Future Capability of the Armed Forces

Lord Risby Excerpts

Thursday 16th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Risby (Con)]

My Lords, this debate is particularly timely as the Farnborough International Airshow begins on Monday. We do indeed live in a volatile and dangerous age, but there is no Member of your Lordships’ House who cannot recognise that, over time, our influence on the world stage has been reducing. At the heart of this has been an anaemic economy and an insufficiently sizeable and focused defence budget.

Nowhere is the lack of direction more glaring than in the space domain—the very central nervous system of modern high-intensity warfare. Instead of accelerating our surveillance satellite programmes, a new plan cancels critical narrowband communication networks. By failing to secure our own space infrastructure, our future forces will risk being dependent on non-sovereign networks controlled by external providers. Furthermore, our approach is drifting. Space resilience is heavily cited in official documents but remains entirely unfocused, lacking specific variable requirements for system recovery and capability generation. Worryingly, we are falling critically out of step with the United States, which has made a fundamental conceptual shift towards an offensive space control mindset.

The strategic defence review called space

“a domain that is central to warfighting”.

Indeed, rapidly increasing congestion in space means that there are now 16,000 satellites compared with 3,000 five years ago, and 100,000 are expected by 2030, offering nefarious actors more opportunity to conceal their activities. In the context of the international environment, space can no longer be viewed merely as an enabler of other domains. It is a critical war-fighting domain and the backbone of our critical national infrastructure.

Underpinning developments in fifth generation warfare is the role that space-based assets play. This is important, particularly as digitalisation increases, delivering precise navigation, instant communications, global surveillance and early missile warning systems. Without space-based assets, co-ordinating fast-paced multidomain operations and combined arms manoeuvres becomes very difficult. The recent defence investment plan announced that the incoming Skynet 6 narrowband satellite system would not proceed. Cancelling Skynet 6A will have a demonstrably adverse effect. This is so disappointing when many in the industry felt that, for three years, the significance of this had been understood clearly by government.

By contrast, if we want a model of a country that has really understood the challenges, we turn to Poland. It is investing 4.5% of its GDP into hard and visible capacity, helping to create greater defence capability from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Even Germany, casting off the Merkel inheritance, is projected to spend more on defence than France and the United Kingdom put together, without the huge debt situation in both countries. Recently, I had the chance to learn all about this by talking with government officials who are in Poland. What was spelled out was impressive yet depressing, because this great success has arisen from fiscal and pro-business policies which had stimulated growth in the private sector. For us, the lessons are obvious.