This Island Was Our Moat. Now It’s a Target Grid. How to Stop Fighting the Last War

By Jaffa Levy — London

They came first in small boats. Julius Caesar, peering across the narrow water, lashed together a flotilla of timbered hulls and tested the Channel twice, in 55 and 54 BC. The crossings were tenuous, the landings hard, but the sea itself—the short, churning strait—was the measure of Britain’s peril and protection. Later came other tides: Norman sails in 1066; and, centuries on, corsairs out of North Africa prowling the western approaches, seizing villagers from lonely coves and harrying the trade lanes. The Channel was always a hazard—but also a hedge, a moat that made invasion a feat rather than a fait accompli.

When we were most exposed, the water saved us again. In 1940, the nation found boats—trawlers, lifeboats, sailing craft—and crossed to Dunkirk to bring the Army home. The Royal Navy held the narrows while the RAF owned enough of the sky, and Hitler’s Operation Sea Lion died on the far shore for want of both. Geography, married to grit, was enough.

Then one June morning the world woke to a different kind of war.

At dawn, Ukraine’s Operation Spider’s Web lit up runways thousands of miles from the front. More than a hundred small drones—cheap, pre-positioned, and cued by meticulous intelligence—rose almost at once and found their mark. A new grammar announced itself: hide near the target, strike in volume, overwhelm the guard, let algorithms do what distance used to. The spectacle was not in the cost of the airframes but in the audacity of the plan—and in how easily it could be replayed elsewhere.

Picture, then, our coast in winter light. A freighter sits just outside the shipping lanes, its transponder pinging a routine string of digits every few seconds, indistinguishable from the hundreds of vessels that idle off Britain each night. Deck cranes creak, hatches open and shut for reasons that look like cargo housekeeping. Closer in, under sodium lamps, a lorry idles by an industrial estate where contractors swap night shifts. The site is ordinary: a portable cabin chained to a flatbed, tool crates, a tarpaulin that has seen better weather. At an airfield, the night crew hears a high note and cannot place it—could be wind across a mast, could be nothing. In a control room by the docks, a supervisor watches a camera smear in rain and makes a note to call maintenance in the morning.

We once imagined danger would arrive as fleets on the horizon or carpet raids you could hear from miles away. It may come instead as a dozen quiet problems at once: brief outages in port CCTV feeds; a burst of false echoes on a local radar; an unexplained flock on a runway sensor; small fires that smother quickly but start again downwind. The signature is not shock and awe. It is nuisance compounded into disruption.

Ports, the nation’s blood supply, wear their vulnerabilities in plain sight. Fuel farms sit behind mesh fencing and berms; container stacks create canyons with blind corners; cranes and loaders crowd the same narrow aprons where tanker trucks reverse. Daily life is a ballet of hazard management—loading schedules, exclusion zones, hot-work permits—where any interruption multiplies. A single berth closed for hours unthreads timetables across counties. Add a foggy night and a labour changeover, and the margin for error narrows to minutes.

Airfields are simple machines. One strip of tarmac, a handful of taxiways, a few delicate nodes—ATC, comms huts, power and fuel. Crews drill foam deluge and FOD sweeps, move aircraft between open stands and shelters when they have them, and guard the perimeters with patrols that know every gate by name. What they cannot change is geometry: the runway is a single point of failure, and the support web is thin by design, optimised for efficiency. A runway closed at 01:23 can still be an international story by first light.

Bases gather what we cannot quickly replace. Not just airframes and ordnance, but crews certified on exact types; spares binned by serial number; hardened networks that become brittle when power flickers. Efficiency concentrates value. To anyone patient and curious, it also sketches an invitation: here is where to touch if you wish to be felt.

Across the world, navies still parade their reach. Ours has two big decks—HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales—that write graceful arcs across friendly seas—Australia, Japan, the South China Sea—sometimes with U.S. Marines and F-35Bs circling the pattern, a joint photograph of alliance. But a carrier is only a moving airfield, and this era is unkind to airfields that declare their position a day in advance. The rhetoric around “hypersonics” is often louder than the data, yet the trend line is blunt: faster, smarter, more manoeuvrable threats from farther away; and beneath that noise, something quieter but no less dangerous—cheap, saturating volleys of drones and cruise missiles that force hard choices on any ship that wishes to remain seen.

The harder truth sits closer to home. The British Empire is over. There is no one to impress with a pennant run through someone else’s straits. Partnerships still matter; sometimes presence does, too. But the national problem is not projection. It is protection. If we must spend billions—and we must—then spend them where the country breathes: on the ports that feed it, the airfields that defend it, the bases that keep its promises.

Abroad, the pattern is already familiar. In the Taiwan Strait—about eighty miles at its narrowest—water still deters an amphibious crossing, but only because defenders have reimagined the fight: sensors strung tight, drones and missiles layered deep, “porcupine” investments that make the first day of war too costly to start. China adapts in turn with anti-access arsenals and swarming concepts. The lesson is not romance for fleets. It is discipline in defences.

