Media: indifference on defence

By Richard North - July 4, 2026

Following on from yesterday’s piece on the Navy’s adoption of the CCV concept, it is instructive to note that the legacy media has largely abandoned any attempt to maintain a dialogue on the merits (and demerits) of the system. It seems to be leaving the discussion and analysis to specialist journals and, of course, social media.

Generally, the legacy media is content to be wise after the event. This is typified by the Telegraph a few days ago which published a coruscating critique of the Type 45 destroyer, but when the first ship – HMS Daring – was launched in 2009, the paper devoted itself, to slurping up the BAE/MoD propaganda.

With not a hint of the travails to come, it described the ship as “the most powerful frontline warship since the Second World War”, asserting that it was “the world’s most advanced air defence ship”, retailing guff from BAE Systems, its builders, which claimed that its “hugely powerful radar and missile system, has left American visitors to the yard ‘shaken and shocked’”.

In part, this superficial and uncritical approach to defence reporting reflects the indifference of a demilitarised public, which is so distant from defence issues that news on these subjects has to compete with a pop star’s wedding and some football games in a remote country on the other side of the Atlantic.

Gone are the days when, in 1906, Britain was the world leader in naval architecture, launching HMS Dreadnought, a revolutionary warship that instantly made every existing battleship on earth obsolete overnight.

But, by resetting the naval scoreboard to zero, Britain inadvertently gave Imperial Germany a chance to start an arms race on equal footing, a development which, by late 1908, triggered a massive panic in the British political establishment.

Asquith’s Liberal government received alarming (though later proven exaggerated) intelligence that Germany had been secretly accelerating its shipbuilding programme and prominent industrialists warned that the German firm Krupp was stockpiling steel and nickel covertly to build a fleet that could match or surpass the Royal Navy in the North Sea by 1912.

As so often on the issue of defence spending, the Cabinet was split, with chancellor David Lloyd George and home secretary Winston Churchill aggressively opposed to massive naval spending, preferring to conserve the budget to fund their landmark social welfare reforms (the “People’s Budget”). They offered a compromise of just four new Dreadnoughts.

The Admiralty, however, demanded a minimum of six ships to maintain the “Two-Power Standard” (the doctrine that the Royal Navy must be larger than the next two largest navies combined), which gave the Conservative opposition a huge opportunity.

Fanned by the right-wing press – most notably Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail – it launched an unprecedented public relations campaign. The journalist Robert Blatchford published a series of terrifying articles warning of an imminent German invasion – (not dissimilar to the current rhetoric about Russia).

At the time there was a lobby group called the Navy League which organised massive public rallies – no “Free Gaza” marches then. And it was during this frenzy that George Wyndham, a Conservative MP, coined the rhythmic, punchy slogan that captured the nation’s jingoistic mood: “We want eight and we won’t wait!”.

Crowds marched in the streets chanting the phrase, petitioning parliament, and treating warship construction as a matter of immediate existential survival. The public was effectively demanding that the government tax them more just to lay down more steel.

The public pressure was so overwhelming that the Liberal government caved in. In a famous summary of the bureaucratic compromise, Churchill later wrote: “The Admiralty demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight”.

That 1909 campaign represents the absolute antithesis of today’s defence politics. Then, the media and the public understood that mass matters. They knew that an island nation dependent on sea lines of communication could not survive on clever theories; it required physical hulls and deep magazines. When the government tried to skimp on numbers, the public revolted.

Now, the MoD announces the outright cancellation of its heaviest future surface combatant (Type 83) and replaces it with an unproven, cost-cutting “Common Combat Vessel” experiment – and the national legacy media responds with total silence. There are no marches, no slogans, and no front-page scandals.

The indifferent British public – insofar as it has even noticed – has been conditioned to accept the illusion that technology has made mass obsolete. In 1909, the man on the street knew that you couldn’t fight a global arms race with promises and whiteboards. Today, the MoD can quietly field a fragile “Postcard Navy” because nobody is marching down Whitehall chanting for more missile cells.

Another big difference is that, while in 1909, the world’s navies (and especially Germany) were rushing to copy British designs, with the CCV, no major navy is going down the UK’s route, viewing it as a massive gamble.

