UK hails Ukraine's counteroffensive as Russia's “functional defeat” in Black Sea

Interesting piece of speculation about the UK needing an offshore arms manufacturing capacity from the defence minister James Heappey at a security event in Warsaw.

He made the familiar argument that over the past 20 to 30 years Europe has run down its arms stockpiles and manufacturing capacity, something that has been revealed by the “constant drumbeat” of demand made by Ukraine, The Guardian reports.

But he added the UK was a post-industrial economy and that had implications for the Ministry of Defence’s thinking on how to conduct a big war. He said there simply was no means in the UK to repurpose its locomotive factories into tank manufacturing, or civilian aircraft manufacturing into military manufacturing.

“We don’t have a lot of that stuff anymore before” he explained, implying a large UK defence industrial base cannot be reconstructed in time required.

He said that led to an interesting question “Where is near to the UK with defendable air and sea lines of communication where we can have an offshore manufacturing base that is more resilient and more reachable for the UK than where we manufacture now?”

Amidst the Allied disappointment about the pace of Ukraine’s land offensive, he hailed “the functional defeat” of Russia in the Black Sea over past weeks saying the “Russian navy has been forced to disperse to ports from which it cannot have an effect on Ukraine”.

He says it as “every bit as important” as the Ukrainian land breakthrough in Kharkiv oblast.