I call to order today’s House of Commons Defence Committee evidence session on defence in the High North. I am very pleased that we have two very esteemed academics giving evidence to our hearing. Joining us virtually is Professor Katarzyna Zysk, who is professor of international relations and contemporary history at the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies and part of the Norwegian Defence University College in Oslo. A very warm welcome to you, Professor Zysk. We also have with us in the room Professor David Blagden, associate professor of international security and strategy at the University of Exeter. It is wonderful to see in the audience a former member of the Defence Committee, James Gray, who has also given evidence to the inquiry on defence in the High North. A very warm welcome to you all. Without further ado, let us look at Russia and the High North with Lincoln Jopp.

Good morning, Professor Zysk, and thank you for your time today. We used to have a saying in the Army: “If you don’t understand what is happening, get a bigger map.” I would like you to put into context where, in the Russian psyche, the High North fits into its broader perception of itself and of its near and far abroad. Could you talk us around that to begin with, please?

What is really interesting is that despite the extreme political, economic and military costs of the Russian war against Ukraine, Moscow has maintained a sustained strategic focus on the Arctic, and on the European part of the Arctic in particular, so the High North. It seems that Russia remains determined to preserve and even expand its influence in the region, as has been demonstrated in relatively high military activity, despite the ongoing war, and in political signalling from the top of the political and military leadership in Moscow, including Putin. We have also seen that signalling in political strategy documents, including the foreign policy concept from 2023 and the maritime doctrine, which have defined the Arctic broadly as vital to Russia’s national interest and placed the region among the top national priorities. The message from Moscow is consistent and deliberate, and there are several important reasons for that. The single most important one is, of course, the nature of the military capabilities that are based just across the border with Norway on the Kola peninsula. This is where Russia’s significant leverage over NATO is concentrated. The region holds the strongest part of the Russian navy and the largest share of the strategic sea-based nuclear deterrence. The region also provides critical access to the Atlantic ocean. It is also important to note that because of the development in the Baltics—the enlargement of NATO to Sweden and Finland—access to the Baltic for the navy has been constrained. We have also seen the development in the Black sea, because of the successful Ukrainian operations, so arguably access from the High North is becoming even more important. The Bear gap and GIUK gap chokepoints remain critically important for Russian submarines to get access towards Europe and across the Atlantic. They are also important for Russia to control what is coming toward the Kola peninsula. There is no doubt that the war in Ukraine remains priority No. 1 in all this development. That Russian posture has been affected because of the war in Ukraine. Some ground and airborne units and naval infantry formations are down to 20%. They are fighting or have perished in Ukraine. This affects force generations, combat effectiveness in the region, and maintenance. That said, an important point to make is that the Russian strategic deterrence force in the region continues to play a central role in performing some of the core missions that, again, go well beyond the region. This is about ensuring survival and freedom of operation of the SSBNs and defending Arctic approaches to the Russian homeland, but also holding European targets and NATO naval forces at risk and denying NATO sea control to complicate transatlantic reinforcement. For that, Russia continues to use certain advantages that they still hold in the region, such as subsurface capabilities and surface naval forces. There are new assets on the way. Despite the warfighting, the northern fleet is going to get several new multi-role Yasen submarines, which are one of the greatest anti-submarine warfare challenges to NATO. There are new Admiral Gorshkov-class frigates armed with hypersonic Zircon missiles also on the way to strengthen the northern fleet. The importance of the region is also embedded in the defensive and offensive capabilities of the aerospace forces in the region. Electronic warfare, of course, is one example. We see it being regularly used by Russia. It is also embedded in the capabilities for seabed warfare, with assets that are designed specifically to degrade or destroy critical infrastructures and technological networks that NATO’s warfighting depends on and, of course, western societies are built on. This includes the assets of the main directorate for deep-sea research, or GUGI, which remains highly active with its specialised surface vessels and submarines that continue surveying underwater infrastructure and prepare to damage it in a conflict. We have seen that pattern of operations over the past 15 years. We saw some examples, especially the UK-Norwegian operation that deterred these submarines earlier this month. For Russia, the High North also continues to be an important critical testbed for a new generation of weapons—for instance, hypersonic cruise missiles that are regularly tested in the region, but also new types of nuclear weapons, such as the nuclear-powered and nuclear-armed Burevestnik cruise missile, or the Poseidon underwater vehicle. Both were tested in the High North in October last year. One other important aspect that I would mention is that the High North, as we have seen several times over the past 15 years, serves Russia as an active platform for power projection. We saw this most recently during the full-scale invasion, where Russia uses forces, capabilities and capacities from the region actively in warfighting in Ukraine, but also uses the infrastructure in the High North—for instance, for the dispersal of strategic bombers to the Olenya airbase, from where Russia has regularly conducted cruise missile attacks on Ukraine. One last thing I would mention is that as the war in Ukraine drains Russia’s resources and pushes the Russian economy toward recession, the Kremlin has fewer options to influence western decision-making. Therefore, it seems that there is the potential that the propensity to rely on nuclear signalling alongside grey-zone operations and capacities such as those belonging to GUGI will grow. The northern fleet and the other military assets that Russia has in the High North remain central to this strategy.

That is an incredibly high-protein answer. Thank you very much indeed. It will take us a while to process all of it, but I am interested in coming back to your final point and this inherent tension behind what you described as the No. 1 priority, which is the war in Ukraine. If I can put words in your mouth, would it be fair to make the distinction that that is an operational priority, whereas the High North remains Russia’s strategic priority? When faced with such competing priorities, the British approach has always been to ringfence the nuclear programme in order to protect it against, as it were, corporate raiders from other parts of the services and the Ministry of Defence. What can you tell us about this tension within the Russian side? How have certain Russian admirals and politicians been able to maintain their strategic focus in the light of the competing demands of what you might describe as the contact battle?

I would agree that, strategically, this force plays roles well beyond the region: it is regional but also has certain supra-regional missions. That is what really brings the core importance of the region to Russia. We have seen also this deprioritisation to some extent. There is still a lot of focus and activity at the top level of the political and military structures in Russia, but at the same time we have seen, for instance, that the pattern of operations of the northern fleet in the region has changed since 2022. There has been great research done in Norway, tracking exactly that, which shows that, before 2022, we saw a number of extensive exercises. The Russian bastion defence aims to protect strategic submarines through layers of defences. Further down in the outer part of the bastion, Russia would likely try to deny the conduct of maritime interdiction operations. We saw that, before 2022, these operations were quite expansive. During the Ocean Shield exercise in 2019, Russia pushed the bastion defence way down to the Norwegian sea, and even to the North sea. Since 2022, these operations were constrained to the inner part of the bastion, so largely east of the Bear gap. This also simply shows the constrained resources that Russia can use in these kinds of power-projection operations, so that shows the tension and the prioritisation. Another example, but not a military one, is related to the relationship with China. Since 2022, Russia has made a number of gestures towards China that surprised me as a researcher of Russia studying Russian sensitivity around maintaining sovereignty and national control over, for instance, the northern sea route which, since 2022, Russia has opened for joint management with China. This also shows that, while this is not necessarily something Russia would have done before 2022, it is pressed to secure support from and co-operation with China in order to be able to continue the warfighting in Ukraine.

I want to pick up on a couple of points you made, and dig into something we are really interested in talking about. If there is to be further action from Russia beyond its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, where is that most likely to be? There are various points across the NATO border with Russia where that could happen. How does the High North fit into that, given everything you have just said, and given some of the sparseness of populations on some of these islands? We have seen Russia not afraid to do a land invasion. The Committee visited Estonia last year, and we are visiting the Arctic region later this year. What is the likelihood of conflict with Russia breaking out in the High North versus somewhere like the Baltics?

The conclusions that were drawn from research on security in the Arctic and the High North conducted more than 15 years ago still remain valid today. They suggest that conflict involving the High North is more likely to arise as a spillover from Russia’s confrontation with another great power or with NATO in another region, rather than as a conflict originating in the Arctic itself. The crisis of the past decade, with the annexation of Crimea, the ensuing sanctions, and then the consequences of the full-scale invasion and the way Russia used its forces from the Arctic in Ukraine, has shown how closely the High North is embedded in and connected and linked to Russian strategic thinking with other security regions. We have seen spillover time and time again in the region, so that should be taken almost for granted. The linkages are also structural. They are rooted in the region’s central role and the Russian strategic deterrence posture. Russian military conduct reflects this logic. Again, we have seen the operations in the Black sea and in the Baltic theatres. They appear more aggressive than in the High North. There is also the changed posture. One interpretation is that the changed operations and posture in the Arctic are related to resource limitations. One could also argue that Russia is trying not to raise its profile too much, because it does not want to open a second front of confrontation that it cannot really afford today. At least today, the situation looks like Russia is trying to tread relatively carefully.

