Iran’s missile and drone strikes against U.S. allies in the Middle East have highlighted Britain’s limited capacity to protect its own citizens and interests, not only in the Gulf region but also at its sovereign military bases on Cyprus. Last week, several drones—suspected to have been fired by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon—targeted a British base on Cyprus. Only afterward did London rush air defense assets to the region to protect its forces, prompting questions over why these weapons were not there in the first place.

The case is emblematic of the reduced state of the British armed forces. That should not be a surprise: Already in 2024, British security experts found that ground-based air defense systems weren’t “equipped to be able to defeat many kinds of air threat.” Although the British Army’s Sky Sabre systems are capable of intercepting drones, these weapons are only available in limited numbers and were reportedly not allocated to defend British bases on Cyprus. To add to the embarrassment, the Royal Navy withdrew its last frigate from the Gulf region in 2025, admitting that this was because there were simply not enough of them to meet operational needs. It was the first time in decades that there were no major British warships in the region.

Iran’s missile and drone strikes against U.S. allies in the Middle East have highlighted Britain’s limited capacity to protect its own citizens and interests, not only in the Gulf region but also at its sovereign military bases on Cyprus. Last week, several drones—suspected to have been fired by Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon—targeted a British base on Cyprus. Only afterward did London rush air defense assets to the region to protect its forces, prompting questions over why these weapons were not there in the first place.

The case is emblematic of the reduced state of the British armed forces. That should not be a surprise: Already in 2024, British security experts found that ground-based air defense systems weren’t “equipped to be able to defeat many kinds of air threat.” Although the British Army’s Sky Sabre systems are capable of intercepting drones, these weapons are only available in limited numbers and were reportedly not allocated to defend British bases on Cyprus. To add to the embarrassment, the Royal Navy withdrew its last frigate from the Gulf region in 2025, admitting that this was because there were simply not enough of them to meet operational needs. It was the first time in decades that there were no major British warships in the region.

London’s response to the Cyprus attack has been to send aircraft, helicopters, and a Type 45 destroyer, HMS Dragon, to the Eastern Mediterranean. These destroyers constitute Britain’s most advanced air defense—responsible for defending not just British aircraft carriers but also the country itself against ballistic missiles. The problem: The Royal Navy only has six of these vessels, all of which have been undergoing a comprehensive overhaul after they proved unreliable in warm-water environments like the Persian Gulf, leaving them unavailable for years at a time. As of mid-January, only three of the six destroyers were labeled “operational,” which is not the same as being immediately available. Even the Dragon has required several more days of preparations and will arrive roughly two weeks after it was needed.

Britain’s inability to protect its overseas interests largely reflects the atrophied state of the once mighty Royal Navy. The most evident challenge is an insufficient number of ships and submarines, exacerbated by a shortage of personnel to sail them. The Royal Navy has aircraft carriers and those six state-of-the-art destroyers—but at times no support ships to replenish their stores. Until new classes of frigate come into service, supposedly by the end of the decade, British forces are reliant on a dwindling number of elderly Type 23 frigates designed during the Cold War.

For anyone following British defense, the straitened circumstances of what used to be a leading NATO power is no surprise. London’s unwillingness to fund defense is a saga that has played out over multiple governments and across political parties, despite increasingly strident warnings of growing threats.

Under the current Labour leadership, however, the gap between Britain’s stated needs and its willingness to meet them has become incomprehensible. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s senior defense and security officials have been unequivocally clear that Britain faces imminent threats and that investments and defense transformation are both urgent and overdue. “For the first time in many years, we have to actively prepare for the possibility of the UK homeland coming under direct threat, potentially in a wartime scenario,” Britain’s 2025 National Security Strategy warns. At the same time, the Starmer government has repeatedly delayed key plans and denied the money to fund them. This mismatch is referred to increasingly often as the “say-do gap” in British defense, including in a series of damning studies by former senior officers and security think tanks.

London’s say-do gap was on full display at last month’s Munich Security Conference, where Starmer warned European leaders that they need “to spend more faster.” Britain’s own spending, however, has been accelerating rapidly backward. If funds for the country’s nuclear deterrent are set aside, Britain is allocating only about 1.73 percent of GDP on defense, the second-lowest share among NATO’s 32 members. The only member to spend less is Iceland, which has no military forces at all.