There is no dispute that global navies are aggressively investing billions in uncrewed surface vessels (USVs), underwater drones (UUVs), and autonomous “loyal wingmen”, but without exception, they are treating these systems as additions to their traditional fleets.

The UK stands entirely alone in cancelling its primary, heavily armed next-generation destroyer (the Type 83) to replace it with a lighter, uncrewed-dependent “mothership” (the CCV).

This includes the US Navy which is still committed to mass in its global fleet, investing heavily in crewed warships. Nevertheless, it is pursuing a “hybrid fleet” vision (planning for up to 72 Medium Unmanned Surface Vessels [MUSVs] by the 2050s), but its doctrinal philosophy is completely opposite to that of the MoD.

Rather than acting as replacements, these robotic ships are designed to act as external, “plug-and-play missile” magazines for traditional, heavily armed, high-end warships.

The Americans are not cancelling their multi-billion-dollar Flight III Arleigh Burke destroyers nor the upcoming DDG(X) next-generation cruiser programmes. They assume that when a peer enemy turns on their electronic jammers, the network will glitch, and you will still need a 10,000-tonne, heavily crewed, Aegis-equipped steel hull with 96 to 122 vertical missile cells to survive the initial salvo.

With that, not only is the UK on its own, as a pioneer of the front-line hybrid fleet, it must do all the heavy lifting in terms of developing the technology and defining the complex and entirely novel operational procedures that will be needed once the fleet is at sea.

Given the huge challenges involved, it hardly takes a genius to work out that the procurement timeline for the CCV and its drones is a complete fantasy, not least given the MoD history on managing major projects.

If, for instance, you take that track record and look at the Type 26 frigate, this began life as the Future Surface Combatant in 1998. It will not achieve Initial Operational Capability until roughly 2028 (at the earliest).

To expect a brand-new, highly complex concept like the CCV to be fully in service by 2035 defies everything we know about MoD. The idea that the MoD can push through a design from a clean sheet of paper – inventing a new hull, a new propulsion system, and a completely unproven “Maritime Fighting Web” software architecture to control four entirely new classes of drones (Types 91 to 94) – is absurd. The 2035 date is a non-starter.

By the time the National Armaments Director Group finishes early design work, writes the treasury business cases, argues with BAE Systems and Babcock over costs, and cuts the first piece of steel, it will be 2033. Under standard British build rates, the first hull wouldn’t touch the water until 2040.

Because the Type 45 destroyers cannot have their service lives extended and must begin retiring from 2035, the Royal Navy will face a catastrophic air-defence black hole for a generation.

The only possible way the Navy can get anything resembling a CCV into the water by 2035 is if they completely abandon the idea of a “new warship” and rebadge an existing project. What we can expect is the MoD to resort to a slightly modified Type 31 frigate hull, with the interior spaces redesigned and extra satellite dishes and computer servers bolted on.

They will then call this modified, budget frigate a Common Combat Vessel and tell the world what geniuses they are.

However, the CCV is not a stand-alone ship. It is a “brain” that is utterly useless without its uncrewed appendages. For the system to work by 2035, the MoD must simultaneously develop, manufacture, test, and field the Type 91 autonomous missile barges; the Type 92 underwater sensing platforms; the Type 93 Extra-Large Uncrewed Underwater Vehicles (XLUUVs) and the Type 94 uncrewed radar platforms.

To expect that a defence procurement system that is taking 30 years just to put a standard anti-submarine frigate (Type 26) into operation can then seamlessly design and integrate five entirely separate crewed and uncrewed programmes simultaneously in nine years stretches credulity to breaking point.

This is the ultimate in “PowerPoint procurement”. The MoD has set an optimistic 2035 deadline not because it is technologically achievable, but because the Type 45s are being phased out and they need a fictional future timeline to justify why they are scrapping the Type 83 destroyer. It is a massive institutional gamble, and history already tells us the likely outcome.

This is something that even a supine legacy media should be able to understand and report on. But, instead, it is largely obsessed with the notional cost of implementing the DIP, when core elements such as the CCV are unachievable within the timeframe set.

Would that we had a grown-up media – and a grown-up public – that could focus on such issues for more than a nanosecond before moving on to its usual diet of trivia.