Am I right in thinking that there are islands in the High North that, technically, belong to Norway? I might be wrong so I want to clarify this. They are basically uninhabited. There are other islands in the Baltic sea and so on, but there are islands in the High North that, theoretically, Russia could test our resolve by occupying, even if that is in a deniable way. Is that fair to say?

Yes, absolutely. These are also the opportunistic scenarios that we can discuss. The Svalbard archipelago is unquestionably under Norwegian sovereignty. Even Russia does not question the sovereignty of the archipelago under the 1920 Svalbard treaty. Under that treaty, it also grants to the 49 signatories of the treaty, including Russia, access and commercial rights to nationals of treaty signatories to develop activities on the island. Russia has the second-largest presence on the Svalbard archipelago, after Norway. There has been, let us say, an increased profile of more aggressive rhetorical gestures from the Russian population on the islands. We see that Russia has been testing the limits of how far it can go before it gets pushback from the Norwegian authorities. This is a place where there is a certain asymmetry between the Norwegian authority and the treaty-based rights that create this space for grey-zone activity. In terms of the scenario that you have mentioned, where it can be exploited by Russia, where Russia can push NATO when there is certain legal uncertainty, at least in Russia, there is certainly a possibility for this sort of grey-zone operation, especially if Russia perceived NATO’s cohesion as undermined; it would assume that NATO would not respond decisively. Svalbard is covered by article 5, so that would potentially open for testing the credibility of article 5.

Do you want to come in as well, Professor Blagden?

Do you mean on just that latter question or on both that have been covered so far?

On both.

To whistle through quickly, on that first one on how important the High North is for Russia, it is clearly vital on so many fronts. As Professor Zysk mentioned, it is where it tries to keep its nuclear deterrent safe, which has long been by no means assured, given how capable US and NATO counterforce capabilities are. It works very hard to keep its nuclear deterrent safe up there. It is where its huge exposed maritime flank is that can bring NATO capabilities right to its door. It is the source of so many of its economic hopes in terms of oil and gas, as well as minerals that are going to be increasingly important to the evolving configuration of the world economy. It is a key theatre in and from which it can bring pressure to bear on and, conceivably, even break or defeat NATO, including its most nettlesome members like the UK. In terms of the question about conflict and where it is most likely, Professor Zysk covered most of the big issues. In the north-east Atlantic and High North, we see that NATO and Russia are at loggerheads already, so it depends, in some ways, on your definition of conflict. Clearly, even if we are in some sort of grey zone or sub-threshold—all of these jargony terms that swirl around—we are, crucially, still not above threshold. It is still much better to be sub than above, but there is a lot of confrontation already going on in that theatre. Again, as Professor Zysk mentioned, it is a theatre in which Russia still has a lot of key strengths and capabilities compared with the army that has been so badly depleted in Ukraine. It is a theatre where there is scope for resolve probing around an issue like Svalbard. Conversely, the most plausible theatre for Russia, if it came to an outright attack on NATO in the hope of trying to break it or pull off some sort of fait accompli that tore NATO apart, is probably the Baltic states, but it is very hard to see some confrontation there not immediately widening into a north-east Atlantic and High North dimension. As soon as you want to go after, say, rear bases for NATO air power in places like RAF Lossiemouth, straight away the High North, the north-east Atlantic and Norwegian sea have been brought into play. That was my two penn’orth on those questions.

Let us move on to the United Kingdom’s role in the High North.

If we were to think in terms of absolute fundamentals, the UK has no higher interest than control of its north-east Atlantic region and sea lines of communication. That necessarily also entails benign Governments in the territories adjoining that region, so we want places like Norway to be friends. It would be very bad if a place like Norway did not have a very friendly, UK-aligned Government. Beyond that immediate regional concern, the UK has a vital interest in ensuring a favourable balance of power in Europe writ large and in preventing its domination by some aggressive great power, which realistically means Russia. It has a bunch of corollary interests as well, such as the centrality of the north-east Atlantic for British economic and political health, whether that is things like energy of both the old, fossil-fuels kind or the new, wind-farm-type kind, and also the centrality of undersea cables to the functioning of our political and social lives and economy. Bundling all of those interests together, key threats to all those things exist in and emanate from the High North. Furthermore, a really crucial thing is that, while High North west European states that are currently British friends, such as Norway, Sweden and Finland, are capable, they are not major powers with all the capabilities necessary to ensure their own and the region’s wider security. A favourable balance of power in North America is also useful to the UK, but there are major powers that live in North America that can deal with that themselves, thank you very much, whereas that is not necessarily the case to quite the same extent in Scandinavia. If you bundle that combination of lots of pressing interests with the fact that the states there are fairly small and fairly sparsely populated, and need some external support, those two things together are what really make it a crucial role for the UK and its armed forces.

Russia is the greatest threat to regional security and to nations in that region, certainly from the Norwegian perspective. This is because of the combination of Russia’s expansionist ambitions, which have not changed, despite the catastrophe of the ongoing operations in Ukraine. This is because of the drive to change the security system in Europe, and also because of the direction of the large-scale military reform that Russia started in December 2022, which indicates clearly that Russia is preparing for a long-term confrontation with NATO, and the northern fleet sits at the centre of that effort. This is where Russia’s significant leverage over NATO is concentrated. In terms of the threat from Russia, one thing is the military capabilities and, especially seen from the Norwegian perspective, the Russian bastion defence concept, which aims to defend the SSBNs through several layers and to control the maritime and airspace east of the Bear gap. This covers parts of the Norwegian territory, which is obviously a cause for concern. If we look at the ambition, Russia also aims to significantly expand armed forces in the region. It started turning some of the Arctic brigades, including the 200th separate motor rifle brigade, into divisions. This one was turned into the 71st guards motor rifle division. They will not be filled fully unless the active warfighting ends, but that still indicates an ambition for a broader military build-up that Russia plans along the Norwegian and Finnish border. We have mentioned the concerns about Russian activity on Svalbard. This is certainly something that we have to pay attention to, in addition to the changed pattern of Russian influence efforts, both in Svalbard and in northern Norway, where there has been more activity, more pressure and some provocations. The Kremlin has also issued a number of pointed accusations alleging discrimination by Norway against the Russian population on Svalbard, and alleging the militarisation of Svalbard, which Russia regards as demilitarised. Legally, there are some limitations on military presence on the islands. There are also the hybrid operations that we have observed, with sustained espionage that has been quite intense, including against military targets in northern Europe, including in Norway, such as seabed operations and the mapping of critical infrastructure. Russia is also using various cover means, including civilian vessels, to conduct these kinds of operations. There is also a concern that these vessels can be used to attack critical infrastructure. The Russian maritime doctrine has clearly stated that civilian vessels can be used for military purposes if necessary. These kinds of operations, as I mentioned, are expected to intensify because there are limitations on how Russia can influence western decision making. The last thing, if I may mention it, is the durability of the threat from Russia. In my view, Russia is likely to regard any settlement of the war in Ukraine as a pause rather than resolution. The worldview and the ideological foundation that have been driving this war have not changed, so the confrontation with the west is likely to continue. Russia will use any pause to rebuild its economy, reconstitute its military forces and prepare for the next phase of the confrontation.

Professor Blagden, the UK signed a strategic partnership with Norway in 2025, the Lunna House agreement. Likewise, there is a close working relationship with Canada, and not just with regard to the Five Eyes—the strategic defence review noted that Canada is a key NATO partner, especially with respect to the High North. In your opinion, should the UK be building the region’s security in the High North through bilateral agreements, such as those with Norway and Canada, or through multilateral partnerships, such as with NATO or the Joint Expeditionary Force, or is it a combination of both? What should we do?

It is probably an unsurprising answer, but a bit of both. It depends on both the operational context and the outside circumstances. For so long, so much of what would have happened in this theatre would have been bilateral US-UK activity in terms of the kind of information that was shared, or co-operation on submarine operations or undersea data. Clearly, some of that still continues. Whether that is just the muscle memory of a once warmer relationship or whether the relationship can be reheated or recovered, maybe we will get some clues to that this week. Clearly, there are some big, fundamental divergences in US and UK interests going on, so those will have some big implications for that bilateral. When it comes to some of the other stuff, such as co-operating with other European partners, it really does depend. If it comes to standing up an ASW hunt for some Russian submarines that have entered the north-east Atlantic or whatever, you probably cannot afford for it to become a big multilateral parliament where everyone has to agree, and lots of states with no particularly notable ASW capabilities or no particular concern with that theatre still get asked their opinion. Indeed, when it comes to information sharing, there are levels of sensitivity when you want to share information. If you share something across the whole of NATO, it might have different implications for just how sensitive it can remain, so you will probably sometimes want to embark on small bilateral things. Where the UK and Norway have a profound shared interest that is probably greater than any other NATO states is the Norwegian sea and the GIUK gap, or at least the eastern end of it. Ditto with Canada when you get to the other side of the north Atlantic. On a number of other fronts, if it comes to, say, operations in the Baltic, the great strength of the JEF is that it is, basically, the club of everyone, so it has a great strength in its unity, in that sense, with pretty much all of the Baltic states.

