The robot submarines that can defend the UK from Putin's secret attacks
Sir Keir Starmer’s much delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.
The world has certainly become troublingly familiar with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in recent years, both in the skies above Ukraine and Russia but also in the Iran conflict.
However, there is less awareness of how autonomous weapons are poised to transform maritime warfare too.
And with Russia scouring the seabed of the Atlantic in order to map Britain’s vital undersea cable and pipe infrastructure – the Ministry of Defence (MoD) says Russian incursions into UK waters have increased by 30 per cent over the past two years – maritime drones, particularly submarines, could be the key to protecting the Home Front from the likes of Vladimir Putin.
Three families reflect on the early signs of the illness, which affected their parents.
They include the things they missed or dismissed, what they’d do differently and what they’d want other people in the same position to know.
One of the first incidents that rang alarm bells for Robert was his mum falling victim to a suspected scam from someone selling mattresses door-to-door.
She also started to struggle with cooking and making her special dishes she’d been making for decades without a problem.
We [had] just sort of played along with everything. But on one particularly bad day, I blurted it out over the phone, ‘Because you’ve got dementia, mum!’ She threatened to kill herself, which was very scary. Maybe it’s something I should have explained properly to her from the get go…
I think we missed some of the really early subtle signs.
Rosie’s mother was diagnosed with Young Onset Alzheimer’s Disease at 58 but some symptoms, like brain fog, were put down to the menopause.
She had become more forgetful, and was repeating herself, but as she had always “been scatty” it was dismissed.
It was on strange things like going to the same buffet.
Chloe was just 14 when her mum, Sarah, was diagnosed with young onset frontotemporal dementia, a rare form of the disease.
Another time Sarah, who was diagnosed in her forties, forgot how to boil an egg.
On Saturdays, when she’d usually go shopping, she’d go out and come straight back home, almost like she forgetting
what she was going out for.
Officials have drawn up contingency plans to cut further green levies from energy bills if prices remain high this winter, The i Paper has been told.
Several options are now circulating among Burnham’s transition team who are believed to be weighing up how to deliver on that pledge. A Treasury source said work on a package was ongoing to help with rising costs.
Burnham could remove remaining green levies from energy bills, funded through general taxation instead.
One proposal would be to raise the bank surcharge from its current 3 per cent.
Replace stamp duty, loosen fiscal rules and tax the capital gains uplift on inherited assets.
A written statement published by the Chancellor said the remaining sum would be “confirmed at Budget 2026, in a fair and balanced way”.
The coronation of Andy Burnham is fraught with dangers. Never will a prime minister have arrived in Downing Street with so little scrutiny of what he wants to do.
Sir Keir Starmer’s much-delayed Defence Investment Plan had one big bet at its heart: drones are the future of warfare.
American company Anduril makes the “Seabed Sentry“- a weighted cylinder that uses sensors and AI to monitor what is happening under the sea. They could be used to listen out for spying and sabotage by Russian submarines. They are far cheaper than crewed submarines using traditional sonar.
A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped onto the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listens out for undersea activity.
The UK is woefully unprepared with the Royal Navy in a desperate condition. Whoever sits in Downing Street come next September will need to address matters of defence, homeland and cyber defence especially, with urgency.
Electric flying taxis could be above the streets of London by 2028, a manufacturer has claimed. Here’s what you need to know.
Vertical Aerospace is still testing the aircraft and it will need to be approved by both the approval from the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and the European Aviation Safety Authority (EASA). But the company says the aim is for air taxis to become as cheap and convenient as ordering an Uber to the airport.
Writer Sadhbh O’Sullivan looked into her own forgotten subscriptions when she became a first-time buyer, and realised how much she was wasting on things she wasn’t using.
I’d long considered myself to be quite a reasonable spender.
But the hidden costs across her bank accounts, like free trials that hadn’t been cancelled and memberships for abandoned services, proved otherwise.
It was full of small amounts, £2.99 here, £4.50 there. These small amounts added up.
