Badenoch's £10bn UK air defence plan would cover only key sites, BBC says

Britain lacks system for long-range ballistic, hypersonic missiles

UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has announced a £10 billion, ten-year commitment to build a new British air defence system, BBC News reported. The Labour government has separately allocated up to £1 billion to address the same threat, with both parties agreeing the UK needs layered air defences.

The Conservative proposal originally described the system as “in essence, a British Iron Dome,” referencing Israel’s layered air-defence network. The party subsequently said the phrase was a shorthand for improved air defences and suggested rebranding the proposal as the “Britannia Shield.”

BBC reporting called the comparison to Israel naive. Israel is roughly 10% the size of the UK and has been regularly targeted by drones and missiles over the past decade, while the UK has not faced comparable attacks. The BBC said even the “Britannia Shield” framing may be a misnomer.

The UK currently operates several systems to deal with short and medium-range threats, from drones to cruise missiles. The Royal Navy’s Sea Viper is among the country’s current air-defence systems. The armed forces do not operate a weapons system capable of countering long-range ballistic and hypersonic missiles, BBC News reported.

The capability gap was flagged in the government’s Strategic Defence Review, published in 2025, which explicitly warned of threats to the UK from ballistic and cruise missiles and drones and called for greater investment in air defences. The Labour government is allocating up to £1 billion to address the threat, according to the BBC.

The UK focus on air defence follows conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine that have shown air-defence systems can be overwhelmed by mass attacks. In the Middle East, Iran’s attacks have broken through the layered air defences of US military bases, causing significant damage, according to BBC reporting. In Ukraine, Russia’s war has exposed the difficulty of defending against large-scale attacks.

Sophisticated air-defence systems capable of countering a range of threats are expensive. Each interceptor used by the US Patriot missile system costs about $4 million (£3 million), BBC News reported. The US Army has requested a fourfold increase in its budget for missiles and interceptors for next year, bringing the total to $36 billion (£27.1 billion). Israel spends a significant proportion of its $45 billion (£33.9 billion) annual military budget on air defences.

BBC reporting said it would be “nigh on impossible” for the UK to develop an air-defence system that could defend the whole country with the resources under discussion, and that the most realistic outcome would be a system to protect select strategic sites, including military bases. The UK does not currently have such a system.