The UK Royal Navy (RN) Chief has announced plans for a new naval collaboration construct designed to build combat power and conventional deterrence around Northern European countries’ northern maritime border, with Russia.
What is currently called the Northern Navies Initiative was announced by General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, the RN’s First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff, during a speech to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London on 29 April.
The concept is built around enhancing northern navies’ conventional deterrent power across a maritime region holding significant strategic importance for these countries and NATO. In and around this region, Gen Jenkins explained, Russia is continuing to test NATO countries, especially in the underwater domain – with Russia’s sub-sea capacity and capability strengthened by continued enhancement of its Northern Fleet.
In response, Gen Jenkins said, “We are now looking at the creation of a family of allied fleets.”
The First Sea Lord reported that, earlier in April, he had hosted Northern European naval chiefs to discuss how to deliver the plan. Revealing details to the RUSI audience, he said “We signed a statement of intent committing each of our navies to working up detailed proposals for the Northern Navies Initiative.”
Noting too his aim to add further details on the plan’s workings and delivery in the coming months, Gen Jenkins added:
“We know we have no time to lose …. By the end of 2026, I want us all to have signed a formal declaration laying the foundations for what will be a vital and enduring partnership for many years to come.”
The initiative is not a NATO construct, but is designed to support the alliance’s strategic and operational needs in the region.
It seems set to be based around the existing, UK-led Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), but with the aim of bringing additional combat power to deter risk of a high-end maritime fight in the region.
Underlining the importance of credible combat capability within the new construct, Gen Jenkins said it will be “a force designed to fight immediately, if required, with real capabilities, real war plans, and real integration .., a force that generates the maritime, air, and amphibious strike capabilities we all need.”
“This would be a visible and persistent conventional deterrent, a force that is stronger collectively than the sum of its parts,” he added.
Multinational models
JEF itself is a 10-country partnership (with the UK, as framework country, joined by Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden). Active since 2014, JEF has generated and supported operational outputs across all domains, but with particular maritime focus. In the maritime domain, its role is to deter and manage sub-conflict-threshold crises in a manner complementary to NATO needs, before such crises escalate to a point of needing NATO hard power deterrence and defence input.
JEF’s ‘sub-threshold’ role has been illustrated neatly by its deployments in the Baltic and North Seas and up into Norwegian waters to deter rogue activities targeting critical undersea infrastructure (CUI).
The new, RN-led, Northern Navies Initiative seems designed to use a framework like JEF to step up European NATO hard power naval capability and capacity in the region. “The reality is we must now deepen and evolve this partnership if we are to generate the collective combat power necessary to provide conventional deterrence along our open sea border with Russia to the north,” said Gen Jenkins. “Like the current JEF model, it should not be seen as separate to NATO. It would be a means to help NATO, to respond rapidly and seize the initiatives in this strategically vital region.”
As with JEF, the UK appears to be leading out on the Northern Navies Initiative. Gen Jenkins explained that the force construct would be brought together and trained under the RN’s fleet operational standards and training (FOST) programme, supported through UK doctrine and integration standards, and perhaps even commanded from the RN’s maritime operations centre at the UK’s Northwood operational headquarters.
Allied and partner contributions are critical to the new construct, too. Describing it as a partnership of Northern navies delivering a multinational, high-end warfighting-capable force to deter in and defend northwestern Europe and the High North, Gen Jenkins said the force would train, exercise, and prepare together; would be built around interchangeability, being able to substitute, swap, or mix equipment, parts, ammunition, or personnel; would be operating common systems and platforms; and would share digital networks, logistics, and stockpiles.
The commonality in systems and platforms requirement is illustrated by another multinational partnership that offers another case study in directions the Northern Navies Initiative could take. The UK’s Type 26 anti-submarine warfare (ASW) frigate is now in build for three northern navies – the RN, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN), and the Royal Norwegian Navy (RNoN).
For the RN, Type 26 is a centrepiece of its transition to a ‘hybrid navy’, integrating crewed and uncrewed platforms to help build mass in sensing, lethality, and other operational outputs. Both the RCN and RNoN have expressed interest in the RN’s new ‘hybrid’ ASW concept, ‘Atlantic Bastion’. The RN and RNoN, and the UK and Norway more broadly, are already taking their bilateral relationship a stage further (as set out in the Lunna House accord, signed in late 2025), by looking at various options for enhancing co-operation on naval capability and operations. Lunna House is a bilateral link “through which two navies are set to combine to counter Russian activity in the North Atlantic”, Gen Jenkins explained.
Gen Jenkins added that other allies have shown interest in the RN’s ‘hybrid navy’ plans, and that he hoped others may be interested in Type 26, too.
Naval News comment
NATO has been the ‘hub’ of Euro-Atlantic regional security for Western allies in the post-war world. In very recent times, as European security has become more unstable across different regions, more bilateral and multinational constructs – like Lunna House and JEF, respectively – have been established, somewhat like regional security ‘spokes’ around NATO as the theatre security ‘hub’.
The Northern Navies Initiative seems to be another such ‘spoke’, but one – with its greater focus on integrating and deploying high-end combat power – designed to deliver more ‘hard-edged’ outputs and effects not only to reinforce NATO deterrence, but perhaps to demonstrate to the United States the European NATO countries’ physical commitment to this cause, and in turn to Russia that European NATO countries can bring considerable collective conventional capability. It should be noted that the new initiative has emerged only a few months after strains surfaced within NATO regarding European allies providing more physical capacity and capability, including at sea, to deter threats around the Greenland-Iceland-UK (GIUK) Gap and further into the Arctic and High North region.