According to a Nationwide survey almost one in five Brits don’t use every platform they pay for.
The bank suggests they could save as much as £400 a year by ditching them.
National Trading Standards’ 2025 research found 4.7 million people were paying for subscriptions they didn’t know they’d signed up for.
In 2024, a government report found unused and unwanted subscriptions cost consumers up to £1.6bn a year.
Hunt them down
Banking apps usually list your ‘subscriptions’ separately from direct debits and standing orders so you can easily spot what you’re shelling out on.
Check everything
You can be debited through credit cards, E-payment services, your mobile phone bill, Apple Pay or Google Pay.
Don’t vow to use a subscription you’re not going to, even if you
have good intentions.
Many businesses have changed from monthly to annual payments so look further back.
Make sure to track any subscriptions you have kept so you can cancel them, if need be, in future.
But staff say many people treat their shops like a tip.
Here they share the most useful donations they get, and the
ones that drive them mad.
The quality of donations over the last year has diminished.
Claire Stockman, head of retail for St
Luke’s Hospice [pictured], says many donations include used items from fast fashion like Boohoo and Primark, which they cannot sell for more than £2, if at all.
of what comes into St Luke’s Hospice is unsellable, Stockman says.
She adds its soiled, damaged beyond
repair or smelly.
Harriet, a volunteer at Crisis in Dalston,
says people bring in clothes that are dirty and stained – things that they cannot sell
on Vinted.
She also sees dirty kitchenware and technology that no longer works.
There was a box donated after someone’s family had passed and in it were all these medals. I researched them and the whole collection ended up going for £2,340…
A good donation is anything new with tags on, anything that hasn’t been opened, or higher quality items.
Items that have been well looked after are more likely to sell and generate a better price for charity too.
Harriet adds that knick-knacks and wine glasses are surprise hits in her branch.
Here, psychologists, career consultants and sleep experts give their best advice on how
to beat the gloom that the
work week is looming…
Pave the way on Friday
Psychologist Maria-Teresa Daher-Cusack says to wrap up tasks and not to leave big or difficult things for Monday. And write a to-do list for the next week so you know what to expect when you return after the weekend.
Get outside early
Doctor Naheed Ali says getting out on a Sunday morning – not sleeping late – helps regulate the circadian rhythm that can become skewed over the weekend.
On Sunday spend time away from technology to allow yourself a personal reset away from doom scrolling.
Put yourself in the best position to rest by avoiding large meals, screens and caffeine.
If possible don’t stack your Mondays with high-pressure tasks.
Don’t just save joyful things for the weekend. On lunch breaks, try to do something you enjoy.
If the Sunday scaries are constant, listen to them. If every Sunday fills you with dread and nothing seems to quell it it’s worth asking if it’s the job, the culture or the career itself. No one should spend half their weekend bracing for impact… ” says Victoria McLean
But no country’s energy system is 100 per cent secure and large-scale blackouts, although rare, are possible.
Here’s how to prepare, and what could happen, if we do have a blackout.
If the UK’s power went down tomorrow, these are the ways it is likely to impact you first.
For EV owners that are already on the road, Professor Keith Bell, who works in electricity planning, recommends that those with an EV with reasonable charge use it as a generator, like your own store of electricity.
In the case of the power system going down, petrol isn’t a totally safe option as queues at petrol stations could be huge and places are likely to run out of fuel.
The longer the power takes to return the worse things are likely to get. In 2021 Storm Arwen physically damaged power lines across the UK.
During the 1977 New York blackout, which lasted 25 hours, there was civil unrest, resulting in widespread looting and arson, although intense heatwaves are thought to have exacerbated the situation.
To get updates during a power cut – a car radio can be used, but in severe weather it might be safer to stay inside.
A minimum of 2.5-3 litres of drinking water per person per day is recommended.
The Government recommends opting for torches over candles, for safety reasons.
The general verdict from defence experts is that the £15bn allocated for the DIP is inadequate to the scale of the threat Britain faces from Russia – particularly with £4.7bn of that still unfunded. But Starmer tried to blunt the criticism by earmarking £5bn for increasing the use of drones and autonomous weapons.
