zone or producing a significant heat signature is likely to be struck.
Across the most contested areas, it can be relatively common for Ukrainian units to deploy hundreds and sometimes thousands of drones a day, many of them failing to come back.
As former British soldier and politician Bob Seely – author of a recent book on Ukraine – puts it, that means any military using more expensive drones costing tens of thousands of dollars or more could easily find itself spending several billion dollars every week.
“The Western military-industrial model is bust,” he warns, at least unless it can generate more weaponry much cheaply.
Ukrainian arms firms, unsurprisingly, argue that they offer an easy solution to that problem, already routinely producing large volumes of weapons much cheaper than many of their foreign counterparts. Some of their weapons have reportedly sometimes failed to function in Ukraine’s fast-moving battlefield.
But they also find themselves much less able to access foreign capital and even basic business services, in part due to corruption worries. “If you have the word ‘Ukraine’ and ‘drones’ in your name, you won’t even be able to access banking in the UK,” complained one defence executive.
At the DSEI conference in London, British aviation, defence and security trade group ADS announced it would admit Ukrainian firms. But the truth is that such partnerships have not always proved that easy. At the same conference, Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger told Politico the building of an ammunition plant for the German company within Ukraine had been delayed by disagreements over its location.
Still, the company confirmed construction of the plant was going ahead – and that Ukraine would also take delivery of Rheinmetall’s Skyranger anti-aircraft cannon by the end of the year. At best, proponents of that system say it could prove to be a game changer against drones at the front, potentially delivering another major shift in the dynamics of the conflict.
That raises another challenge: nations racing to invest risk inadvertently saddling themselves with equipment that is fast proven obsolete. It’s a challenge Western militaries and their associated industries have struggled to tackle in the past – but this time the stakes may be considerably higher.
(By Peter Apps; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
Advertisement
Advertisement