Is the JEF the right organisation for the High North? Its operations are predominantly in and around the Baltic sea, so would that organisation be the right one for the High North?

No, potentially not. It is a strange beast because, as originally conceived, it was a joint expeditionary force, and it has grown these legs as a bit of a sub-regional mini-lateral, or whatever you want to call it, and taken on a slightly wider remit than simply an expeditionary force that can go and do some expeditionary things. You are probably right that its orientation, in terms of its geography and the pressing priorities of a majority of its members, is Baltic-centric.

Perhaps a way out of that is to get the Canadians more involved. What would your views be with respect to Canada being asked again to become a member of the Joint Expeditionary Force? I take on board the point that, in 2013, they respectfully declined. Should that be something that we should pursue?

Yes, potentially. Canada is a capable country in a number of ways. It is not that it is suddenly going to bring overwhelming power to bear with a huge augmentation or infusion of major naval capabilities to that organisation, because it simply is not that big or powerful a country in its own right, and will always have a North American—that is, western Atlantic and eastern Pacific—preoccupation. You are right that, certainly, if we want to conceive of the JEF having some great advantages compared to the whole of NATO and its ability to make decisions and get stuff done, Canada does share that particular interest in the maritime security of the north Atlantic as distinct from solely the Baltic. Canada is in a position where, for a bunch of other reasons, it is looking for other, stronger alignments at the moment, because its own geopolitical circumstances have become more fraught than they once were.

Professor Zysk, what are your views with regard to bilateral as opposed to multilateral agreements? You will be more than aware of the very close relationship between Norway and the UK. Should we be pursuing bilateral as opposed to multilateral agreements?

The answer to this question is that it is not necessarily binary between bilateral and multilateral. Given the scope of challenges, from nuclear deterrence and defence to grey-zone operations, security and defence in the region is best addressed through this layered infrastructure, with NATO as this core element, and with bilateral agreements and this excellent example of UK-Norwegian co-operation, including on anti-submarine warfare and so on. Regional bodies like JEF play a complementary function. JEF can occupy an interesting, important position between routine peacetime activity and the invocation of article 5. In a scenario where tensions are rising and article 5 is not yet invoked, JEF may be an important tool to manage the escalation ladder and demonstrate results before NATO is mobilised. It is certainly a promising forum. It has already proven its value, and it is certainly seen by Norway as an important instrument to invest in moving forward.

Yes, definitely. I would agree with you that the Joint Expeditionary Force is a lot more agile an organisation than NATO. What are your views with regard to inviting Canada back in to become a member of it? Or should the JEF retain a focus on the Baltic region?

From what I understand, the focus of JEF is not only on the Baltic region, but also on the High North and the north Atlantic. As such, there are certainly shared values and interests with Canada as well. This is quite a flexible tool, so a contribution from Canada in certain operations would certainly be valuable.

Professor Blagden, do you want to come back on this point?

Yes. The one thing I forgot to include in my original answer was to point out that JEF has great advantage in terms of agility, and things like the bilaterals, the mini-laterals and all the rest of it, but, at a time when NATO itself is under pressure, we have to be a little cognisant of splintering off to do too much—“This subgrouping is flexible, and this subgrouping is flexible”—and careful not to undermine the coherence of NATO as a whole any more than it already is. Given that it is under pressure from some question marks about US commitment, to put it mildly, trying to shore up the coherence of NATO as a whole remains very important. Q62 Mr Bailey: I thought it would be useful, in the context of this discussion, to clarify a couple of your remarks, Professor Blagden, in terms of what is sub-threshold and what is above threshold, and also to clarify your definition of conflict. I say this because you have both spoken about escalation ladders, so it would be useful to hear from you what those things look like.

One of the things we do, both in our media debates—academics are guilty too—and the public debate writ large, is sometimes lose sight of the important distinction of war, when people say, “We are already at war with Russia”. In a whole number of really important ways, we are not, and that is a great success. When we are there tearing our hair out about sub-threshold activity, it is precisely because you have achieved successful deterrence. They are doing stuff sub-threshold because they have decided that the costs of going above threshold would be too bad for them at the moment, and we would like to keep it that way. Hot war has a very severe and grave quality all of its own. Ukraine is at war with Russia, and Russia and NATO are not. The reason why we talk about the cold war as a cold war—a period of very hostile inter-state confrontation and competition, and all these other synonymous words—was that there was lots of hostile activity going on, seeking to weaken, hurt and achieve strategic advantage over the other, while stopping short of open warfare in the central European theatre. The sabotage, the espionage, the subversion, some of the assassinations, the propaganda-type activity, and all that jockeying for advantage is, clearly, already going on, and so, depending on where you want to draw your lines, you could say that it is an important form of international conflict that the UK and NATO are already in, and that we need to work really hard to manage and ensure that it does not go up the ladder. One of the things in the north-east Atlantic and the High North is that you are often dealing with forms of confrontation that are very hard to see. Even surface naval warfare is not observed by the British or Norwegian public, or the press or anyone else. The naval confrontation is out there and happening in the High North and in the north-east Atlantic, far from the public gaze. Therefore, the public only really consumes it in so far as they are told about it by the state, when this thing has happened. Q63 Mr Bailey: Is that not a failing of your argument, and maybe our discussion, in recognising those activities and subsequently classifying the cold war as being a war, and our failure to recognise that those activities are under way now and are much more powerful? I like to use Warden’s rings to consider what he called state paralysis. Four of the five rings are non-military. The last one is fielded forces. The art of air power, which was the pre-eminent weapon for the last century, was to strike at the other four without having to fight fielded forces, and that is the logic we are seeing in Iran right now. In terms of the slow escalation, the raising of the threshold, the building of Russian Orthodox churches in places where we did not expect them to turn up, the crossing of the line in Estonia in terms of green men, and the consequences of GUGI investigating our submarines, if we do not call that war, if we continue to call it sub-threshold, and if we do not point to it, without trying to relive the “Yes Minister” sketch, at which point do you raise a concern?

I agree with you. In some ways, we can get too hung up on our thresholds, definitions and lines in terms of where it is sub-threshold or above threshold, and where the threshold is. All these things are spectrums of conflict in which we are trying to achieve enough strategic advantage to advance and preserve our core interests, without escalating further up that ladder in a way that then would start imposing costs that we do not want to bear. I get frustrated. Certain British people have spoken about the idea of seeking escalation dominance versus Russia. The great problem with escalation dominance as a concept, which a lot of people pointed out when Herman Kahn came out with it, is that if both sides think they can get that and are pursuing it, everybody dies. I have often preferred escalation equivalence as a concept, the idea being that whatever rung up this ladder you go, you will bear greater levels of non-advantageous pain, so it is just going to get hurtier and hurtier without anyone prevailing. Escalation equivalence is always the best thing to seek and aim for, but that is easy to say here, and striking the right balance is very difficult, particularly when it is very hard to convey what is going on and you are saying, “This stuff happened under the north Atlantic.”

Should the UK be adopting a leadership role in defence of the High North? Is it adequately equipped for that?

The quick answers are yes and kind of. Thinking back to a previous answer about all the interests the UK has in that region, and the need for a UK role because the friendly countries that dwell in that region are not all that powerful, given that they are not all that big, at least not in population terms, there is a very clear imperative for the UK to be involved in that region. If we think a little bit beyond that initial answer, the US commitment is unreliable at best, and maybe even worse if the Greenland question returns or whatever. France is the other major European NATO maritime power on the same scale as the UK, but is not so close, configured or interested in the High North as the UK is. The UK, then, really is the most suitable and maybe the only major NATO power to play such a role, and it has all those regional interests I just described. Also, the UK still has capabilities for operating in that region that few can match. It has the best non-US SSNs—the nuclear-powered hunter-killer submarines. It still has some fabulous anti-submarine kit and expertise. Type 23 frigates are long in the tooth, but they are still superb anti-submarine platforms. It has the carrier-enabled power projection, which we often think of only in terms of land attack, but you can conceptualise it in the High North as the full spectrum of the ability to generate sea control and reinforce a threatened ally with air power. If land-based air stations can be held at risk, the great advantage of a carrier is that it is an airfield that can move around, which in some ways makes it much harder for an adversary to target. It has other vulnerabilities of its own. The UK really does have some capabilities that few can match, including the Royal Marines in terms of their Arctic training, accreditation and capabilities. With all that said, and despite those capabilities existing, we have seen that our numbers of hunter-killer submarines and frigates in particular are now very low. The availability even of the ones that we possess has been very poor. The carriers have some big deficiencies in terms of things like the munitions that have been accredited for the aircraft that they carry. It is very much yes to the first one and kind of to the second one.

What is the view of our European partners on the UK’s ability to operate in the High North?