Russia, chastened by Spider’s Web, poured concrete and earth. Shelters appeared where aircraft had been left in the open. Decoys were painted, tyres draped over bomber wings to confuse image-matching seekers, mobile electronic-warfare units rolled into place to jam and spoof. None of it was neat, much less perfect, but it was fast, layered and ugly—everything defence must be when the first shot is cheap and the second shot is cheaper.

Here, too, the parts are arriving. In West Wales, the Army has live-tested a radio-frequency directed-energy weapon (RF-DEW) against a swarm of roughly a hundred drones, reporting neutralisations at about 10–13 pence per shot. The system—developed by a Thales-led team—uses high-power radio waves to disable drone electronics, complementing but not relying on link jamming. The UK has also trialled the DragonFire laser at the MOD Hebrides Range (2024), a line-of-sight system moving toward ship and land integration later in the decade. Beyond exquisite systems, the National Protective Security Authority (NPSA) has issued practical counter-UAS guidance for critical national infrastructure and the maritime sector—covering detection layers, response playbooks and vendor selection—so ports, refineries and airfields can act now. On the policing side, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) is building beyond-visual-line-of-sight procedures and has trialled remotely launched drones for rapid response at major events—muscle memory for wide-area incidents.

What we have not yet done is tell ourselves the truth in one voice. The public-facing Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Strategy is still anchored in 2019, while technical advisories have moved on. An updated, inter-agency doctrine should align MOD, Home Office, NPCC and NPSA on authorities, escalation paths and common tools. The allied example is plain: U.S. Northern Command is field-testing rapid “fly-away” counter-UAS kits for bases without organic defences; the UK can mirror this for ports and airfields. At the operator level, ports should adopt NPSA checklists (sensor coverage, CCTV hardening, drone-sighting reporting chains, tested counter-UAS options). Airfields should prioritise shelters, foam and deluge systems, decoys and runway-closure drills. Base perimeters should expand routine screening of temporary structures and contractor traffic near fuel and power nodes—the very seams exploited by pre-positioned attacks.

Be honest about the carriers. Keep HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, but align deployments with real protection. The Sea Viper upgrade on Type 45 destroyers—including new missile and radar improvements, and recent supersonic-intercept trials—widens the envelope, yet cannot by itself guarantee survivability against complex, manoeuvring and saturating threats. Spending should rise at least proportionally on home-island air, missile and counter-drone layers while sea-based defences mature.

How to Stop Fighting the Last War

Five tests for seriousness (measure quarterly, publish results):

1. Cost-per-shot vs cost-per-salvo: Field defeat options that can stop 50–100 drones at ≤£1 per shot (RF-DEW/HPM, guns, smart fuses) and track stock levels in days of combat.
2. Left-of-launch coverage: Routine screening of portable cabins, contractor yards and ad-hoc storage within 5–15 km of ports, airfields and bases; joint CI tasking orders in place.
3. Hardening & dispersion: Percentage of aircraft under shelters; time to re-open a cratered runway at night; decoy ratios at fuel farms and C2 nodes.
4. Multi-agency drills: MOD–Home Office–NPCC–NPSA joint exercises at least quarterly, with a single call-out protocol and clear rules for electronic/kinetic defeat.
5. War stocks & attritability: Months of munitions/spares onshore; attritable sensors and interceptors in volume, not prototypes.

Governance and procurement—do it now:

• Update doctrine: Issue a refreshed UK Counter-UAS framework (public outline + classified annex) codifying authorities, ROE and rapid tasking.
• Rapid fielding model: Run rolling 90-day buy-test-field spirals (UOR-style) for C-UAS and hardening kits; separate “good enough now” from long-lead exquisite.
• National fly-away kits: Fund mobile counter-UAS packages for ports/airfields/energy landfalls; exercise them under police command as well as MOD.
• Standing red team: Authorise an independent cell to attempt “Spider’s-Web” style penetrations (with warrants) around real sites; publish operator lessons.
• Degrade-mode drills: Train monthly for GPS-denied/comms-jammed conditions; insist on manual fallbacks at ports and airfields.
• Budget rebalance: Ring-fence spend for shelters, foam, decoys, runway repair, RF-DEW/HPM, and munitions depth; stop raiding resilience to fund prestige.

Practice at home what we preach abroad. Britain is co-leading a Drone Capability Coalition with Latvia and has pledged around 100,000 UAVs to Ukraine by April 2026. The same tempo—rapid competitions, red-team trials and iterative fielding—should be institutionalised domestically for port and airbase defence, not confined to overseas aid.

There is a temptation to buy the future as if it were a photograph—sleek, exact, heroic. The future that threatens us is messier. It arrives in vans and shipping containers, in software updates and counterfeit manifests, in small things that add up to a morning you cannot forget. We have lived by the sea a long time. We know what it means to respect the weather. This is only another kind of weather: invisible, fast, and everywhere at once.

So let us act like islanders again, not emperors. Let us build ugly shelters and clever beams, share secrets faster than we share credit, and spend our billions on the places that keep us alive. The sea still laps our shores. But the moat is a myth now. The island endures only if we choose, deliberately and every day, to defend it.