The critics of British inaction include the country’s own lawmakers. In late 2025, the U.K. House of Commons Defence Committee released a report castigating the government’s multiple failures not only to meet its defense commitments to NATO but also to protect the British homeland itself. Frustration with Britain not only is spreading within NATO but has extended to Japan, which is reportedly unhappy with London’s vacillation on a joint project to develop a next-generation stealth fighter.

For all his public nods toward defense, Starmer made his priorities clear early in his premiership, when he declared that there was “no institution more important for the security of our country than the National Health Service.” Since Britain’s health care system is funded almost completely through taxes, it directly competes with the rest of the government budget. With that budget also creaking under a disastrous welfare bill, Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is reported to be blocking increases in defense spending.

Britain’s current promise is to raise defense outlays to 2.5 percent of GDP by 2027, with an “ambition” to reach 3 percent later. Even if met over Reeves’s objections, this trajectory is so unambitious that the annual increments can be measured in tenths of a percentage point. Further underlining London’s lack of seriousness is the fact that much of the promised increase is made up of accounting fudges, including reclassifying other budget items as defense.

Funding has to be enough to mend the consequences of decades of cuts, including painful and morale-sapping penny-pinching inflicted on service personnel and their families. Armed Forces Minister Al Carns is alarmed that much of the British military “hasn’t changed from the Eighties and Nineties.” The majority of armored vehicles, including tanks, were built between 30 and 60 years ago. Successive procurement disasters have led to major gaps in capability. The Army’s main battle tank has not received a significant upgrade since the last century. When it finally does, only 148 of the tanks will be upgraded to the latest specifications—and the track record suggests that this number will be cut. Similar problems plague Britain’s airborne forces. A single airborne drop of any size, for example, could require the use of the Royal Air Force’s entire fleet of parachute-capable aircraft.

The decline in the size of the armed forces overall has been steady over decades. Between 2000 and 2024, British Army personnel numbers shrank by almost 30 percent; the force is now the smallest it has been since the 1790s. The Royal Navy and Royal Marines have together shrunk by almost 25 percent and the Royal Air Force by more than 40 percent. Britain now has neither a powerful land force nor a navy large enough to be present where needed—as the world saw last week.

The British government’s rhetorical line on defense has been that technology reduces the need for soldiers and sailors. But even an armed force that is technologically advanced by recent standards may find itself seriously challenged. The front line in Ukraine will not be an exact blueprint for how future wars will be fought, but the drone and anti-drone technologies developed there will prove a serious challenge to any military that has been reluctant to invest in adaptation—as we can now see in the Middle East, where the United States and its Gulf partners are struggling to defend against Iran’s massed drone attacks. In late February, former Ukrainian military chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, who is now ambassador to Britain, warned in stark terms that the technological revolution on his country’s front lines has left European militaries far behind. Yet a long-promised Defence Investment Plan laying out how Britain will respond to the challenge has yet to appear.

In previous decades, the main criticism over successive British governments shrinking the armed forces was their failure to reconcile global ambition with their unwillingness to pay for it. But now, the danger is more immediate and fundamental. Despite the clear warnings in its own strategy documents, Britain has neither the capabilities nor even a plan for defending its own homeland.

That’s the result of the long-standing assumption in British planning that if war happens, it will happen to somebody else a long way away—and that Britain will have a choice over whether to take part. And that it will be able to rely on U.S. military might and be part of a U.S.-led coalition if it does.

The trouble is that all of those assumptions have now been upended. Russia has been practicing hard at delivering attacks at ranges far beyond what most of the British public imagines. Iran is lashing out indiscriminately following the latest round of U.S. strikes. And any planning that relied on Britain only going to war when bolted onto a much larger U.S. force must surely require urgent revision.

This, of course, is hardly a new discovery for anybody who has been paying attention. But with the current British top leadership unwilling to engage in the “national conversation on defence and security” that its own strategic documents call for, that conversation is happening without and in spite of government rather than with it.

It’s another symptom of Britain’s vital need to align action with words so that the words are not devalued. If Britain’s military strategies, programs, and reviews are to win over defense skeptics and generate essential public support for the fiscal change that is essential to implement them, then the British government has to show that it actually believes its own assessments—and act accordingly.