All eyes turned to Cyprus earlier this week when it came under one-way drone attack in an unexpected expansion of the Iran war. Or, more specifically, Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) on the island came under attack.
There are two of these, relics of more glorious days of Empire now gone, at Akrotiri and Dhekelia, both in the south of the island. The former boasts the important strategic airfield of RAF Akrotiri, where the RAF holds some of its Typhoon and F-35B jets at the moment, and there that the first Iranian drone made a dent in the runway.
How did it get through the defences? We’ll get to that in a minute. Less well known perhaps is the SBA at Dhekelia, situated towards the eastern end of the island.
To most casual observers, it looks like a typical sleepy overseas garrison, with standard British military barracks, married quarters, and a handful of soldiers doing not very much most of the time.
However, Dhekelia includes the jewel in the crown, the signals intelligence gathering facility at Ayios Nikolaos. According to Wikipedia, it is the largest GCHQ site outside the UK and is run jointly with the US National Security Agency (NSA), which has US personnel on the site. It silently hoovers up electronic intelligence from across the Middle East and well beyond and relays it to those who need to know.
The arrival of the war against Iran at RAF bases in Cyprus is bad news for Britain. The SBAs lack adequate air defences and only have a limited capacity to fight back.
The Typhoon and F-35 fighter jets operating out of RAF Akrotiri have limited stockpiles of munitions and neither should really be used for shooting down drones. Of far more use for that job would be the British army’s Sky Sabre air defence system, but it’s not clear from open sources how many units, if any, are currently stationed on the island.
And the only piece of UK equipment capable of intercepting a true ballistic missile targeting Cyprus is on the Royal Navy’s Type 45 destroyer, and it is a limited capability at that.
War has come to Britain. This is how the one-way strike on a RAF base in Cyprus changes everything | KitasWeather/Reuters
The RN boasts six Type 45s, but possibly only one is immediately available for deployment to the eastern Mediterranean, and with the best will in the world, it can’t get there overnight.
So, absent British assets to do the job, the UK is relying on the US flotillas of aircraft carriers and other warships to deal with the ballistic missile threat. And after our PM’s initial refusal, which was partially rescinded, to allow US aircraft to use British bases for their attacks on Iran, it may be that Trump will not be kindly disposed to cries for help should push come to shove.
But the point is that British sovereign territory has been directly attacked, but Starmer’s declared plan is to ‘de-escalate’. Really?
He has continued to insist that Britain was not taking part in the strikes, but this position must surely change if more UK interests come under attack.
Others have pointed out that the best strike option for the UK would be Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from one of the RN’s attack submarines. Yet the only one (out of six) operationally available, HMS Anson, is currently visiting Australia on a ‘show the flag’ mission, which is hardly helpful for a war in the Middle East.
Britain’s armed forces are indeed in a sorry state, the hard reality of a failure by successive governments over decades to invest in their personnel and equipment.
Add to the mix a vacillating and indecisive PM, and it’s a recipe for disaster, and this sorry state of affairs can’t be remedied overnight. Let me mention once again that Britain’s welfare budget is close to six times its defence budget. The Government’s spending priorities are clearly all wrong.
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