Integrated Air & Missile Defence: Does the UK need an 'Iron Dome'? (2024)

MBDA's Sky Sabre air defence system replaced Rapier in service with the British Army.(MBDA/Crown Copyright)

Comparisons with Israel’s Iron Dome system – the well known short-range interceptor system which protects its population from incoming rockets – are, as some observers have already noted, misguided. The pressing need to improve the UK’s defences from air threats is an important topic, including the proliferating UAV threat, but references to Iron Dome are unhelpful. It protects a small country, with adversaries at its borders, from short-range attacks. As John Foreman pointed out in The Spectator, the UK is 11 times larger than Israel and has 75 cities with a population of over 100,000, whereas Israel has just 15 such cities concentrated in a compact area.

Attempting to replicate such a system would be an illogical course of action. The UK's Chief of the Defence Staff addressed this argument recently, stating that our geographical and political realities – sitting at some range from our nearest adversary with our NATO allies standing in between Russia and the UK – provide protection from short range attack (potential maritime drone strikes from the North Sea notwithstanding). Yet he emphasised that longer-range missiles could still pose a threat to the UK.

For the UK, an overarching Iron Dome system is also impractical given the size of the country and the cost of blanket coverage. In any case, as was recently reported, Israelis are now questioning their reliance on Iron Dome. Nissan Zeevi, an Israeli living near the border with Lebanon, interviewed by The Guardian, said: "The Iron Dome was a strategic mistake. It normalised rockets hitting Israel, it gave us the feeling of security. But feeling secure is not the same as being secure. After 7 October we woke up."

Iron Dome didn’t deter Israel’s adversaries; instead they looked to other, horrific, means of terrorising the Israeli population and provoking conflict. The Iranian (along with their proxies in Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq) strike on Israel on 14 April was, arguably, designed with Iron Dome in mind – to appear sufficiently aggressive but also launched in the knowledge that almost all the missiles would be neutralised, and none would make it into Israel’s core defended zone.

The UK's fleet of Bloodhound air defence missiles is now relegated to museums - this example at the RAF Museum. (Crown Copyright)

However, the UK is only now, in the light of recent events, waking up to its scarcity of resource to defend against air attack. Integrated Air and Missile Defence (IAMD) - the acronym and NATO doctrinal term for this capability – is something that has been admired as a deficiency for some time by UK governments but with little actual investment in its’ improvement. The Defence Command Paper Refresh in 2023 acknowledged that ‘The challenge of protecting ourselves against attack from the skies, both overseas and at home, is at its most acute for over thirty years – as is evidenced in the war in Ukraine.’ It went on to offer, somewhat feebly, that the MOD would ‘step up our efforts to deliver an Integrated Air and Missile Defence approach’.

Back in the Strategic Defence and Security Review of 2015, a more solid commitment was made to procure a ground-based Ballistic Missile Defence radar for the UK and the protection of NATO. Since then, that commitment has apparently been delayed by three years to 2029, despite US approval in 2022 for the sale of such a system to the UK. So the signs are not encouraging that the UK government is really committed to ‘stepping up’.

A wartime composite image depicting the air war over London in 1940. Should the UK government be preparing for another Battle of Britain? (Crown Copyright)

Perhaps instead we should talk more simply about defence from the air and, in the UK, about how we prepare for the next Battle of Britain?

This will look very different from the experience of 1940, albeit that battle was won because Britain created an integrated air defence system for the first time in history. As Air Marshal Greg Bagwell points out, the RAF was created because of the furore over the bombing of Britain in the First World War, but these two world war lessons around the criticality of IAMD are now lost on much of the electorate and indeed many of their elected representatives. As he wrote of the missile attacks on Israel on 14 April and on Ukraine over the last two years: ‘we see it as something otherworldly, and have yet to wake up to our vulnerability, or truly imagine what it means to be under attack in your own homeland – we have become complacent at best, and reckless at worst’.

We don’t need an Iron Dome, but we do need to have a serious conversation about defending our country from attacks from the air.