The decision by UK military chiefs and ministers to send a warship to the Eastern Mediterranean was not made until Tuesday morning, two days after the drone attack on the RAF airbase in Cyprus, The i Paper understands.
RAF Akrotiri came under attack from a Shahed drone on Sunday but a proposal to send a Type 45 Destroyer, which can shoot down missiles and drones, to the region was presented to the Chief of the Defence Staff Sir Richard Knighton at 930am on Tuesday, it is understood.
The destroyer, HMS Dragon, has been undergoing maintenance and will have the state of the art Sea Viper anti-missile system, which can take out 16 missiles and drones simultaneously, refitted today.
But it will not arrive in the Eastern Med until next week, western officials said.
It is the “most ready” of the six Type 45 destroyers in the Royal Navy fleet, officials said.
‘Unforgiveable’ UK so ‘unprepared’
The disclosure will fuel concerns that the British response to the Iran war has been too slow, after Keir Starmer initially refused a request from the US administration to use British airbases to mount strikes against Iran at the weekend.
The US-Israeli strikes against Iran had been rumoured for weeks, and there have been questions over why Britain had not decided to send a warship to the region to protect UK interests earlier.
Former Conservative defence minister Tobias Ellwood said the decision to deploy a warship should have been taken as soon as the emergency Cobra meeting was held on Saturday in the wake of the first strikes.
He said: “This decision, along with wider, rehearsed protocols should have kicked in at that first Cobr meeting.
“Many of us predicted that America was going to attack weeks ago. That’s when moving assets to the region should first have been considered.”
And a former UK diplomat said on Wednesday it was “unforgiveable” that the UK was “so unprepared” to respond to the fallout from the US-Israeli offensive.
Ameer Kotecha, who resigned from the Foreign Office on Tuesday, told Times Radio that the British embassy in Tel Aviv “has been aware of the fact that an American and Israeli strike is coming for weeks, and has been warning London that that strike is coming”.
He added: “I’m not spilling any state secrets by saying that because, as you point out, the whole world could see the Americans assembling an armada of ships and other military capabilities in the region.”
Typhoons and F35s have been destroyed
Britain has however been deploying other military assets to the Middle East over recent weeks, including RAF Typhoons in Qatar, and Typhoons, F35s and ground-based air defence in Cyprus.
They have been flying several missions a day since the Prime Minister gave the go-ahead for RAF planes to take part in defensive-only action on Sunday.
The proposal to deploy a destroyer was made at 0930 on Tuesday morning and that was then passed to ministers before the final decision was made, it is understood.
“Dragon is the one that is ready for that mission, or is the readiest for that mission,” a western official said on Wednesday.
“It’s going to get ammoed up today, and that’s why that is the ship that is deploying. There’s nothing that would have happened to accelerate that being ready earlier… We are fighting with what we have got right now.”
Officials denied that the decision not to deploy the warship sooner was a cost-saving measure.
Already pressures on defence spending
Meanwhile the Institute for Fiscal Studies said there were already huge pressures on defence spending even before the Iran war began.
IFS director Helen Miller said: “There are clear pressures on public spending. Perhaps top of the list of pressures are calls to increase defence spending, which were growing even before the Middle East conflict. The scale of potential ambition here is important.
“The UK currently spends around 2.4 per cent of national income on defence. Meeting the NATO commitment to move that to 3.5 per cent would cost around £35 billion per year in today’s terms.
“That’s the equivalent of what we current spend on the Ministry of Justice and Home Office combined. Funding it through higher taxes would mean, for example, 3 – 3.5 points on the main rate of VAT.
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“The takeaway is that we should not expect the government to be able to meaningfully increase what we spend on Defence – if that’s what it decides it wants to do – without significantly cutting other government programmes or raising taxes.”
Max Warner, senior research economist for the IFS, said that if Starmer wants to hit 3 per cent of GDP on defence by 2030, it would cost £14bn more relative to current plans.
He said: “It’s unlikely to be sustainable to just borrow to fund a permanent increase in spending on defence, and that’s therefore going to raise tricky questions about potentially either increasing tax or reducing spending on other things, if the government wants to go faster on defence spending.”
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