UK will know of incoming hits but cannot stop most missiles

Britain’s investment in homeland air and missile defence will mostly buy better warning that an attack is coming rather than the means to stop it, General Sir Richard Barrons has told the Defence Committee, warning that the iron dome type system many people assume protects London “is not even remotely there.”

Giving evidence on the Defence Investment Plan alongside Lord Robertson, his fellow Strategic Defence Review author, the former Commander of Joint Forces Command was asked whether the roughly £790 million the plan provides for homeland integrated air and missile defence is enough to be ready for possible Russian aggression against NATO by 2030. Setting out what the money actually purchases, Barrons said the bulk of it goes on improved command and control. “You’ll know better that you’re going to be hit by a missile,” he told MPs, alongside “some improvements for the Air Force’s ability to shoot down cruise missiles” and improvements to the Type 45 destroyers “so it has a better capability against ballistic missiles.” The distinction matters because command and control determines how well a country can detect, track and warn of incoming threats, while the capacity to intercept them depends on launchers, interceptors and directed energy weapons held in numbers, and it is that layer, on the general’s account, that the plan barely touches.

“I think many people in the country assume there’s a sort of iron dome over London, at least, and it’s not even remotely there,” Barrons said. The reference is to Israel’s Iron Dome, the layered system that intercepts rockets and missiles over Israeli cities, and no equivalent protects British population centres or infrastructure, with the air defence of the UK homeland currently resting on Quick Reaction Alert Typhoons, a small number of the Army’s Sky Sabre batteries, and whatever Type 45 destroyer is available at sea.

Even embracing the technological change that is cutting the cost per interception, through directed energy weapons such as DragonFire and cheaper missiles from newer entrants, Barrons put the price of a genuine defence far beyond what has been allocated. “Entry level, probably 80 billion pounds over 10 years. Entry level IAMD of my dreams, probably 120 billion pounds over 10 years, and we got a billion,” he said, describing integrated air and missile defence as “the iconic thing that didn’t make it into the review.”

The shortfall sits, in his framing, in the unaffordable half of the defence iceberg. The review and the plan represent only the top half, he told the committee, with at least another £60 billion to £80 billion hole in defence infrastructure, spanning falling-down airfields, ports, housing, reserve forces and cadet facilities, that never made the cut because it was not remotely affordable, and he cautioned that arguing over the margins of the plan should not be mistaken for fixing defence.

Lord Robertson told MPs the homeland threat has transformed since his 1998 review, when Britain considered itself an island with a moat, a long way from trouble. Pointing to Iran’s attempt to fire a ballistic missile at Diego Garcia, 2,000 kilometres away, using an out-of-date Russian system, he said: “We are now within range in a way that we weren’t before.”

Barrons also identified defence medical services as “the most hollowed out bit of defence,” telling MPs that any plan to deploy the Strategic Reserve Corps on the continent must account for mass casualties reaching NHS beds with a system to move them home, and “I can’t see where that exists. That’s not in the DIP.” Munitions spending across the plan, he added, will buy substantially less than the 30-day stocks the services would want to hold. On the government’s claim to have already met NATO’s 1.5 per cent resilience spending target, both witnesses were unpersuaded, with Robertson saying it has never been explained how the figure is met and Barrons observing that the money has visibly not been spent on securing bases such as Brize Norton, mending military ports, gearing the NHS for mass casualties or enabling mobilisation. “Whatever the money has been spent on, it’s hard to see in the military lane,” he said.