In his speech unveiling the DIP on Tuesday, the Prime Minister claimed that by pivoting to unmanned military assets, Britain is “learning the lessons of Ukraine”, where “the very nature of conflict is changing before our eyes”.
One of the most eye-catching features of the DIP is the decision to scrap plans for eight Type 83 destroyers, designed for air defence, and instead build a fleet of “at least” six new, cheaper ships called Common Combat Vessels (CCVs).
While the CCVs will be crewed, the idea is that they will act as “motherships” for fleets of uncrewed vessels or drones operating in the air, on the surface and under the sea.
The head of the Royal Navy, First Sea Lord General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, has promised a “hybrid navy” in which crewed ships will fight “with and alongside drones and other cutting-edge weapon systems” to increase “the mass, survivability and lethality of our force”.
For now, the CCVs remain undesigned and unbuilt – just one of the reasons why the plan to substitute them for the destroyers has prompted considerable scepticism in naval circles.
The Royal Navy is already using drones, such as on RFA Lyme Bay, a ship designed to land troops and vehicles which has recently been refurbished to support mine-sweeping exercises in the Strait of Hormuz by deploying underwater and minehunting drones.
Autonomous maritime drones and weapon systems already exist and are operating around the world.
One of the companies at the forefront of the technology is Anduril – the US arms firm founded by the flamboyant, Trump-supporting billionaire tech entrepreneur, Palmer Luckey.
Before the DIP was published, Richard Drake, the managing director of Anduril UK, talked The i Paper through several existing autonomous vehicles which provide a glimpse of the types of military hardware which could soon be lurking in and around British waters.
The first is Seabed Sentry – a system developed by Anduril in the UK. Taking the form of a long, weighted cylinder, Seabed Sentry bristles with sensors and uses AI to monitor what’s happening below the surface.
A dozen of the cylinders can be dropped on the seabed at a time by an autonomous submarine, with the devices forming a network which communicate between themselves and listen out for undersea activity.
The approach differs significantly from the Navy’s current way of monitoring the UK’s vital undersea infrastructure and keeping tabs on what Russian submarines are up to.
Drake said: “When we talk about anti-submarine warfare, we’re listening for noises undersea.
“Our Type 23 frigates and our submarines carry a sonar array – a long line of microphones – behind them as they go around.
“So our thought there is, if we can have lots and lots of smaller [assets], they’re cheaper, they’re easily available… you might drop them in specific places around the coast, and they can all then join together and listen.”
While the UK understandably tries to keep much of its undersea monitoring secret, it is common knowledge that in the Atlantic it has relied since the Cold War on an American network of underwater acoustic spy cables which listen out for the larger Russian submarines.
However, it is thought that much of the undersea infrastructure around our coast – such as energy pipelines and the cables which carry about 99 per cent of our internet data – are not continuously monitored in real time.
“In the UK, the protection of our critical national infrastructure, hasn’t always been top of anybody’s list in terms of budget,” Drake said. “These [sensors] aren’t necessarily there as a matter of course.”
Anduril arguese that its mobile sensors offer a superior form of monitoring because they can be moved around and deployed in secret under the waves, whereas acoustic cable systems require large cable-laying ships which can be identified from space.
As things stand, the patchiness of undersea monitoring means that guarding against spying and sabotage by Russian submarines is an intensive and potentially hit-and-miss effort.
For example, when the MoD revealed in April that it had rumbled a Russian submarine spying on undersea cables, the then defence secretary John Healey disclosed it had been foiled using a Type 23 frigate, a replenishment tanker, Merlin helicopters and RAF P8 anti-submarine aircraft, with the British ships and aircraft having to cover thousands of miles to track the submarine and other Russian vessels using sonobuoys.
The argument from Drake and others is that greater utilisation of autonomous assets would allow the Royal Navy to be more selective in its deployment of expensive, crewed vessels.
