Britain needs an Iron Dome – but £10bn won’t buy one

           

 

 

 

Kemi Badenoch has proposed spending £10 billion on “Britannia Shield”, a new integrated air and missile defence system intended to protect the UK from drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles. The proposal has inevitably been described as a British version of Israel’s Iron Dome, although in practice Britain would need a much broader network of radar, missiles, aircraft, ships and counter-drone systems. The problem Badenoch has identified is real: Britain does not have sufficient layered air defences to protect the whole country, its critical infrastructure and its overseas bases from a sustained modern aerial attack. The question is whether £10 billion spent on a national shield is the right military answer.

There is no doubt that Badenoch has identified a genuine weakness in Britain’s defences. We have Typhoon and F-35 fighters, Type 45 destroyers, Sky Sabre ground-based air defence and access to NATO’s integrated air and missile defence network, but what we do not possess is anything approaching a comprehensive national shield capable of dealing with large numbers of drones and missiles arriving simultaneously.

Recent events have made that weakness harder to ignore. RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus was struck by a drone in March, fortunately without casualties, while the threat posed by relatively cheap unmanned aircraft has been demonstrated repeatedly in Ukraine and the Middle East. The days when Britain could regard air defence principally as a matter of intercepting hostile aircraft are therefore over.

Modern air defence must deal with everything from cheap drones costing thousands of pounds to cruise and ballistic missiles costing millions. It must also be capable of coping with saturation attacks, where dozens or potentially hundreds of weapons are launched in an attempt to overwhelm the defender. That creates two immediate problems for Britannia Shield: cost and military priorities.

£10 billion sounds like an enormous amount of money, but in modern defence procurement it may not buy anything resembling a shield covering the entire United Kingdom. A credible system would require sensors and radar, command-and-control networks, missile batteries, interceptor stocks, electronic warfare, counter-drone weapons and additional protection for airfields, naval bases, nuclear facilities, ports and other critical infrastructure.

That is before we consider Britain’s overseas responsibilities. Cyprus, Gibraltar, the Falkland Islands and other British territories and bases cannot simply be excluded from the calculation, and RAF Akrotiri suggests that some overseas installations may face a more immediate threat than much of mainland Britain. £10 billion may therefore make a substantial improvement to British air defence, but it is much harder to believe that it could provide the comprehensive national shield implied by the Britannia Shield name.

The second problem is opportunity cost. Defence does not operate with unlimited money and, unless Britannia Shield comes with genuinely additional funding, £10 billion spent on air defence is £10 billion unavailable elsewhere. The Royal Navy needs more ships and weapons, the RAF needs combat aircraft, weapons and greater resilience at its bases, Britain needs larger stocks of missiles and ammunition across all three services, and the Army continues to require modernisation.

Put another way, would Britain be safer with Britannia Shield or with additional combat aircraft, more surface ships, larger ammunition stocks and better protection for the military bases most likely to be attacked? That is the military debate Badenoch’s announcement needs to provoke, because the answer cannot be determined simply by attaching a large number to an eye-catching new defence programme.

There is also NATO to consider. Britain does not plan to fight a major European war alone, and NATO already operates an Integrated Air and Missile Defence system combining national and alliance aircraft, sensors, command systems and weapons. Britain therefore does not necessarily have to provide every element of its air defence independently, particularly if allies can provide some capabilities while we concentrate resources on areas where the UK makes a particularly valuable contribution.

Attempting to construct a British equivalent of Israel’s defensive architecture may also be strategically questionable. Israel is a relatively small country facing persistent missile and rocket threats from known directions, while Britain is geographically larger, surrounded by sea, possesses territories and bases around the world and sits within the NATO alliance. Our requirements are fundamentally different, and Israel itself does not rely upon a single “Iron Dome” but upon layered systems designed to counter different threats.

That is why I would favour a more selective approach. Britain should certainly strengthen its air and missile defences, but priority should be given to the places most at risk and the assets we absolutely cannot afford to lose. That means protecting our nuclear deterrent, principal RAF stations, naval bases, command centres and critical infrastructure at home, while urgently improving protection for vulnerable overseas bases such as Akrotiri.

We should also accelerate cheaper ways of destroying drones. Britain’s DragonFire laser programme demonstrates why this matters, because there is little military or economic sense in routinely firing an interceptor costing hundreds of thousands of pounds at a drone costing a fraction of that amount. The economics of modern warfare matter almost as much as the technology, and a defender who repeatedly spends vastly more destroying a weapon than the attacker spends launching it will eventually encounter serious problems.

At the same time, Britain should work within NATO to provide the wider air-defence architecture required against a major state attack. This would allow the UK to concentrate its resources on protecting priority targets and developing capabilities in which it can make the greatest contribution, rather than attempting to reproduce independently every element of a hugely expensive defensive network.

There is, of course, a strong counterargument. If Britain cannot adequately defend its own territory without depending heavily upon its allies, then perhaps air defence deserves priority above almost everything else. Ukraine has demonstrated the enormous damage that missiles and drones can inflict on infrastructure, energy networks, military installations and civilian life when sufficient numbers penetrate a country’s defences, and it would be foolish to assume that Britain will always remain beyond the reach of such weapons.

But defence planning is ultimately about priorities, because Britain cannot buy everything it would like to have. Governments must decide which capabilities provide the greatest deterrent and military effect for the money available, and my instinct remains that £10 billion could probably be spent more effectively across the Armed Forces than by attempting to create a comprehensive national Britannia Shield.

However, Badenoch has undoubtedly achieved something important politically. She has identified a genuine vulnerability, attached a substantial figure to fixing it and put the Government in the position of having to explain its alternative. The debate has consequently moved on from whether Britain has an air-defence problem to what the country can actually defend, against which threats, for how long and at what cost.

Badenoch may therefore have won the opening political exchange without necessarily proving that Britannia Shield is the right military solution. That distinction matters because an eye-catching commitment to spend £10 billion should not be confused with a fully developed defence strategy, particularly when the eventual cost of comprehensive UK air and missile defence could be considerably greater.

Britain does need better air defence, and the evidence for that is increasingly difficult to dispute. But protecting the country does not necessarily mean attempting to build an enormously expensive dome over the entire United Kingdom. It means identifying the threats most likely to confront us, deciding which assets must be protected, establishing what our NATO allies can provide and then spending scarce defence money where it delivers the greatest military effect.

Britannia Shield has at least forced that question into the political arena, which is useful in itself. The Government must now explain its own approach, while Badenoch must demonstrate that £10 billion buys Britain something approaching the protection being promised rather than merely an expensive part of it.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford is a former British Army officer and defence commentator and the Editor of DefenceReview.UK.

Lt Col Stuart Crawford is a defence analyst and former army officer. Sign up for his podcasts and newsletters at www.DefenceReview.uk

 

 

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