For years, a growing chorus of defence experts, former ministers and service chiefs has been warning that failure urgently to rebuild Britain’s defences only increases the risk that they will be tested in conflict. Now, that risk has been demonstrated clearly by the UK’s inability to protect its citizens, its interests, and even its bases in the Gulf and on Cyprus from the fallout from American attacks on Iran.
The crisis has exposed just how few capabilities the Royal Navy has left to respond to an emergency.
Shortage of operational vessels left the Navy planning to have no warships at all in the Gulf for the first time since 1980 – a move defended by the Royal Navy’s fleet commander just two days before the current round of attacks on Iran began.
Now, HMS Dragon, a destroyer with anti-missile capabilities, has been pulled from planned maintenance to be sent urgently to the eastern Mediterranean. That suggests strongly that it will have sailed with known defects and unfinished work, which will have a knock-on impact on both effectiveness and future availability.
It’s a symptom of how the consequences of defence cuts over decades are biting hard now that Britain’s armed forces are being tested. Drone attacks on Gulf cities and on Cyprus could provide the wake-up call that finally shocks the British government into action. But it’s more probable that the snooze button will once again be pressed, as chancellor Rachel Reeves continues to block the funding that has both been promised to Nato and used as a baseline assumption for the UK’s own National Security Strategy (NSS) and Strategic Defence Review (SDR).
The stark impact of the UK’s refusal to invest in defence can be seen clearly in the Joint Expeditionary Force, the defence club of like-minded nations for which the UK serves as the framework nation and notional leader. In 2014, the UK’s leadership was supported by the fact that it was the only one among the 10 members that claimed to meet its Nato spending commitment of 2 per cent of GDP. Just over a decade later, it has fallen from first place in relative spending to ninth – ahead only of Iceland, which does not even have a military.
As well as the funding itself, the UK faces questions over what the money is to be spent on if it is ever forthcoming. The reported absence of drone defences protecting the UK’s sovereign base at Akrotiri in Cyprus has deepened fears that the UK has not adapted swiftly enough to new capabilities that are shaping conflicts happening now.
In 2025, British commanders at a joint exercise in Estonia were reportedly shocked at the ease with which Ukrainian and Estonian opposing forces located and destroyed their vehicles using new technology. That’s not just drones and how they are used, but innovations from the Delta information sharing system in use with Ukrainian forces, to covert wildlife cameras tracking enemy movement.
Defence observers hope the experience can be a catalyst for change in the UK’s forces, and kickstart the process of disseminating lessons learned from Ukraine so the British Army no longer plans to fight as though it were 2021.
There are persistent rumours that the small detachment of British Challenger tanks assigned to Estonia is to be withdrawn, and the forces allocated to reinforce the British presence in an emergency are to be scaled down to “light role” troops. If so, it will be hard to spin the move as anything positive. Unless properly handled, a drawdown of this kind would send yet another message that the UK is simply unwilling to take its commitments to allies seriously – and provide yet another data point for Russia to doubt British resolve and capability.
The problems are not just far away. The UK’s NSS warns directly of direct threats to the UK homeland. It’s long been known that the UK needed to develop a cost-effective counter-drone and counter-missile capability as part of an integrated air and missile defence (IAMD) system. The Sky News podcast The Wargame, recorded in early 2025, highlighted the country’s almost complete inability to counter long-range missile threats.
But as Francis Tusa wrote in The Independent yesterday, hostile drones can be launched from much closer. The wave of drone incursions that closed down European airports in late 2025 did not involve any actual attacks – but demonstrated how vulnerable our critical infrastructure is and how easy it would be to mount one.
The vulnerabilities are not just to air threats. The government is reportedly on alert for Iranian sleeper cells to be activated in the UK to carry out attacks. Yet despite the combined threat, the government has still not released a promised home defence programme, or started visible work on rebuilding civil defence.
National and local agencies, departments of state, emergency services and industry are increasingly aware of the threat to the UK, and looking to central government for direction and resources to meet it – but, apparently, not receiving it. The Ministry of Defence has single-service and joint regional liaison officers (JRLOs) that connect MOD with civilian and regional defence and resilience partners like police forces, councils, the National Grid and more. But in the absence of direction and prioritisation from the government, there is little they can do beyond sharing information on the problem without offering solutions.
In 1936, Winston Churchill told parliament, “The era of procrastination, of half-measures… of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences.” The war on Iran shows that our own period of consequences is here now. We just have to hope that the government’s procrastination will not have cost us too dearly.
Keir Giles is director of Conflict Research Centre Ltd