“[Autonomous assets] can cover so much more area and ground with far less people,” he said. “Because those sorts of things [undersea infrastructure] are not exciting until they become exciting, and they’re probably not exciting from 95 per cent of the time.
“Frigates, they’re great things, but there aren’t very many of them.” (Currently, only five are operational.) Drake went on: “You might get an inkling that something is happening in the north of Scotland, and then the transit time to get there is difficult. It might have gone by the time you get there.”
Crucially, the autonomous assets are often much cheaper than crewed ships. “A lot of the money in defence goes on protecting the person in the platform,” he said. “So if you no longer have the person in the platform, you can go for a different type of solution, which is a better value for money solution.”
“The hybrid navy approach… really lets [the Royal Navy] sweat their expensive assets in the right place at the right time, and all the dull stuff could be done elsewhere by robots.”
Alongside Seabed Sentry, Anduril has two models of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). The AUVs can patrol below the waves, dropping sensors and retrieving others (the cylinders can be recharged and reused).
If the sensors detect something suspicious, the AUVs can also be sent to find out more. “When these things hear something, you can then cue this uncrewed underwater vehicle to go and have a look and see what it is right now,” he said.
Anduril’s extra-large AUV –about 12 metres in length – is already being used by the Australian navy, where it goes under the name Ghost Shark. The Royal Navy already has its own uncrewed submarine – an experimental vessel named Excalibur, which was unveiled in 2025.
Of course, autonomous maritime assets will not just be used for monitoring and reconnaissance. Anduril already has a lethal undersea vehicle – Copperhead. Capable of travelling at more than 30 knots, Copperhead is essentially an autonomous torpedo which can be launched from Anduril’s extra-large AUV. It can be directly controlled or programmed to make decisions on which targets to hit in a kamikaze attack.
As already mentioned, drones and uncrewed vessels have their doubters. One of the main criticisms of the DIP’s blueprint for a hybrid navy is the lack of technical detail about the new vessels. Alongside the CCV, the DIP outlines four new types of uncrewed vessels: a missile-launching platform (Type 91), an anti-submarine sensor ship (Type 92), an uncrewed submarine (Type 93) and a radar ship (Type 94).
The DIP has allocated “at least £1.3bn” for the combined hybrid fleet, but given the lack of detail, there are concerns about the efficacy of the new systems and whether they will be delivered on time and within budget. Matthew Savill, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank, said: “Considerable emphasis is placed on autonomy and uncrewed systems to compensate for the limited mass the UK’s Armed Forces can currently bring to bear.
“This gives a clear prioritisation of effort but puts pressure on a mixture of experimental technology and evolving concepts – a bold bet on technological solutions with no margin for error if procurement is not speedy and implementation rapid.”
Given the CCVs are supposed to be cheaper than the Type 83 destroyers, there are widespread fears that the hybrid navy concept is being driven by cost-cutting considerations which could leave the Navy even more hollowed out.
The durability of the new technology is another major worry. Mike Martin, a Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the Defence Select Committee, posted on X this week: “I am obviously in favour of replacing crewed systems with autonomous systems where possible.
“But the maritime domain is the last domain that I would do that in because it is such a harsh unforgiving environment… everything breaks, all the time.”
The claim is that without sailors aboard to continuously maintain and repair them, uncrewed vessels will be too unreliable and breakdown too often, leaving Britain vulnerable.
As with all autonomous assets, there are ethical concerns about unmanned systems killing humans. According to Drake, in Anduril’s systems, there is always a “human on the loop” in the form of “mandatory checkpoints for the human to go, ‘Is that the right thing to be doing? Is this the right time to be doing it?’”
The exact future of the DIP remains uncertain – as well as the lingering questions about the funding and shape of the plan, the expected arrival of Andy Burnham in Downing Street means that it will have to be implemented by a prime minister who did not conceive it.
But whatever happens, there can be little doubt that in the coming years the UK government will be placing more and more of the responsibility for ensuring this island’s security in the custodianship of autonomous machines.