Britain's air defences are embarrassingly weak

Telegraph

20-02-2025

This week the Telegraph is running a series of exclusive essays by expert commentators looking into Britain's 'hollow' armed forces.
Integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) is a hot topic across Nato just now. It isn't, in fact, purely defensive: it is also an enabler for offensive operations and a deterrent. It's probably one of the more vital Defence capabilities, given ongoing events across the world – most obviously the struggle for the skies above Ukraine, mass missile/drone strikes against Israel and the interdiction of the southern Red Sea by the Houthis.
As the UK has the fifth largest defence budget in the world (and the third biggest in Nato) one might expect that we would be strong in this area. Sadly, as is all too often the case, it's not true.
When looking at IAMD it helps to break the threat into three. There are ballistic weapons (including nuclear), conventional missiles (air and subsurface launched) and drones. If one considers the likelihood of coming under attack from any of these during the post Cold-war era, you can see why IAMD wasn't really catered for – the threat was very low. It's very real now, however.
At the moment, all three services bring some capability to defeat some of these threats. The RAF has the Quick Reaction Alert fighter jets based at RAF Coningsby (QRA South) and RAF Lossiemouth (QRA North). These occasionally hit the headlines by rattling windows as they go supersonic en route to intercept suspect aircraft. These suspects are often Russian 'Bear' bombers or maritime patrol planes, making incursions into the UK Air Defence Region (ADR). There is also the F-35B, the UK's only fifth-generation stealth plane, operated jointly with the Royal Navy.
The RAF will also fly the E-7 Wedgetail early warning aircraft when it comes into service – at the moment the service has no airborne radar capability. For detecting planes, missiles or drones inbound to the UK we are reliant on the RAF's network of ground radars. This is not ideal as radars down on the ground have a close horizon, below which low-flying drones or cruise missiles can hide. However there is a common Nato fleet of E-3 Sentry radar planes dedicated to the protection of the alliance from the east.
The RAF also has the lead on the ORCUS counter-uncrewed aerial system (C-UAS) which uses electronic counter measures and jamming to defeat drones. The Dragonfire laser system will complement this when it goes operational as will other directed energy weapons when they mature. This is a rapidly developing area driven by both land operations in Ukraine and maritime operations in the Red Sea and frankly, these systems can't become operational soon enough.
The British Army has the 7 th Air Defence Group based at Thorney Island. They have the 'Sky Sabre' version of the Common Anti-Air Modular Missile (CAMM – sorry, everything has an abbreviation) whose radar has a range of 75 miles and the missile itself about 15 miles. Longer range variants are being developed with Italy and Poland but for now, it's whites of the eyes stuff really. In addition, they have the High Velocity Missile (HVM) Starstreak and the Lightweight Multirole Missile (LMM) Martlet. Both are very short range – around five miles – and designed to counter threats from high performance, low flying aircraft and 'pop up' strikes from helicopters.
All our ground-based missiles are both short range and expeditionary by design. They were not designed to cover large areas of land in the UK. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that they have some capability against conventional missile and drone attacks, threats two and three on my list.
The Royal Navy has the Type 45 destroyer with its Sea Viper weapons system. This includes a Sampson Radar (250 miles), Sylver vertical launch system (48 silos) and the Aster 30 missile (75 miles). Of the six that were built, there are generally two available for operations at any given time and like any weapon system, they need to be in the right place at the right time to be effective. Here the RN and the RAF can collaborate to maximise the chances of achieving this, even to the level where the RAF can tell an RN ship where to take up station. The Type 45 has demonstrated that it can defeat low end ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones very well. It has no capability to shoot down missiles with a exo-atmospheric trajectory or hypersonics and is no good for drones over land. In other words, limited capacity against threat one, good against two (if in the right place) and nothing for three. The RN also operates the F-35B from its carriers and if things really did start to heat up with Russia these would be a key part of the North Atlantic barricade.
To summarise all this, we can protect against the cold-war style threat of bombers coming over the top but the kit we have to do it is largely expeditionary and therefore notice is required to get it in the right place. If a submarine fired a cruise missile from west of Ireland at, say, Heathrow, we have nothing. Against the nuclear or ballistic threat we have nothing and against the drone threat, capabilities are improving but we have nowhere near enough.
Fixing all this would actually be quite straightforward. Spoken like a true mariner, of course, but the best option would be land-based Sea Viper providing overlapping coverage for key strategic locations, such as airports, ports, airbases, and critical national infrastructure. Just one missile battery based at RAF Saxa Vord in the Shetlands would give the Russian bombers a headache as they came over the top and would probably lengthen their route as they opted to go around it. As ever, this is as much about controlling the space as it is about actually shooting things down. There is another interesting conversation to be had here about what happens if any of this challenges the validity of the QRA as this would be met with fierce opposition from that part of the RAF, but that is for another time.
As a ready-to-go alternative to Sea Viper, there is the Patriot family of surface to air interceptors. Or there's the even higher-end version, THAAD, designed specifically to beat ballistics. Patriot has done some impressive things in Ukrainian hands, shooting down Russian hypersonics previously claimed to be unbeatable. There's also the European SAMP/T (already in use in France and Italy) and Meads (US, Germany and Italy). Iron Dome is not the right answer for us, it is too short range (40 miles). Of the Israeli systems, the Arrow family (100 to 2,000 mile range depending on variant) or David's Sling (200 miles) would be better.
But now we get to the crunch. A single THAAD battery of six launcher vehicles, each with eight missiles, two operations centres and the AN/TPY-2 radar costs $1.8 billion dollars. The missiles are $12.6 million each. The harsh reality is that UK defence has been hollowed out for so long now, we can barely afford the absolute basics such as ships, tanks, fast jets and accommodation. On top of this, we are not spending enough to counter the things Russia is actually doing to us every day, such as cyber-attacks and seabed warfare.
Our lack of any serious land-based anti-air missile capability is yet another rather obvious gap in our Defence capabilities nonetheless, like having no airborne radar. When the likes of Jordan and Romania – and even Egypt – have Patriot, it's a bit embarrassing that the best we can offer is Sky Sabre. We should fix this.
But anyone who expects the Strategic Defence Review to provide the fiscal headroom to do it is, I suspect, going to be disappointed.
Tom Sharpe is a former Royal Navy officer. He trained first as a Fighter Controller and then as a specialist Anti-Air Warfare Officer.
Other articles in our ongoing series on Britain's 'hollow' forces: