Twelve NATO allies, led by the United Kingdom, announced at the Ankara summit that they will jointly fund a £37 billion deep precision strike missile programme over ten years. The new weapon — described by No. 10 as “one of NATO’s most advanced” — is designed to strike targets up to roughly 200 miles away with pinpoint accuracy, with a potential extended range of up to 1,250 miles. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper said it would enable allies to “hit high value military targets and the logistical engines that drive armies, deterring any aggressor.” The programme was announced alongside other Ankara summit commitments: a £70 billion package for Ukraine over the coming year, the Patriot interceptor manufacturing licence for Kyiv, and NATO members’ agreement to a 5 percent of GDP defence and security spending target by 2035. The Kremlin’s response was muted, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov stating that Russia still preferred “settlement through political and diplomatic means” — a formulation that manages to sound conciliatory while signalling no change in strategic objectives. The UK has separately committed £300 billion by 2030 under its Defence Investment Plan, though Prime Minister Starmer — who announced the missile programme as one of his final acts before being succeeded by Andy Burnham — has been criticised for declining to commit to the specific 3.5 percent GDP target that nearly all other NATO members endorsed.
The received wisdom
The official framing of the Deep Precision Strike announcement is one of solidarity, deterrence, and hard-won European realism. After decades of post-Cold War “peace dividend” thinking, NATO’s European members are finally reckoning with the reality of persistent Russian military aggression — an aggression that has now been running continuously for over four years, cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and tested the Alliance’s unity in ways that seemed inconceivable a decade ago. The £37 billion commitment, this argument runs, is not mere signalling but the kind of long-horizon industrial planning that serious defence requires: you cannot build a sovereign precision strike capability in a crisis; you have to invest years in advance. The UK’s leadership of a 12-nation consortium is specifically designed to prove that Europe can, in fact, organise collective defence without becoming entirely dependent on American willingness to remain engaged. Against the backdrop of US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announced six-month review of US forces in Europe and Trump’s persistent demand that Europeans pay more, the new missile programme is exactly what Washington has been asking for — and precisely what European credibility requires.
A different read
The announcement is welcome. It is also, without much exaggeration, a confession. A weapon system funded today and not expected to be ready until the 2030s will not help Ukraine hold the Zaporizhzhia line this autumn, will not replace the Patriot batteries that allied countries have been unable to deliver in sufficient quantities, and will not compensate for the shortfall in conventional artillery, armoured vehicles, and trained manpower that has defined the European contribution to Ukrainian defence since 2022. Ukraine’s own naval drone campaign — striking 25–36 Russian shadow-fleet tankers in four days — demonstrates that asymmetric innovation at the tactical level can have strategic effects precisely because it requires no decade-long procurement cycle. The new NATO missile programme is the inverse: a decade-long procurement cycle designed to produce a weapon that will be impressive when it arrives and irrelevant to the immediate crisis.
The historical parallel is not comforting. After the fall of France in 1940, the British government commissioned numerous advanced weapons development programmes — many of which were excellent and some of which eventually proved decisive. None of them helped in 1940 or 1941. The mismatch between the timeline of institutional procurement and the urgency of operational need is one of the most persistent structural failures of democratic defence planning. Governments announce long-horizon programmes partly because they are intellectually serious, partly because they satisfy defence industry political constituencies, and partly because they provide a politically useful narrative of action that defers accountability for near-term shortfalls. The £37 billion announcement does all three.
The 5 percent of GDP commitment deserves particular scrutiny. NATO members agreed to this target at Ankara; the UK is notably among those that have not specified how it will be reached or by precisely when. UK defence spending currently sits at approximately 2.3 percent of GDP. Getting from 2.3 to 5 percent within nine years would require roughly doubling the defence budget — a commitment that would crowd out virtually every other government spending priority and is not reflected in any current fiscal plan. The gap between summit communiqué and budget allocation is where NATO credibility goes to die. Previous targets — the 2014 Wales Summit commitment to reach 2 percent by 2024 — were met by only a handful of allies, mostly those with existential Russian border concerns. The 5 percent target, in the absence of binding enforcement mechanisms, is a rhetorical escalation rather than a strategic transformation.
None of this is an argument against the Deep Precision Strike programme, which is a genuine capability gap in European arsenals. Long-range precision strike is exactly what NATO’s deterrence posture lacks relative to Russian systems; the investment is justified on its own terms. But the programme’s announcement should not be mistaken for a resolution of the underlying political problem: European democracies have not yet found a durable political consensus for the level of defence spending their security situation requires, and summit announcements do not substitute for that consensus. The UK’s own ambiguity — declining to commit to 3.5 percent while leading a £37 billion consortium programme — is a microcosm of the Alliance’s broader difficulty. It is possible to be simultaneously serious about specific capabilities and unserious about the aggregate commitment that would make those capabilities meaningful.
NATO scrambled jets over 700 times to intercept Russian aircraft approaching allied airspace in the past year; Russian military activity around UK waters surged 30 percent. The threat is not hypothetical and is not receding. The answer cannot wait for the 2030s.
What to watch
- UK fiscal reality check: The Autumn Statement will be Andy Burnham’s first serious opportunity to translate defence rhetoric into actual spending lines. Whether his government backs the £37 billion programme with corresponding cuts elsewhere or new borrowing capacity will reveal whether the commitment is real.
- US force posture review outcome: Hegseth’s six-month review concludes in late 2026. If the review recommends a substantial reduction in US troops or systems in Europe, the urgency of the European precision strike programme will be dramatically elevated — and the 2030s timeline will look indefensible.
- Industrial base capacity: Whether 12 nations can coordinate a joint procurement process without the programme fragmenting into national variants — the traditional failure mode of European defence cooperation, from Eurofighter costs to NH90 timelines — will determine whether the £37 billion delivers one system or twelve.
- Ukraine battlefield feedback: The war in Ukraine is the largest live-fire laboratory for precision strike capability in a generation. Whether the alliance is systematically incorporating lessons from Ukrainian drone and missile operations into the Deep Precision Strike specification will be a test of institutional learning.
— J