My impression of it from having given talks in Norway and worked with Norwegian and other Scandinavian colleagues is that it is pretty favourable. They think highly of UK submarine and anti-submarine capabilities. They like it when a really meaningful British contribution turns up for a High North NATO exercise and, conversely, feel a bit jittery and anxious when the British commitment to, say, a High North exercise is less substantial than it might have been. They might be being polite, so it is probably also worth asking Professor Zysk, because she can be more candid about what they think of us.

Professor Zysk, would you like to come in on either of those questions?

Yes, absolutely. The view is that the UK should lead in the High North in terms of a framework of nations, of which JEF is a great example, and in terms of bilateral co-operation, which I have mentioned in our discussions with northern Allies, and perhaps especially with Norway. The role is justified in terms of geography, the UK’s political weight, its military capability—and, of course, the nuclear component is very important as well—and the depth of engagement in the northern maritime domain that the UK is bringing to the table. I agree that there is no credible alternative candidate for leading JEF, for instance, but the ambition to lead has to be accompanied and matched by a credible presence, readiness and logistics. As you all know, the High North is one of the world’s most challenging operational environments, with vast distances, very sparse infrastructure, harsh weather, the polar night, degraded communications at high latitudes, and strange satellite geometry. There is also, of course, Russian disruption and GNSS jamming. That all creates an environment where navigation and communication cannot be taken for granted, so these are huge challenges that have to be addressed. Not only UK the but other allies too acknowledge that there are gaps in our persistent sensing and domain awareness in the region at high latitudes, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance coverage. This is also another argument or case to make for integrated co-operation in order to address these vast challenges that this region poses. Again, UK-Norwegian co-operation is a great example of that, and anti-submarine warfare in particular. Detecting, tracking and deterring Russian submarines before they reach the GIUK gap, especially for early detection in the Bear gap, is incredibly important and necessitates co-operation between both partners. What I would mention in addition to infrastructure, intelligence sharing, maritime experience, and so on, is also that the deep trust that is necessary for this co-operation to be as successful as it has been is incredibly important, and the co-operation between these two countries illustrates that. Also, these two countries signed the frigate framework agreement.

We will be coming on to some of those gaps as we move along. This is particularly focusing on the UK’s leadership role, and thoughts from European partners.

There is a clear yes in answer to that question. I would just highlight that unilateral leadership would probably overstate British capacity and underuse the important capabilities and capacities that the actors share. This co-operation and British leading, but in close co-operation and co-ordination with partners from the region, is probably the best way to go.

It is a bit of an academic answer, but it very much depends on what you mean by can and what you mean by significant. In terms of the can, the UK is the fifth largest economy in the world, depending on how sterling and the Indian rupee shift against each other, and largely forecast to overtake Japan again in the next couple of years to maybe become the fourth largest economy in the world again, as a country of 70 million people. In that sense, it is a big economy and a big country, and could make meaningful contributions in two European theatres at once. If we talk about what is significant, even a modest British Army battle group in eastern Europe is very significant because of its tripwire-effect connection to a nuclear deterrent. Even a modestly sized British Army battle group in eastern Europe is still a thing for Russia to contemplate attacking, because it means that you are then going to war with a nuclear power, which is something that has always made even Russia very jittery. A single hunter-killer submarine, if it is in the High North, is a hugely consequential capability in terms of them being very hard to find and you not knowing what they are, and them being able to track and hurt you from vast distances away, given that they can fire torpedoes or cruise missiles. In that sense, yes, you can, and yes, they are significant. I would also add that if we think about the here and now, and the present day, they somewhat draw on different capability sets as well. The High North theatre is more of a maritime/air-type theatre. The eastern flank is more of a land/air-type theatre, and air capabilities are probably where the starkest tensions arise. Although they do have the great advantage that they can go in different places really quickly, how many missions are you simultaneously hatting your fleet of fast jets with? That is all true, but I agree with you that, as things currently stand, it is really hard. There are broader political questions about the allocation of the British state’s budget. The pension triple lock means that that budget can only ever grow at the expense of anything else. The MOD’s budget is already really large but, for a whole bunch of reasons—very few of which include malice or incompetence, but many of which involve some big structural issues—it does not get a whole lot of stuff, or a whole lot of fielded capability, at least, for the amount of resource that it already gets. For a whole bunch of reasons, UK forces have become desperately denuded. We hope they are in a trough at the moment, because a trough implies that you are going to go up a wave on the other side. For a whole bunch of reasons, whether it is other demands on the British state, how much bang for buck we managed to get from the defence budget, or the fact that our forces have shrunk so much, you are probably right that, at the moment, we need to be careful about making really grand claims to big, leading commitments in a number of theatres at once. If eastern Europe means the Baltic states, that is one thing, but if eastern Europe becomes some sort of post-ceasefire garrisoning of Ukraine, that is another step beyond that as well in terms of spreading yourself really thinly while making some really grandiose promises.

. My colleagues have touched on this, but I want to move on from policy and to drill down into UK capabilities for the High North. We have various capabilities, whether submarines capabilities or anti-submarine operations. We have the submarine under-ice capability. We have our air capabilities. Juxtaposed next to that is the fact that we could not even get a single naval asset into the Middle East at the outbreak of the Iran war. Professor Blagden, how well equipped are the UK armed forces to operate and sustain themselves in the High North? What are the current and emerging capability gaps?

The first answer is very, in some really key ways. In terms of hunter-killer submarines, when the Astute class are working—it has all been in the public domain about availability and all the rest of it—they are, reportedly, exceptional. You have stuff that is in the public domain about the Americans talking about how blown away they were by their capabilities and all the rest of it. To an extent, the underwater Navy, by which I do not just mean the submarine fleet, but also the frigate fleet that clung on to anti-submarine capabilities, has always looked to the High North. The Type 23s, going back to their original conception, were conceived with that theatre in mind. We have some really key capabilities on that front. The Royal Marines, long conceived, have these other expeditionary roles, but their NATO mission is that High North reinforcement. The carrier strike group has proven that it can operate quite effectively in that theatre for extended periods of time, but with a few big caveats about weapons, which I will come to in a moment. Fast-jet capabilities have long been stationed up in Britain’s High North, which is probably not the High North on any Arctic definition, but looking upwards from Lossiemouth and northwards up into the Norwegian sea and that kind of direction. The P-8 is a fabulous maritime patrol aircraft, as we all know. Access to particular sensor data that we have had from the co-operation with the Americans, expertise in a broad sense, technology writ large, and the nuclear deterrent in particular are so central to dealing with Russia and making a meaningful contribution to security in the High North. That was all the nice glass-half-full stuff, but when we think about the submarine shortage, in terms of both availability and numbers, you may be at a target fleet of six or, ultimately, seven Astutes, even with regular routine availability on a 2-2-2 rule or whatever. Depending on where in the world you want to put them, and if you want one for anything other than the High North, you are talking about one in the High North. There is a frigate shortage in terms of absolute numbers of hulls, and also in terms of their availability, as the Type 23s have aged and fallen off a bit of a cliff, according to what is in the public domain. In terms of the Royal Marines, there has been the disappearance of the littoral manoeuvre capability with the retirement of the Albion and Bulwark LPDs going so recently. We might not necessarily think of the mine countermeasures fleet as a High North capability, but if you want to keep the west coast of Scotland clear to get your submarines into the north Atlantic, mine countermeasures are a really important part of that capability. In terms of weapons writ large, whether that is distribution of anti-ship missiles, or land attack cruise missiles that only a handful of frigates have, we do not yet have them on our F-35s. Our F-35s can fire surface-to-air missiles to defend themselves, and drop gravity bombs on things, which is fine for certain things but is maybe not everything you would conceive of them doing if you wanted to win control of the north Atlantic sea, especially if the Americans were not helping you. The availability of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary has also fallen off a bit of a cliff, according to what is in the public domain. It is so important for sustaining long deployments up in open-ocean environments. You can augment that to an extent by making more use of Norwegian ports. You could augment it with a fuelling station in Shetland or somewhere like that, so all of that could help. There is a general shortage of hulls writ large. Lots of countries make more use of basic sloops, offshore patrol vessels or corvettes, which are not much more than a truck for towing a sonar around.

What about airborne early-warning capabilities?

It is not so much a deep area of expertise, but, clearly, that has become wafer-thin as well, and again, like a lot of British capabilities, ends up wearing about 17 different hats. It can be earmarked for that, but then you cannot also earmark it for the eastern flank, and you cannot then earmark it for something in the Mediterranean or the Gulf. Part of it comes back to the situation in the eastern Mediterranean that you mentioned. We can say NATO first, which is fine and no one disagrees with, but, even within that, NATO is lots of different theatres. We are here talking about the High North, but the Mediterranean is also NATO. The sovereign base areas are British territory in the eastern Med, as is the eastern flank. Even within a broad NATO-first orientation, you still have the issue of where you are going to hat very scarce capabilities to, and what for. The other thing is the accumulated and assumed US dependencies that have accumulated over the years.

