UK opposition leader Kemi Badenoch played down initial claims her plans for a £10 billion ($13.2 billion) air defense program would amount to a British “iron dome” after the proposal came under scrutiny.
The Conservative Party initially pitched the policy, dubbed the “Britannia Shield” as a UK version of Israel’s air defense system, designed to shoot down incoming missiles, rockets, mortars and drones. But asked whether the funding would be enough to deliver such a policy, Badenoch said the shield would be focused on protecting critical infrastructure from drone attacks, rather than defending the whole country.
“The threats that we face are different, but at the moment we don’t have this sort of capability,” Badenoch told BBC radio on Tuesday. “We could have a situation, for example, people coming very close to the English Channel and are able to send drones and missiles at our critical national infrastructure. How do we protect ourselves from this? And that is what we have announced today.”
Badenoch said the system could be used to protect British overseas interests too, such as the Falkland Islands and the country’s air bases in Cyprus.
Announcing the pledge on the third day of the party’s annual conference in Birmingham, the Tory leader pledged to spend 3% of gross domestic product on defense by 2030 which her party said would provide an additional £10 billion a year. Party officials said the air defense system would account for around £1 billion annually over 10 years as part of this pre-existing funding promise, which they said would be paid for through welfare spending cuts.
Iron Dome is the name of Israel’s integrated missile defenses, which involves layers of systems, some of which can reach into space. The US Golden Dome program is an ambitious effort to defend the country from “any foreign aerial attack” — and has been estimated to eventually cost more than $1 trillion.
The UK needs more robust missile defenses, said William Alberque, a nuclear arms negotiator and Europe-based senior fellow at the Pacific Forum, and protecting key installations and cities would bolster NATO’s deterrence. But the cost of leak-proof coverage of the entire UK makes such an idea unfeasible.
“It wouldn’t be a dome, Golden, Iron, or otherwise,” he said.
Focusing new UK defenses on drone attacks would be cheaper and more realistic, said Becca Wasser, defense lead at Bloomberg Economics. Russia has been linked to hybrid warfare attacks around Europe , including drones flying around and into sensitive areas.
“The UK has existing detection systems and counterdrone capabilities it could integrate into such a concept,” Wasser said. “That could help keep costs down.”
Stephen Barrett, founder and CEO of Cambridge Aerospace, said £10 billion in funding over 10 years would be a “significant spending commitment” toward defending critical national infrastructure, but suggested it would not go so far as to protect civilians.
“Something that’s important to think about when it comes to if we move to defending the population is that we’re not talking about defending every square inch of UK territory,” he told the BBC, comparing the system to mobile phone masts. “By placing the defenses strategically you could cover very significant parts of the population in key high density areas with a more limited set of interceptor sites and radar sites than if you really tried to cover the the whole territory.”