Specialist British troops have been blasting Iranian drones out of the sky with cheap high-tech missiles fired from ground launchers, The Times can reveal.
A small unit operating in northern Iraq has downed more Shahed-style drones this week than squadrons of RAF fighter jets defending the airspace above Qatar and Jordan. Its soldiers are using laser-guided lightweight multirole missiles (LMMs) armed with 3kg fragmentation warheads, which obliterate targets with shrapnel at ranges of up to 8km.
Although not publicly identified, they are thought to belong to the RAF Regiment’s specialist counterdrone unit, which serves as a last line of defence against unmanned aerial attacks.
The troops, who are protecting a coalition base housing UK forces, sprang into action when Tehran launched waves of kamikaze drones at Gulf nations in response to US-Israeli strikes that killed the country’s supreme leader last weekend.
They destroyed one suicide drone on Saturday, multiple on Monday, and multiple more overnight on Wednesday, the Ministry of Defence said, without giving specific figures. Elsewhere in the region, RAF Typhoons took down two drones in Qatari airspace on Sunday and Monday, while F-35 warplanes destroyed multiple targets over Jordan on Monday.
The RAF Regiment is equipped with Rapid Sentry, a static turret-like ground launcher for LMMs, as well as surveillance radars and an electronic warfare system that can neutralise aerial threats. The missiles, nicknamed Martlets, are estimated to cost about £50,000 each, a quarter of the price of the Asraam short-range air-to-air missiles fired by RAF combat aircraft, which are about £200,000 per shot and have a range of up to 25km.
Earlier this week, weapons analysts criticised the RAF’s use of expensive air-to-air missiles to intercept cheaply made Iranian Shahed drones, which cost between £26,000 and £67,000 each to manufacture, depending on the variant. They argued the fighter jets were effectively “
firing golden bullets at plastic targets”, and could instead use their cannon to bullseye slow-moving drones in the air. Questions were also asked about why the UK appears to have failed to learn lessons from Ukraine, which uses drones to intercept thousands of Russian kamikaze devices, as well as heavy machine guns, anti-aircraft artillery and helicopter gunships.
The government said on Tuesday that it was sending two Wildcat helicopters armed with LMMs to defend RAF Akrotiri, Britain’s large airbase in Cyprus. The announcement was made after the base took a direct hit from a Shahed-style drone that slipped past UK air defences and blew a hole in a spy plane hangar.
The government also announced that UK and Ukrainian counterdrone experts had been deployed to the Middle East to bolster British air defences and assist allies.