In your opinion, does the Royal Navy’s Atlantic bastion strategy stretch sufficiently far north to address the region’s security and defence challenges?

The bastion concept is an interesting thing. There are some bigger questions about the whole Atlantic bastion relationship with hybrid fleet, which I am not going to immediately dive down into. It depends somewhat on what we include as part of the bastion. There is the published, promulgated, “It will operate in these kinds of zones”; if you conceive of it more widely as the SSNs too, for example, then what might be promulgated is, “Here is where we are going to put our sensor net-type thing of largely uncrewed sensors,” but that enables our SSNs to push further north, or something like that. We do not know exactly. It depends slightly on what we conceive of as the bastion and where different elements of it will deploy. There is a lot to be said. Sid Kaushal and Edward Black published a RUSI paper just before Christmas, in which they spoke about extending it geographically east and west, and some of the advantages that might come from that. It also depends slightly on what you conceive of it as. SOSUS—or, as it was later called, IUSS—is the American-led system that is in the public domain as underwater sensors that have been there for years. If you conceive of the Atlantic net and then the Atlantic bastion concept as mobile versions of a sensor net that, instead of being laid on the seabed, you can move around, then great, it gives you additional flexibility. If you take it too far north, you run into some potential issues. As soon as you start going around the north cape of Norway and into the Barents sea, you get into more escalatory and confrontational dynamics with Russia. Even though we call these things cheap because they are unmanned, how many of them do you want to lose? The further they are from maintenance support, the more you are going to lose. The closer they are to Russia, the more of them Russia is going to interdict, presumably. If you conceive of it as initially a GIUK gap-type capability, which then provides that sensor net function, from which you can then push on into the Norwegian sea and further north, that is great. It does slightly depend, first, on what the Navy ultimately ends up doing with it, and secondly, on some bigger questions about how effective a hybrid-type system ultimately is.

Professor Zysk, in your esteemed opinion and given the Norwegian perspective in particular, how well equipped are the UK’s armed forces and what do you see as the capability gaps?

I will be careful in answering this question. Broadly speaking, there is a great appreciation in Norway of the UK’s contributions and co-operation. I have mentioned some of the capabilities already. Moving forward, applying the Nordic model of co-operation would make it economically sounder. This is one way to approach the problem, at least partially. This co-operation brings a complementary strength. We have mentioned frigate co-operation. In this is embedded the idea of common learning and common platforms, which share maintenance, parts and training, and have greater interchangeability of crews and personnel, which has the potential to make it all more economically sound for both parties. We can generate more capability, more credible deterrence and, importantly, stronger commitment through very concrete mutual dependence. If I can mention one thing about Atlantic bastion, it is really important that the sensing or detection happens before the Russian submarines cross the Bear gap in order to make the deterrence credible. One other aspect to add to what has been said is that co-operation with allies is important. It is really important that the sensors or capabilities that will be put in place are compatible so that the British and the Norwegian sensors can talk to each other. I just wanted to put that on the table.

I am going to go back to Professor Blagden to talk about autonomous systems and uncrewed systems; Professor Zysk, I am going to come to you afterwards to ask about the Russian situation in respect of those topics. Professor Blagden, I have been looking at some long tweet strings by you with a lot of views about hybrid navy and the merits and pitfalls of relying on uncrewed vehicles and vessels to fill the gap where we might like to have, in fact, more ships or submarines. I ask this question in the context of there being funding shortfalls. Whether it is the Navy, Army or RAF, we would love to have unlimited funds, buy a lot of platforms and recruit a lot of people, and then, beyond that, be able to look into the autonomous space as well. The Navy has some shortfalls, which you mentioned in a previous answer. Is it even possible to use uncrewed vessels and vehicles to make up that gap? Or is it a fool’s errand?

It is possible, to some extent. In terms of a network of sensing, it is, absolutely. In some ways it comes back to our conceptuals. The sonobuoy is a very old technology. It was used in the second world war. We dropped disposable sonars from aircraft. If you conceive of uncrewed platforms as very long-duration sonobuoys with the advantage of being able to drive them to different places and things like that, they are much more economically viable and better value than existing sonobuoys, which you throw out of an MPA and then after some period of hours do not work any more. The ability to re-task them and reallocate them is fantastic in terms of building broader situational awareness and things like that. They have some other really obvious undeniable advantages. There are fewer precious human bodies in danger. For example, if you can do mine clearance operations with a robot instead of a diver and therefore fewer people have to get a horrible knock on the door, that is fantastic. Part of it is thinking about the conditions under which autonomous exploration is already happening in the British context currently. If we think about it, this is a high‑tech Navy in a country that is capital abundant but labour scarce, which is a pretty classic economic representation. If we can maximise the output of a scarce number of very expensive and precious people using technology and capital, that is fantastic. In that situation, you would very much be interested in exploring the potential source of advantage through the exploitation of autonomous systems. What is interesting with the UK model is that its thinking is currently much more ambitious than pretty much any other developed-world navy. The Americans are conceiving of a 7:3 manned to unmanned ratio for their crewed to major uncrewed platforms. When we are talking about uncrewed, are we talking about a little wave glider pulling a sonar or are we talking about a thing that looks like a sloop but does not have any people on it? There is a wide divergence even within what we mean when we talk about uncrewed. That has big implications for what we mean when we say they are cheap and things like that.

Do you see that ambition and being an outrider as a negative as opposed to as a positive?

It makes it more of a gamble. It is risky. There are at least four big problems with uncrewed naval platforms, one of which is that they have far less deterrent effect. If you go out and destroy them but no people die, it has far less escalatory implication. We have seen this with both Russia and Iran, even before Iran was at war with the US. Back when it was not at war with the US, it shot down or engaged American uncrewed systems. If you are not killing any Americans, the escalatory implications are far lower. That means there is likely to be far less Russian reticence about going out and destroying these uncrewed platforms. If you are faced with Atlantic bastion made up of all these uncrewed ships, the thing you do is hire some merchant ships and drive around the north Atlantic trying to run them down. Indeed, you are likely to be much less reticent about stealing them. Anything that you put on them that is really secret or sensitive, you can expect to pretty quickly be nicked and reverse-engineered, or at least studied. They have far less deterrent effect. They also do not have the same intrinsic flexibility and adaptability. If you think about a crewed mine hunter, for example, yes, it can do mine clearance, but it can also be a patrol vessel that builds a recognised maritime picture. It can also help out with some inshore coastal anti-submarine work because it has a dipping sonar.

You will be aware that lots of people are trying to design, and are quite far down the road of designing, uncrewed systems that can or will, in theory, take lots of different types of payload. On that particular point, people would come back and say, “That is hopefully going to change.”

Yes, but it still will not be able, say, to investigate a merchant ship that is behaving suspiciously, to help a yacht that is in distress or to build at-sea command experience for a junior officer before they command a destroyer. There is a bunch of stuff that they still will not be able to do, but I absolutely take your point. There is also the question about maintenance, support, supply and damage. All these things again exist in trade-offs. You can say that your uncrewed systems are cheap, but if you make them big and complex—it is more like a sloop, so effectively an uncrewed ship—the implications for cheapness are less clearcut. If it has some big OPDEF on board, you might have to pull a crewed ship off station to help it or just concede that it is lost. If you do that a few times, the overall cheapness begins to be not quite so clearcut. The other thing is around the command and control implications. You can go for either pure autonomy, which has some problems of its own, such as not being able to control escalation, or pure remote control, which has problems of its own, such as jamming, interference, interception and increasing the incentive to target the command-and-control infrastructure. If you are operating a largely uncrewed fleet controlled from a few key nodes, you make your force more brittle because those few key command and control nodes are more high-value targets. I am not here to do pure luddism or indeed say that none of these things is going to matter or make a difference. We just have to be careful. If this is in fact a panicked and deficient Navy with a frigate fleet that has fallen off a cliff and we are just telling ourselves hopeful stories that this is going to be the silver bullet that upends the balance of power in the north Atlantic and makes it all okay again on the cheap, we are likely to be really disappointed. We need to be prudent and incremental. How far can we take these things? Just how far do the Russians attrit them? How challenging are the maintenance implications when we start trying to support them at sea?

I think you are right, but there are not many people going around suggesting that this would be a silver bullet. The UK is an outrider, particularly in the marine space, for autonomy and uncrewed systems. Let me put this to you: is this related to our experience supporting Ukraine’s activities and Ukraine’s success in shifting the Russian Black sea fleet out of the Black sea, even though Ukraine does not or did not have a navy?

