Two weeks ago I wrote that Britain was not just failing to spend enough on defence, but spending too much of what it did have on the wrong things.

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Now, as you read this, the long-delayed Defence Investment Plan is quite literally being printed off in Downing Street ahead of its presentation to the public and press and it already looks like we may have lurched from one problem into another.

For years the Ministry of Defence was too slow to absorb the lessons of modern warfare and Ukraine. Drones, electronic warfare, cheap precision, battlefield transparency and expendable mass were all unfolding in real time, while the British system still looked as if it wanted to buy the next version of the last war.

Now, suddenly, the pendulum seems to have swung hard in the opposite direction. It is drones on land, drones at sea, drones in the air, autonomous systems, hybrid vessels, uncrewed missile platforms, command hubs and networked warfare. The full future-war vocabulary has arrived.

That is welcome, up to a point. But the answer to decades of slow, expensive, old-world procurement is not to pretend that glossy concepts and unbuilt autonomous ships can replace real military capability that we may need very soon. That is the danger here.

The Defence Investment Plan is being sold as the moment Britain finally future-proofs its Armed Forces. Sir Keir Starmer says it will keep Britain “safe and secure long into the future”, while Dan Jarvis argues that the character of warfare is rapidly changing and that uncrewed systems are defining conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. They are right about the change, but recognising it is not the same as being ready for it.

The clearest example is at sea. Only a few months ago, Britain was rushing one of its ageing Type 45 destroyers, HMS Dragon, towards the eastern Mediterranean as the threat from Iranian and Iranian-backed ballistic missiles loomed.

That is exactly the sort of mission a serious navy must be able to carry out: air defence, missile defence, deterrence, presence and reassurance. The Type 45s are far from perfect, too few, ageing, overstretched and with well-documented problems, but they exist.

They are real ships, crewed by real sailors, carrying real weapons and doing real tasks in a dangerous world.

Now we are told the Royal Navy........

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