Since the Bloodhound missile system was finally withdrawn in 1991 Britain has not had a long rang, high altitude SAM. Is this a gaping hole in the UK's defences or do we not need one anymore ?
What country that possesses high-altitude bombers and reconnaissance aircraft is going to attack Britain?
Same could be asked about the USA - the main enemy during the cold war being the USSR - but neither have got rid of their capability.
Probably because they can put more funding into it than the UK.It's simply to costly to run from a politcians point of view and isn't worth having whilst the generals might like it, the MPs deem it not cost effective.
The UK doesn't need one right now. But see how fast the world changes, compare the world we live in right now with the world 50 years ago or 25 years ago. Any kind of defence system or weapons system needs time to be established. You can't just buy them when you need them, you need time for training and establishing logistics as well.
SAMS are only useful when you have a lot of area to defend and are facing attacks at all times and over all areas. This is becuase in general terms they are very cheap. However Britain is still protected in that we can send up very expensive fighter intercepters. The flaw in this is that they are expensive to run and can only cover small areas or the whole area against limited attacks. Given that Britain is unlikly to be attacked by anyone capable of putting large ammounts of quality planes against us for a long period it's cheaper just to keep the limited figher intercepters as they can't get rid of them at all as they often serve abroad. FNG
Just occurred to me after looking at this photo - if numbers of missiles like this needed to be outside on launchers all the time for them to be of any real use - what was the shelf life of these things giving the fairly unforgiving northern European climate - even allowing for some rotation of missiles the weather must have led to damage to stocks.
