Britain should install an Israeli-style “iron dome” missile defence system, Penny Mordaunt has suggested, in an unusual intervention highlighting concerns within the government about the increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape.
Ms Mordaunt, the House of Commons leader and a former Royal Navy reservist, again called for an increase in defence spending, saying the government has a “duty to our citizens” to keep them protected as the world becomes less safe.
...
The UK currently spends just over 2 per cent of GDP on defence, but there are growing calls for this to be increased to at least 2.5 per cent, with some figures pushing for as much as 3 per cent.
Writing for The Sunday Telegraph, in a piece that could be interpreted as a pitch for the future leadership of her party, Ms Mordaunt said the UK must be more ambitious about the amount of resources it puts into defence.
“To those that say, about our defence ambitions, we ‘can’t do’, ‘shouldn’t do’, or ‘can’t afford to do’, I say ‘Look to Israel’ – a nation a fraction of our size that has staved off an attack from a nation 10 times its size,” she told the paper.
...
The Iron Dome system, developed with backing from the US, specialises in shooting down short-range rockets. It has intercepted a vast number of rockets since it was activated early in the last decade – including thousands during the current war against Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel says it has a success rate of over 90 per cent.
The Iron Dome is supported by the Arrow system, which is designed to intercept long-range missiles including the types of ballistic missiles Iran said it had launched against Israel.
The defence system is extremely expensive to maintain and operate. Reem Aminoach, a former brigadier general and chief financial adviser to the head of the Israeli military, told Bloomberg that it would have cost Israel around $1bn (£808m) to thwart Iran’s attack, with some interceptor missiles costing $3.5m (£2.8m) alone.
UK Politics
General Discussion for politics in the UK.
Please don't post to both !uk_politics@feddit.uk and !unitedkingdom@feddit.uk .
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric politics, and should be either a link to a reputable news source for news, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread. (These things should be publicly discussed)
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
!ukpolitics@lemm.ee appears to have vanished! We can still see cached content from this link, but goodbye I guess! :'(
view the rest of the comments
Or they could use the money to do something to undo the massive damage done to the UK’s society and economy by the Tory party instead?
I think you missed the last 10+ years of Tory propaganda - it's thr migrants fault and once they shut down the small boats (any day now) they'll use small gliders and we'll have no way to stop them without The Iron Dome!