Jess Battison
I don’t know about you, but the idea of a ‘World War 3’ just seems that bit more possible lately.
From Donald Trump throwing those words around repeatedly to previous 'leaked' documents listing three places in the UK that Vladimir Putin is prepared to attack, some people’s worries continue to grow.
And in news that isn’t particularly going to make you feel any better about that, when the British military simulated a Russian missile strike on the UK, the results were ‘not pretty’.
This simulation was a replication of the attacks on Ukraine on the first night of the invasion in 2022. Air Commodore Blythe Crawford (who recently retired as the Commandant of the UK’s Air and Space Warfare Centre) said that the military used ‘synthetic environment’ to model the possible aerial assault.
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“For the UK, we have stood for years at the western edge of Europe feeling as though the rest of the continent stood between us and the enemy,” he said in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London today (24 April).
“We in the UK over the last few decades have become focused on being garrison safe and making assumptions that we are safe to operate from the home base because most of the wars we’ve been fighting have been overseas.
“We need to reverse that thinking and assume that from here on, we’re under threat in the home base now as well.”
He explained that Britain’s top military warmakers loaded ‘night one of Ukraine’ into the environment to look at ‘how we would solve a problem like that if a similar scenario hit the UK’.
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This came after the expert said the war ‘made us all sit up’.
Crawford said of the simulation: “As you can imagine it was not a pretty picture.”
While he did not quite reveal the details of the damage, he said the simulation ‘reinforced the fact that we really need to get after this’.
It’s also understood that many of the missiles penetrated simulated defences on UK soil as well as revealing a shortage of airfields to launch fighter jets and of hardened aircraft shelters capable of withstanding bomb blasts.
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A Ministry of Defence spokesperson said in a statement: “The UK stands fully prepared to defend itself against any threat alongside our Nato allies.
“Our military is equipped with a range of advanced capabilities to provide a layered approach to air and missile defence.
“This includes the world-class Sea Viper missile system which has successfully shot down a Houthi rebel ballistic missile and attack drones in the Red Sea.”