If they have just spent one year cancelling, delaying, and cutting the military for the pathetic DiP only for Andy to come in and tax/borrow wheelbarrows of money to pour into Foreign Aid, I hope they at least have the decency never to babble about unprecedented threats again.

I take stock. We are due to get at least another press release - we got one from the RAF, not yet from the Army - but hopefully there will be no misleading claims there about the size of the exercise. The MoD's inability to keep track of its own embargoes is cute.

Apparently MoD had planned to make a big deal of this and i kind of opened the stable doors. 7 RHA purged its instagram of its posts after I made this tweet the other day. Now the media op is starting, trying to sell this as the biggest drop since WWII. Obviously it is not.

It's fantastic that a new mission (firefighting) is being added to the Chinook's list of roles right when the fleet is shrinking by potentially 50% over the coming few years. Coherence in UK defence is always the first to take a bullet to the head.

After seeing Norway's Defence Industries expressing all their concern about whether the UK will actually order the things it promised to in return for Type 26, let's take a look at what UK's defence industry representatives told the Defence Committee 4 days ago. It's ugly. Kevin Craven, CEO of ADS, notes that equipment spending cratered rather than going up: "In terms of orders, what is probably interesting to note is that the equipment spend to the year ending March 2026 was £5 billion less than in the previous year". The DiP was "reasonably granular around the first four years of what, in old money, was the defence equipment plan, but thereafter less so. Even in those first four years, it was not clear whether around a third of the £298 billion announced is unfunded or not articulated in the right way." Julian David, CEO of TechUK, goes on to note "Last time we were here, we reported on our survey of members, and 73% said that the market has declined since the report; that was in May. Funding delays and reductions have hit 87% of respondents, and 93% of them are now reassessing investment or recruitment of people to focus in this sector." Stephen Philipson, CEO of MakeUK, with one of my favorite quotes: "The point that we get from many companies is that you cannot invest on press releases. We need detail and funding, and we need to make that work." Another huge quote from him is also: "(the DiP) It is nothing like an equipment plan. This is not investable as it stands at the moment. It gives you a thematic direction of travel in many areas, a lot of which is welcome and is great news, and attracts a lot of new companies into the market, but the questions are then around where the contracts, the programme and the procurement are. We do not have that yet, and that is the problem." It's as devastating as it could possibly be, behind the niceties and the ongoing attempt to say the DiP is "welcome". committees.parliament.uk/ora…

Industry day for Project GRAYBURN (SA80 replacement) incoming, kicking off a more active procurement phase. Tender tentatively scheduled for July 2027. 1.6 billion budget (VAT excluded), to (again tentatively) begin contract execution in July 2029. find-tender.service.gov.uk/N…

And in April THIS year they celebrated sending the first few barrel forgings to Ukraine, coming from Sheffield Forgemasters. Granted, those barrels were still only forgings to be completed directly into Ukraine, but still... Since 2024 we have had multiple announcements about the whole barrels thing. Welcome developments as they are, re-announcing the same things every 2 months gets old eventually. And confusing, apparently, even for those doing the announcements.

Expanding TIQUILA towards 50 kg take off weight is significant because 50 kg is actually quite a bit of drone. Even the Tekever AR3 EVO, significantly larger than Stalker and used in unknown numbers by 43 Bty, 47 RA (4th photo), stops at around 30. There is room for interesting upgrades to Stalker itself, too. These images show some interesting stuff already trialed out in the US by american forces. Bomb dropping, drone carrying, big endurance increases are all already available to pick from, in one form or another.

RAPIER mounted on a Stormer hull form is a thing of beauty. A bit mad, arguably, with how small the vehicle is, but in a beautiful way.

Project TIQUILA is getting a major scope expansion via modification of the existing contract with Lockheed Martin UK (as overall integrator), according to a Voluntary Ex Ante notice. New drones will enter the scope of the project since the take off weight is being elevated to 50 kg, more than twice as much the weight of the heavier of the current pair of drones delivered under TIQUILA. Currently the largest TIQUILA drone is the Stalker (EAGLE for the British Army), VTOL fixed wing used by 32 Royal Artillery. It weighs 20 - 22 kg. The other drone is the much smaller Indago (KESTREL for the British Army) The original TIQUILA contract was signed in December 2022. The notice as published does NOT provide an indication of new value; it quotes the original 2022 figure. In the US, which also uses the STALKER, interesting modifications / upgrades have been installed to have it drop bombs and/or deploy FPV drones. Stalker/Eagle has also demostrated laser designation, notably for APKWS rocket strikes.

The written evidence brought by the Defence and Security Industries Association of Norway is pretty caustic. "It is unfortunately an open question whether the United Kingdom has fully understood what the frigate agreement entails in terms of obligations, within a balanced partnership. The Storting should not approve that a contract for the purchase of frigates is signed before the United Kingdom has committed to concrete cooperation projects for at least half of the total industrial obligation. In addition, a concrete and credible plan for the rest of the obligations must be presented." Neither side, as far as I know, has indicated in public what the offset obligation is like, exactly, bar for the words of Pollard in July that I mention in the below. Honestly, I understand them, though. All of the below commitments from the UK side are still shaky, with no contract awards in sight. The NSM purchase pre-dates the Type 26 deal and is progressing so unbearably slowly (3 ships fitted versus plans for 11, and one of those 3, HMS RiCHMOND, has already been decommissioned...) that I don't blame them for not having one lick of faith in everything else.

Honestly, fair enough of them. As of now UK commitments amount to some involvement in Type 26 themselves (Umoe Mandal for the masts), the Commando Insertion Craft due to be Norwegian made, the few NSM sets for the Navy and the planned order for 3 standardised vessels (with maybe 3 more one day well into the 30s...). Even assuming loads more Kongsberg RWSs eventually happen for the British Army (which by the way could really, REALLY use them, if fitted with 30x113 and up), there clearly is a lot of distance still from "buying roughly the same amount of stuff from Norway", as Pollard put it months back in front of the Public Accounts Committee. These are projects in the hundreds of millions realm, versus multiple billions. There is plenty of room for a JSM buy for F-35 too (wink wink). That would be nice. NASAMS would be useful, but if there was money they'd be presumavly buying more SKY SABRE. Unlikely we'll see a UK NASAMS buy.