Yes. Clearly, there is technological expertise here that is intimately linked to UK support for Ukraine. You are absolutely right. We need to be careful not to generalise too far from the experience of what was effectively a pretty rubbish Russian fleet trapped in a lake, which is what the Black sea effectively is. Pretty much all of its ports can be held at risk. That is very distinct from the situation with the north Atlantic, where you are talking about a much bigger, badder and better-resourced Russian fleet that can get out into the world’s oceans. You are absolutely right, and I am not here to say, “None of this is true.” Some of these questions come down to, “What would the Navy rather have?” In some ways, the Navy has made its choice, or at least the senior leadership of the Navy has made its choice. Let us say you could choose between 30 uncrewed sloops and 10 things that were a crewed sloop with 20 or 30 people on, like a Singaporean corvette at the moment, which can pull a towed array sonar and put a drone up in the air that can drop a torpedo, if it needs to. Those are some of the trade-offs that you are really talking about. If the 30 uncrewed ones deliver more value than the 10 crewed ones, great, you made the right choice. If you put your 30 uncrewed sloops to sea and within six months 20 of them have had collisions with Russian merchant ships, you are left saying, “We have a lot of expensive microchips at the bottom of the sea.”

Thanks for those answers. Professor Zysk, we are quite au fait with what is going on in the UK military. Perhaps you will be able to comment on what is happening in the Russian military as regards uncrewed systems, particularly in the Russian navy.

There has been a strong focus on this from the Russian top political leadership. Putin ordered the Russian Government in December 2022 to make the development of uncrewed systems a special priority for the Russian Government. We have seen the change: Russia entered the war with a fleet of roughly 2,000 unmanned vehicles; in 2024, it used 1.5 million. We are now talking about several millions. We also see an extensive effort to educate Russia’s younger population from the very early stages to be able to enter and support this function. Russia has also not shied away from copying and reverse-engineering some of the Ukrainian maritime drones. Russia has been investing heavily in unmanned systems for the navy. This includes Murena, Iskatel, Oduvanchik and Vizir—they have presented a number. They have already tested many of these systems for a broad spectrum of missions: attack, reconnaissance, ship protection, counter-drone operations, mine laying, mine clearing, and so on. There is a strong effort. In May last year, the Russian navy began establishing specialised regiments for unmanned maritime systems. Overall, we see that Russia sees this as a great opportunity. There is also work moving ahead with the integration of artificial intelligence in some of these systems. They are struggling because of technological sanctions and financial problems, but certain areas are highly prioritised, including the decision-making process. This is an important area to follow and see what Russia manages to do. The Russians certainly believe that this is part of the future for the Russian navy.

To return to my point about escalation, we have had a discussion about uncrewed systems versus crewed systems. Unfortunately, Professor Zysk, we did not get to hear your view on that. I am going to frame the question and summarise the discussion that happened. We have been talking about the deterrence ladder. Those were the words you used earlier. We are now looking at the High North and at vessels. Take an uncrewed vessel: sink it or steal it—is that an escalation? On the border, green men make an incursion into a country: shoot them or arrest them—are they escalations? Which one is effective? How would they be viewed by the Russians?

It depends on the broader situation. We cannot really study this situation without looking at the broader political context. It would depend on how the Russians read our ability to respond, the cohesion in NATO and our willingness to respond quickly without significant delay, which they will try certainly to induce. It may or may not be an escalation. It really depends on how we manage to influence the Russian risk.

When we hear about GUGI subs, should we just sink them or steal them?

We managed to deter them at the beginning of the month. It depends on what they are doing. Going back to the earlier discussion, we are not at war with Russia, but certainly Russia is at war with the west. Russia has been very clear that this is not only rhetoric. This feeds into the broader theoretical thinking of the Russian military and the broader Russian strategic deterrence concept, which aims at the integration of nuclear, non-nuclear and non-military ways and means, depending on where the room for manoeuvre is. There is still this cost-benefit assessment. There is still some rationality on the part of Russia, but it is important—this is perhaps where I depart somewhat from the assessment of my colleague—to treat it as an act of war. However, in terms of how we respond to that, each case has to be part of an assessment. We have observed Russian escalation in the grey zone over the past three or four years. What is really important is co-ordination. I know that this happens in the UK, but in many countries in NATO it does not. There needs to be co-ordination at national level to be able to assess whether something is an accident or an act of war. Is it connected to something that is happening in other countries? Is it a broader operation or not? This ongoing co-ordination at national level and internationally, including with the European Union, given that we are talking about the non-military sphere, is incredibly important to understand what is actually going on. What kind of operation is it? What is the damage? What is the risk? What is the assessment on the Russian side? Where are they going with that? It has to be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

I pick out those two specific cases because they show the incoherence. An uncrewed system, I would posit, is always grey zone or it is an irrelevant consequence of a broader war. It is part of lethality. Whether we are demonstrating will or not, I cannot see the consequences of the removal of an uncrewed system. However, arresting or shooting an unattributed green uniform-wearing individual crossing a national border has some consequences. I am trying to understand where those things meet in terms of response from the Russians. Do the Russians view those things in the same way as I do? What analysis do they make? That shapes the question that I am going to move on to, which is about how we pool our capabilities within alliances and the incoherence of those alliances. It is more about that assessment: does Russia view the loss of assets as a rung on the escalation ladder or will it only respond to the loss of its people?

We have seen that Russia has been pushing further and further. It has been more daring and aggressive in its operations. There were a variety of operations in Europe. We had an attempt at paramilitary operations with a coup attempt in 2016 in Montenegro and in 2023, most likely, in Moldova. Whether you shoot these people, arrest them or act in another way to contain this operation, this kind of assessment has to be done. Russia will be probing—this is what it does—how far it can go before its hands are slapped.

Professor, that is what I am asking. What does that slap look like? Quite simply, is the removal or lifting of an uncrewed vessel a slap?

Not necessarily, no. What would that mean? I do not think human life in itself is of such great importance, unless we are talking about high-level military. We have also seen this happen with a number of Russian generals over the past four years. It depends on how the Russian Government would read that. Would it mean significant damage to their position? Would it endanger somehow the stability of the regime? It does not necessarily have to be an escalation. It depends on the situation. I am sorry I cannot give you more of a straight answer.

In terms of capabilities, to broaden it out, I thought it was quite important to frame what we are trying to deter. Should the UK be developing its own sovereign solutions to address the military gaps that we are discussing, mindful of the things that we are trying to achieve, as we were just speaking about? Should we be seeking to specialise in certain areas or relying on other capabilities?

Some specialisation is inevitable. Navies and air forces are somewhat slower to build than armies. With some caveats, specialist skills and technology in any of the domains are always harder to generate than getting some bodies together quickly. Historically, it has been easier to grow an army more quickly. When a maritime island power like the UK decides it wants an army, it has managed to do it. Building up naval and air force capability is slower and there is more imperative to do it in advance. There is that dimension to it. UK geography means that maritime and associated air control will always really be the UK’s highest mission. Contributing to war on the continent has always been, “If we can achieve sufficient sea and air control, how can we help to tilt the balance of power in Europe in our favour?” Even within the sea and air domains, you run into some quite hard trade-offs. First of all, if part of the context is the doubt about how much American commitment will be there, European NATO states do not necessarily have to replicate everything that the US has. They do not need to fight like the US. You can tolerate some important and valuable gaps, particularly if allies like Norway are more in that space. The thing with allies is that they always have some divergence of interests. That is why they are a different country. If their interests were identical, they would be the same place. With allies, you have to assess the extent of the alignment. The great thing about Norway as an ally is that it has a lot of the same very closely aligned interests. In that sense, when you are thinking about how durable this alliance is likely to be and how much we can count on them to put their forces and capabilities in our way, if the alignment of interests is very close, you have more confidence that you can lean on the capabilities that they can bring to bear. The caveat, though, to all that glass-half-full stuff is that the UK, for years and years, has been generating SDSR-type documents in which we talk about how far we lean on allies. It has ultimately reached the point where the greatest of those allies has suddenly become unreliable. At some point, we have to have some harder conversations with ourselves. We cannot just gap everything. We cannot just say, “We lean on an ally for this. We lean on an ally for that.” When it comes to the High North, the UK is the major power now. The American cavalry is not about to ride over the horizon and save our fecklessness.

That is where I was hoping to go. I was also hoping to hear about specific capabilities that we should be focusing on in that area. I know you covered a lot of ground on that earlier. We have ample evidence, perhaps, to satisfy some of what we are trying to gather. I want to move through the incoherence of our relations and what the UK can do to close that incoherence. We have spoken about Canada, Norway and the JEF extensively, but we have barely, if at all, spoken about NATO and its plans within the region. If I am thinking about shared capabilities, how the UK can lead and this sovereign discussion, if we consider Type 26, there is a unifying concept between Canada and Norway. How does the roll-out of Type 26 act as an act of deterrence and coherence within the JEF and NATO? How is that viewed from outside?

