Britain's total defencelessness from air attack

Weapons development goes in cycles: and right now, defence against air attack is the big puzzle.  Against missiles, to be precise, which these days come in an every-increasing range of types – and numbers.

Ireland is often rightly criticised for hiding behind the whole of the rest of Europe when it comes to every aspect of defence, upon which it spends two fifths of bugger all.  As far as air defences go, we’re effectively doing the same.  Any rabble that can get its hands on Iranian drones, UAVs and the like can inflict serious damage on even countries with advanced air defences.  Here in Britain, effectively speaking we have none worthy of the name.  Were we to be at imminent risk of salvos of drones, cruise missiles and hypersonics of the kind several hostile nations can muster these days, the best we could do would be to line up such of the Daring class destroyers as are seaworthy at any point in time (two? three if we’re lucky): and (even assuming they aren’t themselves eliminated in the first wave) when their limited magazines are empty, that’s us done for.  A further handful of frigates with Sea Ceptors and machineguns, and men ashore with small arms left to tackle such of the slower-moving drones that they can see with the naked eye. 

The same is essentially true, mutatis mutandis, as regards the air defence of any “expeditionary force” we might send into the fray – see this sobering piece from the excellent Sergio Miller (an old comrade of mine) at the Wavell Room.  (On the subject of “projecting power”, I won’t even bother to mention the vulnerability of Gordon Brown’s aircraft carriers, we’ve been over that many times before.)

Pathetic.

At least, someone has noticed: a fancy initiative (review?  committee?) has been launched by the MoD to address the higher-tech end of this threat spectrum – Science and Technology Oriented Research and Development in Missile Defence - ‘STORM‘, haha.  Neat acronym, but it has a paltry budget, and I can’t see Starmer really promoting anything ‘defence’ to the top of the list except a bit of rhetoric. 

To put in perspective the breadth of the challenge, consider how Russia is addressing the problem, which they feel pretty acutely, too, with their huge land mass and multiplicity of large, soft targets of high value (airfields, oil refineries, strategically important factories and the like).  They are trying to throw everything anyone can think of at the problem:  passive measures (camouflage and shelters for aircraft, laying tyres on aircraft wings [sic], installing ‘barbecues’ (metal frames) above the hatches of tanks, erecting wire screens around oil facilities) and active steps (licensing oil refinery firms to acquire small arms [sic], experimenting with anti-drone ammo for existing guns, issuing shotguns to infantry units, stepping up electronic warfare measures, considering a huge fleet of very light aircraft armed, WW2-style, with machine guns against slow-moving long-distance drones) etc etc etc.  But they’ve been at war now for nearly 30 months and they are still taking huge casualties and damage from the air (and inflicting the same, of course).

We haven’t even mentioned the threat from seaborne drones etc …

Who in the West is taking any of this seriously?  Our reliance on nuclear deterrence is now complete.  Under its umbrella, fingers need to be pulled out, and rapidly.

ND