The Ministry of Defence will build at least six Royal Navy Common Combat Vessel instead of replacing ageing Type 45 destroyers with Type 83 ships. The plan shifts the Royal Navy toward vessels built to deploy drones and coordinate uncrewed systems across the air, surface and undersea domains.
Dan Jarvis said the new equipment would be “designed and built for the increasing threats we face”. The department said the vessels would be capable of “coordinating uncrewed systems in the air, on the surface and under the sea to deliver more resilient air defence”, and described the programme as “a once in a generation investment in new maritime capability”.
Common Combat Vessels for the Royal Navy
The Ministry of Defence said the new vessels are a better investment than a “small number of large expensive ships”. That is the clearest break with the older Type 83 concept: instead of one large replacement for a destroyer fleet, the Navy would get at least six Common Combat Vessels designed to extend reach, resilience and firepower without a proportional rise in crew or cost.
The ships are expected in the 2030s and are intended to help the Royal Navy counter Russian activity in the North Atlantic and High North, while also protecting critical underwater infrastructure and strengthening Nato deterrence. British shipyards are expected to gain work from the programme, even though the government did not say how much funding had been set aside in the defence investment plan.
Budget fight over defence investment plan
The new announcement follows the interception of a Russian shadow fleet oil tanker in the English Channel on 14 June, and it lands after John Healey and Al Carns resigned in recent weeks during fraught budget negotiations over cuts to pay for the defence investment plan. John Healey said the Treasury had not committed enough extra funding to address capability gaps in the British military, and Al Carns said the draft was “neither transformative enough nor sufficiently funded”.
James Cartlidge called the plans “too little too late”, while Sir Keir Starmer has committed to publishing the long-delayed defence investment plan before the Nato summit in Turkey on 7 July. Dan Jarvis said the defence investment plan would “prioritise getting the latest kit” into the hands of front-line forces, including new lethal strike drones, leaving the funding split for the six Common Combat Vessels as the immediate unanswered question.