Professor Zysk would be better qualified to talk about how it is viewed from outside the UK, but you are right. One potential advantage is that hopefully it will drive unit costs down, which we all pray will ultimately allow the acquisition of more units of Type 26. So much of the story of European naval shipbuilding programmes is little bitty programmes that end up with debilitating per-unit price tags because so few of them are built, or you just about get the production line running and then you stop for 20 years, and everyone forgets how to build ships. Hopefully, keeping those Scottish frigate factories running on a routinised drumbeat will really help with that. There is also the question about whether you can get maintenance support infrastructure to that really home base-type level for the Type 26s up in northern Norway. That would be hugely empowering and enabling to British Type 26 operations when they are happening in the High North.

If we have a unifying military idea, which is that we are all operating the same vehicles, and the Lunna House agreement with Norway is about having interoperability, would it not be sensible for those partners to be in some shared procurement programme where they can leverage the benefits of their powerful and very distinct economies?

Yes, you are right. It is not an area of my deep specialism. There is shared procurement and there is shared procurement. There is saying, “We make a thing and we would love you to buy it,” versus all the difficulties that you get into once things start being collaborative joint ventures.

We are through that, are we not? We have already agreed that we are all going to have Type 26s. What we have not shown is any coherence between those three nations and, as you said earlier, the liberal organisations that hold them together. I raise this because the levers of power—you both study these things—are diplomatic, information, military and economic, and they should be aligned. There is a misalignment in the High North that comes out in a number of different places. One of them is the military matériel and the gaps, and the other is the coherence of those instruments. I want to move on to America. If we are going to respond, I cannot find or think of another example where those three actors, which are the strongest actors in the High North, share any sense of coherence. Professor Zysk, is that something you would agree with?

I am not sure whether I understood the question. I’m sorry.

Are our diplomatic, information, military and economic responses to Russia in the High North viewed as coherent? I am using the specific example of Canada, Norway and the UK in terms of their leadership and procurement of their military systems.

Are you asking me as seen from Russia—from Moscow?

Yes.

This is what they are really concerned about. From Russia, it does look quite coherent. This is why it has maintained such a relatively high level of military activity despite the limitations of the available forces. This is a region where Russia takes NATO very seriously.

It is more about the JEF and those three countries. We have not spoken about the NATO plan at all. We have spoken about the JEF and a whole load of bilateral relations. We have not spoken about NATO or the procurement messages. There is a foreign policy aspect here, isn’t there? That is how we, as a group of nations, react not only to what Russia is doing, but to President Trump’s recent remarks on our foreign policy and specific criticisms of our maritime focus, which is why I point to Type 26. What capability gaps need to be addressed if we are expecting the US to withdraw? We have not only to recognise those things but to have meaningful structures to respond to them.

You are right. When we talk about NATO, we can talk about the formal processes, the institutions and the structures. All those are in a bit of a state of flux at the moment because of these outstanding question marks about US commitment. You have all these roles and positions that are filled by Americans because of the US’s long-standing hegemonic role in that alliance, but we are simultaneously not sure whether it is actually the position of their Government to still back and support this thing. We can talk about the formal aspects of withdrawal or not, but, functionally, you would probably say article 5 in the American sense is pretty much moribund at the moment now anyway. No one really believes that the Americans are riding to the rescue if there were some situation in the Baltic states. A policymaker might not say that, but an academic can speculate that that is the case. There is that kind of dimension to it. Take NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group, which the UK has always been very keen to work through as its contribution to NATO nuclear extended deterrence, which, again, extends up into the High North. That covers Norway, and now covers Sweden and Finland too. That is still a really central element of trying to work through the NATO structures with this big question about whether the superpower that once backed them is still fully committed. It was reported in the media quite recently that a French SSN had been seen in Faslane around the time that one of the SSBNs sailed on its patrol or whatever. There was lots of speculation. Is this the French now doing delousing for a UK SSBN going on patrol? Is that great alliance solidarity or is it, “Oh my god, we can’t get one of our own SSNs to sea to do one of the highest missions”? Do we see the glass as half full—“Look, even the more southerly European NATO major power that has long looked more towards the Mediterranean and mid-Atlantic region is up here doing important things and contributing to the security of the north-east Atlantic and the High North”—or do we think, “Gosh, our own capabilities are in such a parlous state that we are having to lean on French delousing to get one of the SSBNs to sea”? You are right. On the one hand, in so far as NATO, as a coherent multilateral alliance that the UK has long attached a huge amount of value to for some very clear reasons, can be propped up and shored up, it should be. We should work through those processes and mechanisms as far as possible. But there is this big question mark about the US’s long-standing leadership role, which is still there almost as the institutional residue, yet the political commitment is now in doubt.

Can I add something? I finally understood the question. From the Russian perspective, NATO cohesion is one of the biggest problems in the High North. What is interesting is that despite the signals and actions by the Trump Administration to undermine the political credibility of the US security guarantee, the US is still doing what it has been doing, including in the High North. Exercise Cold Response took place in March, and there were several thousand American soldiers there. This is a signal that is also being received in Moscow. It is certainly a bit confusing but very important. In the context of the High North, it is important to highlight that the type of capabilities and capacities that Russia has on the Kola peninsula are primarily directed against the United States. Of course, they are also directed broadly towards NATO and Europe, but the United States will be their primary recipient. This makes it more likely that the United States has a direct interest in preserving co-operation, presence and collaboration with allies in the region.

We have just touched briefly on what appears to be the weakening commitment from the US to Europe. Are there any particular risks in terms of nuclear deterrence if the UK is forced to counter hostile activity in the region in the absence of the US?

Yes, definitely. The High North is one of the geographical spaces where conventional military activity and nuclear deterrence are tightly compressed. This overlap is manageable with credible US extended deterrence, providing the weight to NATO’s posture in Europe. If the United States is absent or politically constrained, British deterrence is the only sovereign nuclear capability in the region. Of course, that would open up various challenges. As the primary nuclear signalling actor in the region, the burden on UK deterrence is likely to increase substantially. The problem with that is that the UK deterrent is not really designed to substitute for US strategic weight or to account for the way that Russia has formed its nuclear strategy. Managing escalation risk in an environment where the US imprint is weakened or absent opens you up to a lot of problems. One risk is that this absence could lead Russia to assess that NATO’s willingness and ability to respond decisively to Russia’s actions is degraded to the extent that it could misperceive. This could potentially lead to inadvertent escalation. It could push Russia, for instance, to push further into the grey zone, calculating that it will not trigger a meaningful collective response from NATO. That increases risk, broadly speaking, including the risk of miscalculation on the Russian part, which could potentially lead to an escalation happening earlier than if the United States were present in the region. That is one scenario.

There are some real risks. Some of them are risks of diminished American commitment writ large, which might happen to affect the nuclear arsenal, and some of them are specifically implications for the nuclear arsenal. We do not know—it is not in the public domain—how many American hunter-killer submarines, SSNs, might be assigned to the north-east Atlantic. If the US decides that it has other higher priorities for those, that is not the kind of thing that we would know in public, but the people doing planning for the Royal Navy might suddenly have to take that into account. That has implications for the security of the High North and the north-east Atlantic writ large, but also for protecting our own SSBNs when they deploy. It is the same with access to SOSUS data, for example. Again, it is not in the public domain. Do we have access to that? Do we not? Again, that is the kind of thing that would have big implications, if the US either decided it was simply less committed to the defence of Europe or indeed decided to reach for explicit coercive levers against European states, as it has done on a couple of occasions when European allies have diverged. Thinking about the particular nuclear dimension, you have the question of keeping the UK arsenal safe, which includes making sure SSBNs are not found, targeted or tracked out at sea. Another aspect might be air and missile defence of facilities like Faslane. We have had all the furore in the public domain in recent weeks about the paucity of UK missile defences in somewhere like Akrotiri. There are all those questions. You then get into the broader strategic questions about European allies in the High North additionally leaning on the UK nuclear deterrent, which is kind of where Professor Zysk was going. Yes, in principle, the UK arsenal has always been committed in that extended deterrence role to NATO as a whole via the Nuclear Planning Group, while also having a final national reservation on exactly how it is employed. It has not been configured for extended deterrence in the wider sense of the forces that you might need for that. The idea that there is one on-patrol submarine that can fire a submarine-launched ballistic missile does not allow much scope for gradated response. There are two big problems with trying to use it in anything other than a retaliatory end-of-the-world-type deterrent capacity. First, if you fire a missile, you show where the submarine is; secondly, if you fire a Trident D5 missile, you are hoping that the Russians believe you when you say, “No, it’s just a sub-strategic retaliatory thing for your attack on Norway.” You are trying to do really high-stakes communication in the middle of a crisis that could end the world. The UK arsenal is not really well configured for that extended deterrent-type role. There has been a bit of a debate in elements of the papers and stuff about whether the UK needs some sub-strategic nuclear options of its own. There was the announcement last year of getting the F-35A and getting back into the nuclear dual-capable aircraft mission carrying American nuclear bombs. France has its own air-launched augmentation to its nuclear arsenal. It does have the ability to fire an air-launched weapon as a precursor to end-of-the-world naval retaliation. People go in a couple of directions on this. Some people say, “Oh my God, UK conventional forces are so overstretched as it is. Why would you now start talking about another really expensive nuclear option?” Others say, “It’s precisely because our conventional forces have got so weak that we need to talk about some sub-strategic tactical theatre”—whatever adjective you want—“version of additional nuclear capability.” Certainly, if you think about some sort of confrontation with Russia in this region, it is not hard to conceive of a situation where, as things escalated, Russia said, “We have a real problem with all this air power that is being used against us in the High North, which is operating from places like Lossiemouth. The way to get rid of a place like Lossiemouth is to drop a tactical nuclear weapon on it. Maybe we in Moscow think we could do that because the Brits don’t have a credible retaliatory place on their ladder. They’re not going to nuke Moscow with Trident for us doing that. This is a thing that we think we can get away with and they’re not going to have any option to do anything about it.” That is potentially where, once you are in the business of extending deterrent guarantees, given doubts about the assuredness of American backing, it could get trickier. The other thing that has been sloshing around in public debate is how long the Vanguard-class submarine patrols have been getting and whether there is also a case for having some other nuclear delivery system for when you get a break in Vanguard-class patrols, if that force is clinging on by a hair’s breadth in terms of the availability of the hulls and the people. There are two bundles of answers. One is to do with the American commitment to European deterrence in that region writ large, which has implications for how much the UK has to do and how far it has to protect its forces. The other is what it might mean if the UK starts trying to do extended nuclear deterrence on its own. Of course, there is also the servicing aspect of Georgia and Kings Bay, and Lockheed Martin, if the Americans were to try to use that as a lever as well.

