The UK is steadily building air defences spanning lasers, jets and missiles, amid calls to develop an Israeli-style ‘Lion Dome’. Despite this, analysts warn that even if far more money and effort is poured in, British cities will still be highly vulnerable to attack.
“You cannot cover all of your civilian population, it’s not possible,” Justin Bronk, an airpower expert at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told The i Paper.
Bronk said there’s a divide between the public demand for protection and the fact that what you would choose to protect from a strategic and operational point of view – “with the inherently limited amount of layered air defence” – would not be generally your cities, “it would be your key military bases, to preserve your ability to fight”.
The Iron Dome, Israel’s multi-layered sky shield, is often cited as the best example of large-scale air defences, and there have long been calls for the UK to develop its own ‘Lion Dome’.
But Bronk said that even Israel can’t create an “impenetrable” defence over all of its land, which is much smaller geographical than the UK, even with significantly higher and longer-term investment.
UK ‘increasingly vulnerable’ to air attacks
Concerns have long been raised about the UK’s air defence capabilities, with a parliamentary briefing this summer warning that the UK is considered “increasingly vulnerable” to aerial threats.
Earlier this year, a British official revealed that the UK’s top military war gamers had replicated Russia’s attacks on Ukraine on the first night of the 2022 invasion and that the outcome was “not a pretty picture”.
While he would not reveal details of the damage, it is understood that in the scenario many of the missiles would have breached UK defences.
“We in the UK over the last few decades have [made] assumptions that we are safe to operate from the home base because most of the wars we’ve been fighting have been overseas,” Air Commodore Blythe Crawford, who until recently led the RAF Air and Space Warfare Centre, said.
“We need to reverse that thinking and assume that from here on, we’re under threat in the home base now as well.”
What air defence does the UK have?
The UK takes a “multi-layered approach” to air and missile defence, including an early warning radar network, but doesn’t have a ballistic missile defence capability like Israel’s Iron Dome.
It does, however, benefit from Nato’s air defence system, which the alliance describes as a network of interconnected national and Nato-wide systems comprised of sensors, command and control assets, and weapons systems.
The UK’s principle anti-air missile system is the Royal Navy’s Sea Viper, which can track, target and destroy air threats over 70 miles away, and can be launched from a ship in under 10 seconds. The UK can also scramble jets including the Typhoon and the E-7 Wedgetail, which launched last month.
The UK’s Sky Sabre system uses radar to scan up to 120km for threats from aircraft, drones, and missiles, and is capable of hitting a tennis-ball sized object travelling twice the speed of sound. It also has STARStreak, a short-range air-defence missile that can be launched from a vehicle or by a single soldier, and cannot be jammed, protecting it from electromagnetic disruption.
The British Army’s Sky Sabre system, which it says is capable of hitting a tennis-ball sized object travelling twice the speed of sound (Photo: Corporal Adam J Wakefield, RLC/PA Wire)Meanwhile, it is building a laser-based system, Dragonfire, which is expected to be operational in 2027.
In 2022, the UK signed a Letter of Intent to join the European Sky Shield initiative, led by Germany, which aims to create a ground-based integrated European air defence system. However, this is still nascent and lacks the involvement of key players including France and Poland.
The Strategic Defence Review (SDR), a wholesale assessment of the state of the UK’s armed forces published earlier this year, warned that over the next two decades the UK and its allies will have to “compete harder for control of the air, fighting in a way not seen for over 30 years due to the rapid development of adversarial capability specifically designed to counter Western strengths.”
Ukraine has shifted focus to the skies
The problem of air defences is an issue shared across Nato countries, and one that has been a particular focus since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“Ever since the opening days of Ukraine, there’s been a growing understanding within Europe that air defence is an area where the necessary investments and capability haven’t been made,” Sidharth Kaushal, a senior researcher at RUSI, told The i Paper.
“By some estimates, Nato has about 5 per cent of the surface-based air defenses it would need for a hard war on the Eastern flank,” he said.
Russia has repeatedly breached Nato airspace in recent months, including launching drones over Poland and armed aircraft into Estonia’s airspace.
These incursions have tested Nato air defences, with fighter jets scrambled to intercept the threats. The incidents also renewed calls for stronger combined air defences, with the UK joining a new air defence mission in Eastern Europe set up in their wake.
The war in Ukraine has also caused a “newfound interest in integrated air and missile defence for the UK” because of the importance in long-range strike capabilities in the conflict, said Kaushal.
Officials modelled the first night of the Ukraine invasion on the UK. The result “was not a pretty picture” (Photo: Kharkiv Reg. Mil. Administration/Anadolu via Getty Images)Until recently, the focus had been on expeditionary forces, rather than threats to the homeland, but the size and ability of Russia’s long-range strike arsenal “now make discussions on the risk to the UK germane,” Kaushal wrote in a new report, adding that by the mid-2030s to the early 2040s “a degree of homeland ballistic missile defence will probably be important”.
But he told The i Paper that the UK appears to be falling behind the demand, with “pretty limited” air defence capabilities and “significant gaps” in coverage.
“We do have the advantage of geography,” he added. “It is harder to strike the UK than it is to strike, say, Poland or Germany, and in order to do so, the Russians have to put some pretty expensive capabilities in harm’s way.”
While Typhoon jets can travel north – deemed the most likely route for an attack from Russia – reasonably quickly, Russian missiles are “only getting longer range, which massively increases the challenge of interception, so intercepting the bomber cannot be relied on as the sole strategy,” Kaushal said.
“There’s also a significant shortfall in terms of airborne early warning aircraft, E7s,” he added. “The fact that we have three of those means that we can’t maintain a round the clock orbit, which massively limits the capacity to track cruise missiles.”
UK should invest in early warning systems
Following the SDR, the Government announced that £1 billion would be invested in integrated air and missile defence, something the UK MOD said recognises the “vital importance of air and missile defence to UK national security”.
square WORLD Why Trump's sanctions could take Russia closer to the brink
Read More
Kaushal said that, in the immediate term, “the most important thing is the ability to detect and track Russian cruise missiles over very long distances to basically compensate for the limited number of airborne early warning aircraft we have”.
Looking towards the 2030s and 2040s, a “full fat Iron Dome” might be necessary to combat the rising threats from ballistic missiles and hypersonics, he added.
However, the 15-year lead time on most defence programmes mean this would be years off even if approved today.
Meanwhile, the Government announced this week that the military will be given powers to shoot down drones over its bases.
Analysts agree that while steps are being taken to bolster the UK’s air defences, it remains a key vulnerability and that, no matter the investment, it will never be possible to fully secure the country outright against enemy missiles.
Hence then, the article about why uk cities will never be protected from a putin attack was published today ( ) and is available on inews ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Why UK cities will never be protected from a Putin attack )
Also on site :
- Man arrested on suspicion of fatal shooting in Huntington Beach
- Danish authorities banned from using Bluetooth at work – media
- Trump refuses ‘to think purely of peace’