UK armed forces operational commitments

On 16 February 2025 Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the UK is “ready and willing to contribute to security guarantees to Ukraine by putting our own troops on the ground if necessary”.

MPs and defence experts have questioned the UK’s capacity to provide such a force given existing operational demands, issues with the recruitment and retention of personnel, the cost of maintaining current equipment and buying new capabilities.

This briefing focuses on existing operational demands, and sets out some of the continuing major operational commitments for the UK armed forces.

Role and purpose of the armed forces

The Ministry of Defence explains that its role is to “protect the nation, and to help it prosper”.  The armed forces have several core tasks, which include:

Protect the UK, its Crown Dependencies, and its Overseas Territories, and contribute to the collective deterrence and defence of the Euro-Atlantic area: be able to deter and, if necessary, defend against and defeat, attacks on the UK homeland (including our Overseas Territories) and our NATO allies. 

The government has already said NATO and the Euro-Atlantic will remain the focus of its defence policy in the forthcoming strategic defence review, which it says will be published in spring 2025.

UK/Homeland defence

Protecting the UK is a core task of the armed forces.

At a strategic level, this takes the form of the submarine-based nuclear deterrent, which the Ministry of Defence has explained allows the UK to “take the actions required to maintain regional and global security and stability free from the threat of nuclear coercion”.

The Royal Navy and Royal Air Force (RAF) maintain several military assets tasked with monitoring and defending UK territorial waters and airspace, including escort ships to shadow vessels through or near territorial waters, and maritime patrol aircraft to help find and track submarine movements. In an unusual move, a Royal Navy submarine surfaced close to what the Defence Secretary described as a Russian spy ship as a deterrent measure in November 2024.

The RAF’s quick reaction alert force of Typhoon combat aircraft responds to unidentified aircraft nearing or in UK airspace. They launched 11 times in financial year 2023-24, four of which were in response to Russian aircraft approaching UK airspace.

The UK is part of NATO’s integrated air and missile defence (NATO IAMD) system. It is comprised of a network of national and NATO systems including sensors and early warning radar, command and control assets and weapon systems. The UK also has air defence assets of its own which can be deployed for localised defence of the UK mainland, should it be required.

The armed forces are responsible for protecting the UK’s 14 Overseas Territories. Some also function as strategic locations for UK military action and bases, including Cyprus, Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.

Euro-Atlantic and NATO

Successive governments have committed to prioritising the Euro-Atlantic region.

The Ministry of Defence explained its contribution to European security in written evidence to the Defence Select Committee in January 2025 for its inquiry into the UK’s contribution to European scrutiny.

The MOD says the UK “offers almost all of its armed forces to NATO” as part of its contribution to NATO’s warfighting plans. The Alliance is in the process of concluding its latest defence planning round, the process by which NATO identifies the capabilities it needs to achieve a previously agreed level of ambition. This is expected to be agreed in June 2025.

The UK is leading the land component of the new Allied Reaction Force until mid-2025. The ARF is intended to offer a “strategic, high-readiness, force-generated, multi-domain and multinational capability that can be deployed and employed immediately”.

The MOD says the UK contributes to every NATO operation and mission. The MOD does not regularly publish a list of contributions to missions. The armed forces participated in on average 14 NATO-led operational deployments each year between 2015 and 2023. Current commitments include:

• An army battalion in Estonia and a squadron in Poland as part of NATO’s forward land forces.
• Typhoon aircraft to support air policing missions in the Baltics and in eastern NATO countries.
• Contributing to maritime missions, including Operation Sea Guardian in the Mediterranean, and surveillance aircraft to Baltic Sentry.
• Staff members of KFOR, the NATO-led mission in Kosovo.

Outside of NATO, the UK leads the Joint Expeditionary Force, a coalition of ten northern European countries to train and exercise together. The army also regularly contributes troops, including reserve forces, to the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus.

Middle East

There are three major ongoing operations in the wider Middle East region:

• Operation Kipion, a long-standing maritime security mission in the Arabian/Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. The aim of the operation is to promote peace and stability in the region, as well as ensuring the safe flow of oil and international trade.
• Operation Shader, the UK’s contribution to the global campaign against Daesh in Iraq and Syria since 2014. In September 2024 the Iraqi and US Government announced that the Coalition against Islamic State would end its military mission in Iraq by September 2025. Following that announcement, the UK Government has announced its own new bilateral defence agreement with Iraq. The NATO training mission is also expected to continue to support Iraqi security forces.
• Operation Prosperity Guardian, a US-led coalition to support freedom of navigation in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden, begun in late 2023 in response to Yemeni-based Houthi attacks on international shipping. For more on this, see Commons Library briefing UK and international response to Houthis in the Red Sea 2024/25.

Further information can be found in Commons Library briefing UK forces in the Middle East region.

Africa and Indo-Pacific

The armed forces have previously deployed with UN peacekeeping operations in Africa, most recently in Mali and South Sudan.

The army maintains several permanent training bases overseas, including in Kenya, Belize, Canada and Brunei.

The Royal Navy permanently deploys five offshore patrol vessels to specific geographic regions on a long-term basis. These cover the Mediterranean and Africa’s west coast, the South Atlantic, the Caribbean and the Indo-Pacific.

Future commitments

The Ministry of Defence does not comment on future operations “as to do so could, or would be likely to, prejudice the capability, effectiveness, or security of the Armed Forces”.

However, the MOD has announced some major deployments. A significant portion of the Royal Navy’s available vessels will be involved in the carrier strike group’s forthcoming deployment to the Indo-Pacific in 2025.

Looking further ahead, the UK has indicated plans to send an attack submarine to Australia from 2026 onwards as part of a wider agreement to develop its next generation of attack submarines with Australia and the US (AUKUS).

This briefing provides a broad overview of the major ongoing operational commitments of the UK’s armed forces. It is not a comprehensive list of every operation undertaken, nor does it include exercises or short-term training commitments overseas. Small staff contributions to multinational missions and short-term humanitarian missions are also not included.