Thank you for that very sobering interpretation.

With that, we will move on to the last section of our session for today, which is around defence exports and the UK growth agenda.

There are two big priorities for the Government: the High North and making defence an engine for growth. What opportunities are there to contribute to the Government’s growth agenda through defence exports, and how best can these be managed?

There are lots. Right across Europe and the wider world, defence and geopolitics have reluctantly come back in vogue. The UK does have some incredible strengths in this area. During the lean years of the 1990s and 2000s or whatever, it was expending vast resources to cling on to sonar technology, its broader array of underwater capabilities, some of its missile capabilities and things like that, which suddenly are back in demand. As Mr Thomas’s question alluded to, if the UK is going to throw itself knee-deep into the Atlantic bastion and hybrid navy concept, notwithstanding a few caveats about just how far you can hybridise, that might be a real area. If you do end up in a situation where people like the Norwegians want some integrated north Atlantic net and the UK is throwing itself into that capability, that is great. The Typhoon production line has now been kept open with the Turkish order and there is hoped to be GCAP beyond that. That might have some utility as a long-range maritime strike option with High North relevance that could be framed in those terms. There is that kind of thing. One note of caution is that what you really want to do is expand the actual industrial capacity. Otherwise, like the Type 26 order, you just end up squeezing the balloon. It is great that Norway wants Type 26 and it gets some build slots, but the Royal Navy is left waiting longer for the frigates it desperately needs as the Type 23s fall off a reliability cliff.

Does that make it pretty hard to replicate that deal?

Potentially, yes. It is probably harder at the high-end macro platform/system end for big complex frigates. A lot of UK missiles have been performing really well. Everyone has been singing the praises of how well Martlet has done as a much lower-cost way of engaging Shahed-type drones. Things that do not require a massive shipyard might be the kinds of things that can be scaled more easily. If we look at the lower naval end, you can come down from the big Rosyth and Clyde-type factories and start thinking more about smaller yards like Appledore that can build smaller patrol vessels or sloops, whether they are crewed or uncrewed, which is a separate conversation. You are right. In some ways, it is classic chicken and egg. You want to know that there is going to be a reliable pipeline for more Type 26s, more AUKUS-type SSNs or whatever. AUKUS is not a High North thing, but the SSNs are very much central to our High North strategy. If you have that assured industrial pipeline, you can open another hall at Barrow or another yard elsewhere. No one in industry is going to bite the bullet on that if they think it might build two more frigates and then shut again.

Can I come back to the small stuff? The Treasury has this multilateral defence mechanism, which very much seems to be JEF-oriented. We have not really, as a Committee, been able to get a sense of what Government are trying to do. There have been some communications with the Treasury Select Committee, but we are hoping to be able to get into this. Something they seem to be looking at is stockpiling with other JEF nations. I cannot really get my head around the cost-benefit analysis of stockpiling. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Do you mean munitions stockpiling specifically?

Yes, exactly.

For years and years, when I was doing evidence submissions for this Committee back in the twenty-teens or whatever, UK and European NATO stocks of everything had been run down further and further based on a bunch of untested assumptions about the resupply of things from global markets. “We don’t need to hold a big stockpile of things because we will just resupply from global markets.” Of course, “global markets” really meant the United States. That may have been an appropriate way of doing business during the war on terror and the era of power projection against weak Middle Eastern countries that could not shoot back, expeditionary operations, the American unipolar moment and everything else. It started to be found out with the Libya campaign. Britain and France tried to lead on that and had stockpiles for a few days, and then suddenly it was back to Uncle Sam to ask for more help. The scale of what has happened in Ukraine since then and in the Gulf has exposed the centrality of massive stocks of everything. A lot of our assumptions were based on the American way of warfighting, which was to do colossally unfaceable massive firepower for two brilliant weeks against an adversary that could not possibly deal with all the suppression of enemy air defences and all the things that the Americans would be doing for them. Therefore, you did not really need the ability to do long campaigning because the west—America—would just win in a fortnight. Now we are in quite a different paradigm. That affects not just munitions. It affects fuel, spares, blankets, uniforms and food. The idea of consolidating all your fast-jet and warship operations down to a tiny number of bases is financially efficient, but it is not very resilient. You would only have to hit a very small number of places in the UK to fundamentally change our ability to do long-term logistical support.

Is it financially efficient? I am not sure, given the cost of storing this stuff. This is incredibly sensitive kit. I just wonder how financially efficient it is.

Yes, you are right. What is driving it all is the recognition that, long before someone like me turns up and starts playing Fantasy Fleet and saying we should buy some SSKs, some more sloops or something, just getting the main headline force that we have to be able to work and fight for better and longer would make a huge difference. That includes all the boring business of maintenance and support contracts, and all this stuff. It also includes munition stockpiles. For it to be an economic opportunity, it requires people to remain united behind the idea that there is still value in building up stockpiles of this stuff and putting it in warehouses, and dispersing those warehouses, because the warehousing itself is expensive. It is tempting to put them all in one, which is nice and financially efficient, but if the Russians know where that one is, you have a lovely big target. You get more resilience by dispersing it more. It requires the political will to remain committed to the value of building up and maintaining stocks, and dispersing them.

You alluded to the fact our industrial base needs to expand; we need to get money moving to be able to help that expansion. There was a Telegraph article yesterday reporting that the UK—I presume the Treasury—is looking at what would seem an evolution of the MDM, being referred to as a JEF bank. I declare an interest: I have been campaigning for the Canadian-backed Defence, Security and Resilience Bank in charter negotiations. Can I ask about your sense of the foreign policy implications of what would seem to be this race to create an institution? We and our allies should be standing together shoulder to shoulder. What does that look like to the world?

It is not an area of particularly deep expertise for me. Clearly, there is this need to get additional funding into defence spending, whether it is war bonds or defence readiness bonds—those kinds of concepts. Specifically defence-focused banking is a good idea. Some divergence between allies is sometimes helpful. What if every single ally operates the same fleet of something and it turns out to have a vulnerability? If the Russians or Chinese had some glorious cyber back-door into the F-35, the fact that everyone was using the same platform for efficiency reasons would turn out to be a problem. Sometimes having a bit more diversification can be a source of resilience.

This is not about capability; this is about getting money moving.

Yes, I generally agree. I largely defer to you. I do not have deep expertise on the financial side.

Can I ask Professor Zysk about the foreign policy perspective? What does this look like from the Russian angle?

Which foreign policy perspective?

How do they see this race to create a financial institution that can help to get money moving to support defence? We have this concept of a JEF bank, which seems to be the latest evolution of the multilateral defence mechanism. Canada is leading another group of nations with the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank.

I have not yet seen any reaction in Moscow to this particular idea. Generally, I have seen some assessments by the Russian MOD that are very concerned about the momentum that the war in Ukraine has created in European defence. On the one hand, detrimental moves by the Trump Administration, attacks on Europe, undermining cohesion, the Greenland affair, and so on, have been met with joy in Moscow, going exactly in the direction that Russia has been working very hard toward over the past 20 years. At the same time, they worry about the general mobilisation that they see in European defence. The plan to prepare Russia for long-term confrontation is also related to reading the situation as such.

Thank you very much, Professor Zysk and Professor Blagden. Thank you so much for making yourselves available for today. It has really been a fascinating discussion. With that, I call an end to today’s session.