The point was underlined in a written answer this week. Asked by the Conservative MP for Huntingdon, Ben Obese-Jecty, what progress had been made on delivering the up to 7,000 new long-range weapons set out in the Defence Secretary’s foreword to the 2025 review, the Minister of State for Defence, Luke Pollard, pointed to the forthcoming Defence Investment Plan rather than to orders placed or weapons built. The Ministry of Defence “continues to deliver the munitions programme for the UK’s Armed Forces against evolving threats”, he said.
The plan, Pollard said, “will turn the Strategic Defence Review’s vision and recommendations into an affordable delivery plan”, and would “highlight how the Government’s historic investment in Defence will deliver warfighting readiness to deter increasing threats and drive Defence as an engine for jobs and growth”. He did not say when it would be published, although many suspect very soon.
That sequencing explains why a firm figure is hard to come by. The 7,000-weapon pledge was one of the more concrete and widely reported commitments of the review when it appeared in June 2025, but it was set out as an ambition rather than a costed, scheduled programme. The Defence Investment Plan, which replaces the former Equipment Plan, is the document meant to convert that ambition into funded, time-bound orders, and until it is published there is no agreed baseline against which progress towards the number can meaningfully be reported.
The nature of the commitment itself makes a single progress figure elusive. The review did not specify which weapons would make up the 7,000, and the number has been widely understood to span a broad range of munitions rather than any one type, potentially encompassing missiles, extended-range artillery and other guided weapons, including a new long-range missile being developed jointly with Germany. Progress therefore rests on numerous separate programmes, each on its own timeline, rather than on one production line whose output could be counted.
The commitment was set out among the immediate actions in the review, alongside a £6 billion investment in munitions over this Parliament and a pledge to build at least six new energetics and munitions factories. The government said at the time that the 7,000 weapons would be UK-built and would support around 800 defence jobs, part of a wider drive to create an “always on” munitions production capacity that could be scaled up at speed, a lesson drawn from the war in Ukraine and the demands high-intensity conflict places on stockpiles.
The delay to the Defence Investment Plan has become a subject of concern in its own right, with industry and parliamentarians pressing for its publication. For commitments such as the 7,000 weapons, that delay has a practical consequence: until the plan sets out how the money is to be spent and over what period, the ambition cannot be turned into the firm orders that would allow progress to be measured.