James York: Only a restored Merchant Navy can protect us from containerised drone warfare

James York is a member of the Beaconsfield Conservative Association and a policymaker in the insurance industry. 

It is ironic that Ukraine’s drone strike from containers pre-positioned inside Russia happened the day before the UK unveiled its 2025 Strategic Defence Review, and two days after 1,000 people entered the country without permission.

The strike caused massive damage to some of Russia’s highest value assets – and it set perhaps the most dangerous precedent and posed a question we are likely unprepared to answer: how does an open economy like the UK defend against this type of strike?

The only way it can is by returning to merchant shipping at pace. A greater irony is that shipping containers were the reason the UK doesn’t have a sizable fleet under its control now.

In 1960 the UK’s merchant fleet stood at over 4500 vessels – more than enough to keep a heavy industry sustained with new orders for ships, and the lifeblood of a secure island nation’s economic strategy of being an open, globally mercantilist economy.

Today, the fleet stands at under 500. Where Britain’s share of the global shipping tonnage was once roughly 12 per cent, now it stands as insignificant. Instead, Greece has taken the UK’s spot as the European nation with the largest merchant fleet. Globally, South Korea and Japan have also surged past the UK; each living in the shadow of a massive Chinese shipping industry, and using subsidies to incredible effect.

So, what happened? Our shipping industry was demolished by the combination of a declinist national mindset, sequential oil crises, and the rise of containerisation.

Throughout the period 1960-2000, though, the subsidy regime for the industry was tapered and all but removed, just as our rivals did the opposite. Falling behind on innovation at the same time as you’re opening your economy to the entirety of Europe also exposes weakness to destruction, as experience has proven. As the fleet dwindled and the shipyards closed, the heavy-industrial economy an island should hold as core to its interest was lost.

One could flag-wave about a nation that once ruled the waves, but that would be naïve. Mercantile interests require control of shipping to a greater degree – remember, this is the new epoch of international relations and they are post-Putin and post-Trump but pre-climate and resource constraints.

That landscape certainly shows the folly of a nation that can’t rule any waves, let alone all of them. Vladimir Putin knows this, too; Russia has been secretly maintaining a “shadow fleet” through the Ukraine war.

Yet, it wasn’t Russia that slammed home the reality that containerisation is the most potent asymmetric pre-emptive risk to a mercantilist island. It was Ukraine. Using modified civilian shipping containers, they pulled off perhaps the most audacious covert strike since World War 2. In terms of blast for buck, they wrecked billions of dollars’ worth of equipment with millions of cost. That changes war forever – and it poses a huge risk to our military.

A few dozen containers, unwittingly carried into position by truckers in Russia, would pale into insignificance compared to some of the container ships that are possessed by China’s merchant fleet. MSC Irina carries a whopping 24,346 TEU – that’s equivalent to roughly 12,000 forty foot containers on board. Such staggering size is hard to comprehend – and bigger vessels are on the way. Green Sealion is set to hit a mesmerising 27,500 TEU.

If just five per cent of Irina’s containers carried half a dozen attack drones each, the massed fleet would number that would be 3,600 drones. Do you think Britain’s air defences, airbases and other critical installations could survive that one strike? Think hard.

The UK operates around 120 container ports. It would be a normal day to see a Chinese container ship docking. Felixstowe, Southampton, Liverpool, Teesport – each port is also within 100 miles of critical military bases and naval facilities. A ship at each port with thousands of drones on each? It’s game over.

The only way to combat such a strategy is to return to owning and controlling a merchant fleet, and market share must be taken for bringing imports from the Far East. The Fleet Auxiliary could oversee and control it, and every vessel would be a proxy of British merchant sea power. A surge in the UK’s escort warship fleet would complement it, and Lloyd’s of London could be commissioned to support it with preferential subsidised insurance rates – using a captive Merchant Navy syndicate within their infrastructure.

While politicians argue about percentages of GDP and budgets, Ukraine just mastered a form of warfare to which we are all but defenceless: mass damage, low cost. So how are we preparing to meet it? It isn’t as if there’s no threat looming – few deny it. This is now an era, in Starmer’s words, of “war-fighting readiness”.

A new international axis has formed in front of our eyes. China has openly aligned with Russia, and the war in Ukraine increasingly resembles a modern day, pre-World War 3 version of the Spanish Civil War. They want global power to shift and they are prepared to do extraordinary things to ensure it does.

The next wars will leverage trade – leverage containers – and swarm foes with drones. We must oversee the merchant fleet connecting us to the world, lest we be destroyed by it.