German warplanes that can track Russian submarines will start operating off the coast of Scotland as early as next year as part of a “landmark” defence pact between London and Berlin.
The new agreement – due to be signed on Wednesday by Defence Secretary John Healey and his German counterpart – will also pave the way for a German defence company to open a factory in Britain that will make artillery gun barrels.
It will be the first time in a decade that such weapons will be built in the UK – even though the urgent need to expand this kind of production capability was exposed almost three years ago by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
‘A milestone’
In a further deepening of military cooperation, the UK and Germany will work together to build new long-range missiles with the ability to hit targets at greater precision and distance than the UK-French Storm Shadow cruise missiles.
Mr Healey described what is being called the Trinity House Agreement as a “milestone” moment in the UK’s relationship with Germany and said it will help strengthen Europe’s security.
“It secures unprecedented levels of new cooperation with the German Armed Forces and industry, bringing benefits to our shared security and prosperity, protecting our shared values and boosting our defence industrial bases,” he said in a statement.
The Ministry of Defence said the UK and Germany – which ramped up defence spending in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine – are “Europe’s two biggest defence spenders”.
But Britain also has close defence ties – forged around specific defence treaties – with France.
The French military is the European force most typically likened to the UK’s given both countries are nuclear powers with – unsurprisingly – a much greater willingness to project combat power than Germany in the decades since the end of the Second World War.
Boris Pistorius, the German defence minister, who is in the UK to sign the new accord, said Berlin and London were moving closer together.
“With projects across the air, land, sea, and cyber domains, we will jointly increase our defence capabilities, thereby strengthening the European pillar within NATO,” he said.
“We must not take security in Europe for granted. Russia is waging war against Ukraine, it is increasing its weapons production immensely and has repeatedly launched hybrid attacks on our partners in Eastern Europe.”
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This includes the targeting of undersea cables, gas pipelines and other submerged critical infrastructure.
The UK and Germany are pledging to work together to protect such cables in the North Sea.
As part of this effort, they will jointly develop “undersea surveillance capabilities”.
A planned German fleet of submarine hunter spy planes – the P8-Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft – will also operate “periodically” from a Royal Air Force base at Lossiemouth in Scotland.
An exact date for this mission has not yet been finalised as the first of the aircraft, built by the US defence company Boeing, is not set to enter into service in the German military until at least 2025.
The German warplanes could also at some point be armed with British torpedoes.
Another strand of the agreement will see Rheinmetall, the German defence firm, open an artillery gun barrel factory in the UK in a move that will create more than 400 jobs, according to the Ministry of Defence.
It described the defence accord as “the first pillar in a wider UK-Germany treaty pledged by Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Olaf Scholz in August”.