Britain’s defence supply chain is blinking red
Before an official trip to the Falkland Islands earlier this year, the Conservative peer Graham Evans was surprised to receive a Made in China military uniform. Bewildered, during a debate in the House of Lords, he questioned whether Britain and its NATO allies were really unable to manufacture their own kit.
It is not just uniforms. The surveillance drones used by the Royal Navy have Chinese-made cameras integrated in them. The Army’s 3D printers that are used to build “suicide” drones for the front line also use Chinese components that trace back to Chinese suppliers.
That is what security experts have been saying to the MOD for years: stop buying the cheapest options and start asking questions about the origin of the product.
It would be more reassuring to treat this challenge as an issue of procurement: a few sloppy contracts that can be easily fixed. However, such a security lapse is symptomatic of a defence establishment that has spent a decade treating national security as a commercial, budgetary element that needs to be optimized rather than a vital frontier to protect.
The House of Commons Defence Committee has made several warnings that there’s a lack of sufficient oversight regarding foreign investment in British defence suppliers, specifically when it comes to companies that have links to China and Russia.
At least seven companies within the UK defence sector and supply chain have been acquired by Chinese companies over the last decade. In 2021, the Defence Committee called on the government to establish a list of safe, “friendly” countries, to secure British supply chains and safeguard them from malign forces, with investment from outside that list, including from Russia and China, to be prohibited.
Despite that warning, Chinese presence in the British defence supply chains is prevalent. Gloucestershire-based Exception PCB, formerly owned by China’s Shenzhen Fastprint, has been manufacturing circuit boards for the UK’s most advanced warplanes, including the F-35 fighter jets, for years. These specific components, according to the Ministry of Defence’s own materials, are responsible for controlling the aircraft’s engines, lighting, fuel, and navigation systems.
Chinese ownership and presence persisted for six years, with no MOD intervention, and was only resolved when a private investor, Wright Industries, happened to acquire the company in 2025, for reasons that had nothing to do with national security.
And yet, it isn’t just Beijing. There is also a problematic Russia exposure in Britain’s defence supply chain.
Njord Partners, a London-based “special situations” investor, has been reported to have significant exposure to the Russian economy and sanctioned Russian entities. Since 2017, Njord has been an institutional shareholder of and investor in RETN, a Eurasia-focused network service provider, investing as much as 20 million EUR to fund RETN’s international expansion. Jakob Kjellberg, the co-founder of Njord Partners, is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors at RETN.
RETN’s Russian subsidiary, JSC RetnNet, has continued commercial relations and cooperation with state-controlled entities like Rostelecom, the largest provider of digital services in Russia, and the National Research Centre "Kurchatov Institute", a nuclear energy research institute.
The institute itself was formally designated as a national security threat by the U.S. Department of Defense under Section 1286 of the NDAA, barring Pentagon-funded research collaboration with it.
But the exposure lives on. Under Russian laws, all internet service providers and telecom operators must purchase and install special hardware (SORM boxes) on their servers. These boxes are connected via secure communication lines running directly to local and federal FSB headquarters, giving the Russian security services backdoor access to Rostelecom’s entire network, which makes this state-run telecom giant a fully integrated, irreplaceable element of the Russian surveillance framework.
This raises a question: why does Njord Partners invest in and remain an institutional shareholder of such a company?
There are questions for the MOD as well. Given Njord Partners’ connection to RETN and its Russian subsidiary, the fact that Njord holds a 91.5% controlling stake in Ancona International Airport in Italy should also raise concerns.
Serving the Marche region in central Italy, Ancona is a civil-military airport used by the British Royal Air Force to transfer assets going to RAF Akrotiri, a military base in Cyprus. Akrotiri is an indispensable element of Britain’s regional defence architecture, as it serves most recently as the base for coordinated activity in the Middle East.
Even though there is no direct evidence of wrongdoing, the fact that Njord has an apparent Russia exposure through a company – one that could very well have a backdoor into key RAF operations - is a worrisome dynamic. Indeed, Parliamentarians have a duty to use their privileges to identify sensitivities around RAF operations.
The MOD will point to examples of specific cases which it fixed: interventions involving Cobham, Inmarsat, Mettis Aerospace and Impcross, firms deemed to have close, risky connections with China, demonstrate that where foreign ownership in British defence supply chains raises alarms over national security issues, the government can block contentious transactions to ensure that potential risks to national security are mitigated.
Unfortunately, these are only the deals that captured attention. Unless there’s significant attention and time dedicated to a specific challenge, in this case, addressing concerns regarding the British defence supply chain, the government does not fix it. The system should not identify and mitigate a threat once someone spots it – it needs to have a direct approach to threats.
Made in China uniforms are an embarrassment. An RAF transit site with potential exposure to Russian influence, and circuit boards supplied by a Chinese-owned company sitting inside an F-35, are even worse.
Nicholas Chkhaidze is a national security and strategic communications expert and international political consultant based in Tbilisi, Georgia. His work focuses on Eurasian geopolitics, security, sanctions evasion, sanctions enforcement, Russian hybrid warfare and influence operations. He previously served with the Henry Jackson Society’s Russia and Eurasia Studies Centre, Topchubashov Center, Strategic Security Initiative, and NATO’s Public Diplomacy Division.
