General Sir Roly Walker has called on Britain’s leadership to start a “frank conversation” with the public to prepare every citizen for the sacrifices needed to strengthen national defence.
General Sir Roly Walker is a highly decorated combat veteran and former Director of Special Forces who assumed command as Chief of the General Staff in June 2024 to lead the modernisation of the British Army.
While the Defence Secretary and opposition leaders fully endorsed General Sir Roly Walker’s warning, the British public remains deeply split, supporting increased military funding but strongly resisting the idea of personal combat service.
General Sir Roly Walker warned of an “axis of upheaval” involving Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, whose sharing of weapons and technology creates an interconnected global threat expected to reach a critical flashpoint by 2027 to 2028.
General Sir Roly Walker aims to double the British Army’s combat power by 2027 and triple it by 2030 through a “20-40-40” restructuring model that heavily leverages autonomous drone swarms, AI, and smart munitions to overwhelm a larger enemy without increasing troop numbers.
General Sir Roly Walker’s intervention follows a historic pattern of wartime warnings by UK military chiefs, mirroring pre-WWII rearmament appeals and directly building on his predecessor General Sir Patrick Sanders’ 2024 call for a “citizen army” to shake the British public out of peacetime complacency.
In his January 2024 speech, General Sir Patrick Sanders warned that the UK’s 74,000-strong regular force was too small to counter Russia, declaring that the public has become a “pre-war generation” that must establish a voluntary “citizen army” framework capable of mobilising 500,000 personnel if a major land war breaks out.
General Sir Patrick Sanders cited the war in Ukraine to argue that Russia’s high-attrition land warfare brutally proves that while regular forces begin conflicts, it takes a massive, resilient secondary echelon of hundreds of thousands of mobilised citizens to sustain the fight and win it.
NATO planners were deeply shocked by a conflict where Russia frequently fired over 20,000 to 40,000 artillery shells per day, and total casualties reached the hundreds of thousands, completely exposing the inadequacy of Western peacetime ammunition stockpiles and manufacturing capacity.
The mismatch is stark: Ukraine burns through roughly 42,000 to 49,000 artillery shells weekly, a volume that has routinely outpaced the peacetime production rates of major Western manufacturing facilities that traditionally produced only a fraction of that amount.
The chemical bottleneck primarily stems from a severe shortage of nitrocellulose, the critical ingredient for gunpowder, because Europe’s domestic factories fulfil less than half of the continent’s annual propellant requirements while remaining heavily dependent on China for raw cotton linters.
To eliminate its ammunition bottlenecks, the European Union has launched strategic industrial alliances alongside major funding packages, highlighted by the October 2026 allocation of €168.2 million under the European Defence Industry Programme to aggressively scale up the domestic production of propellants and explosives.
Operating outside EU mechanisms, the United Kingdom is executing a sovereign “always-on” Defence Investment Plan that commits £11.1 billion to weapons and munitions, allocates £1.5 billion to build six domestic explosives factories, onshores large-calibre artillery barrel manufacturing, and expands industrial output through bilateral initiatives like the October 2026 Warsaw Defence Plan.
The Ministry of Defence has shortlisted 13 candidate regions across England, Scotland, and Wales for the six factories, prioritising heavy industrial zones with existing hazardous chemical permits such as Grangemouth in Scotland, Teesside in Northeast England, and Milford Haven in Wales.
The 13 candidate regions undergoing Ministry of Defence engineering studies to host the six new energetics factories span Cumbria, Teesside, Shropshire, Cheshire, Derbyshire, Worcestershire, Hampshire, Essex, Falkirk (Grangemouth), Stirlingshire, Dumfries and Galloway, North Ayrshire, Pembrokeshire (Milford Haven), and Monmouthshire.
The selected sites will focus on establishing sovereign, domestic production of nine essential energetic materials, explicitly prioritising RDX, HMX, TNT, and Nitrocellulose, alongside Nitroglycerin, Nitroguanidine, Hexanitrostilbene, Ammonium Perchlorate, and Boron Potassium Nitrate.
Following the conclusion of the feasibility studies in September 2026, the Ministry of Defence is evaluating submissions from 22 contracted companies to award multi-million-pound Front End Engineering Design contracts and greenlight initial infrastructure construction before the end of the year.
While the Ministry of Defence has kept the exact names of all 22 bidding companies confidential for national security reasons, the cohort is officially described as a diverse mix of innovative British SMEs, major defence primes like BAE Systems and Rheinmetall, and specialist chemical engineering partners.
In the upcoming £5 million design phase, major defence primes will leverage their scale to lead massive safety case developments, while agile British SMEs will provide the specialised chemical innovations and fast-tracked engineering designs needed to build the new factories.
To win contracts, companies must satisfy Upper-Tier COMAH Regulations by passing strict Health and Safety Executive inspections, producing five-year Safety Reports, and designing robust emergency plans to completely mitigate major explosive risks.
While the British public remains intensely polarised on personal military service, community reactions are further divided between widespread safety concerns over the risks of expanding domestic explosives factories and strong resistance from civilian sectors regarding the impact of tightening industrial regulations.
