Badenoch "Britannia Shield"

You may have noticed in todays news - Tory plan to spend £10billion on an air defence system - based on Israels "iron dome".

To start with - £10billion is a huge amount of money - where's it coming from?

Secondly - it won't work - you would need over 1200 missile sites to cover the whole of the UK .

For the layers they've named in Britannia Shield:

• Sky Sabre / CAMM-ER: >45km range
• Aster 30: up to 120km range, Aster 15 up to 30km
• Rapid Sentry / Martlet: about 8km range
• Giraffe radar that comes with Sky Sabre: 120km detection range

UK land area is 242,495 km². One battery covers a circle: pi × r².

Ideal world - no overlap, flat earth, no terrain blocking:

In reality you need 50-70% overlap for 360° cover, low-level gaps, maintenance, and because Britain is long and skinny - not a circle. Plus you need to see over hills and cover the approaches over the sea.

Real-world rule of thumb defence planners use is x1.5 to x2 the ideal number:

• Aster 30 layer: 10-12 sites minimum just to give a single continuous long-range ring over land. If you want overlapping cover and to push the ring out over the North Sea / Atlantic, more like 15-20.
• CAMM-ER / Sky Sabre layer: 60-80 sites to give the whole country a medium-range bubble. At £50-70m per battery plus radars, that's already most of the £10bn.
• Martlet / last-ditch drone defence: You don't use this to cover the country - you'd only use it to point-defend specific targets like airfields, power stations, ports. Even then, 8km means to protect just Greater London (1,572 km²) you'd need 8-12 launchers.

That's why Barrons and Robertson said you need £80bn for "entry level" and £120bn for a real Iron Dome style system. Israel can do it because Israel is 22,000 km² - Britain is 12 times bigger, and Israel's Iron Dome is mainly built for short-range rockets, not long-range cruise/ballistic missiles which is what the UK would need Aster for.

So the Tory plan of a "minimal deployable capability" in the first term means picking 6-10 key sites - probably RAF Coningsby, Lossiemouth, Faslane, London, Portsmouth, etc - not a nationwide shield.

IT'LL NEVER HAPPEN…..