Will Artillery Barrels be the Achilles’ Heel of the UK’s £75B Defence Plan?
Canadian Barrel Coating Technology Offers Path to Superior Weapon Performance, Sovereign Manufacturing Capability, and Elimination of Hexavalent Chrome Across British Armed Forces
As the UK Ministry of Defence executes its landmark Defence Investment Plan, British military expenditure is undergoing its most significant structural transformation since the Cold War. Committing to raising baseline defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2030.
The plan allocates £10bn to munitions production over the next decade, nearly doubling previous spending levels to rapidly expand artillery and missile stockpiles. It also commits at least 5% of the total defence budget to research and development through a newly established Defence Innovation Agency.
BAE Systems and Sheffield Forgemasters have delivered the first British-made 105mm and 155mm artillery barrel forgings to Ukraine under a £61m MoD contract; this is the first time barrel forging of this kind has taken place in the UK in nearly two decades. Rheinmetall has separately confirmed that Telford will house its new large-calibre barrel production facility, and the company plans to source its forgings from Sheffield Forgemasters as well.
As domestic barrel production scales across these UK sites, barrel coating becomes an immediate procurement question with direct consequences for weapon accuracy, barrel longevity, and sovereign capability. Notably, neither manufacturer currently has the capacity to finish or coat barrels in the UK, leaving a gap in the domestic supply chain even as forging capacity comes back online.
Hexavalent chromium plating is heavily restricted under UK REACH regulations and is banned outright unless a formal, time-limited chemical authorisation has been granted. The compound is a recognised human carcinogen, a fact many will remember from the 1990s case dramatised in the film “Erin Brockovich,” in which chromium plating contamination was the central issue.
Legacy hexavalent chrome plating, a bore coating since the 1930s, imposes a ceiling on what a barrel can achieve. Tighter bore geometry, reduced friction, and superior surface durability are not simply maintenance benefits. They are performance multipliers. A better-coated barrel shoots more accurately, maintains consistent ballistic performance further into its service life, and degrades more slowly under sustained high-intensity European warfighting scenarios.
Paradigm Shift Technologies (PST) of Toronto, Canada, provides a production-ready alternative. EPVD® is a patented bore coating validated by the US Air Force, US Navy, the Canadian Army, and other organisations across calibres from 5.56mm up to 155mm, demonstrating a minimum 2x improvement in barrel life over chrome-plated equivalents, improved weapon precision, and measurable reductions in MRO burden. EPVD® is fully REACH-compliant and eliminates hexavalent chromium entirely from the barrel coating process.
For the MoD standing up domestic barrel manufacturing at scale, EPVD® addresses three of the most critical priorities simultaneously. It raises the performance ceiling of every barrel produced in the UK, delivering greater precision and more consistent lethality across the operational life of the weapon. It eliminates hexavalent chrome from the manufacturing and sustainment supply chain before regulatory timelines force a more disruptive transition. It reduces the frequency and cost of barrel replacement across a rapidly expanding fleet, ensuring capital investments deliver sustained operational value rather than front-loaded procurement costs.
PST is establishing what would be the only chrome-free advanced gun barrel coating facility in the United Kingdom, providing the British defence industrial base with a sovereign, REACH-compliant coating capability. PST is ready to engage UK MOD procurement offices, the Telford barrel manufacturing facility, and UK prime contractors to define an integration pathway within the Defence Investment Plan framework. To support this domestic integration, Paradigm Shift Technologies’ strategic interests in the United Kingdom are represented by their partnership with Andover-based Perfect Bore Defence Ltd.
About Paradigm Shift Technologies
Paradigm Shift Technologies Inc. (PST) is a Canadian dual-use defence company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, with a U.S. subsidiary, Advanced Global Services (AGS), in Sanborn, New York. PST is the developer and sole manufacturer of EPVD®, a patented gun barrel bore coating technology validated across U.S. and Canadian military programmes.
