Regenerating the UK’s Airpower Edge Within NATO

The security situation in Europe is rapidly worsening, with several concurrent trends making direct conflict with Russia before the end of the 2020s a serious risk. In conjunction with serious financial constraints, this will likely force the new UK government to make major course correction decisions in the Strategic Defence Review (SDR).

The most pressing concern is that Ukraine is increasingly struggling to contain slow but steady Russian advances on multiple parts of the frontlines, especially near Pokrovsk. The situation can still be salvaged, but doing so will require increased support over a sustained period from the UK and other allies, as well as changes on the Ukrainian side to reform mobilisation and training. Second, the US is increasingly militarily overstretched and unable to defeat aggression by China and Russia at the same time. Third, a potential second Trump presidency would likely weaken the political credibility of US security guarantees to NATO. Fourth, Russia’s economy is now on a war footing, and is producing large quantities of equipment, ammunition and vehicles, alongside a sustained mobilisation and training rate which has seen its forces in Ukraine grow to over 470,000 by early 2024. By contrast, the UK’s own stockpiles of ammunition, equipment and trained personnel have been left dangerously hollowed out by decades of underinvestment relative to political ambitions. Worse, the situation is similar in many other European countries, despite notable exceptions such as Finland and Poland – so relying on allies to fill the gaps is not a credible strategy in key capability areas. 

If Ukraine is defeated either in part or in full, and/or if the US is perceived as either unable or unwilling to come to Europe’s defence at scale, then there is a serious risk that Russia might invade part of a NATO member state’s territory within the next 3-5 years. Such aggression would likely be intended to trigger an Article V call from a member state over a limited amount of territory, gambling that European states could be deterred from taking the risk of going to war to eject Russian troops by force. The incentive for Russia to take such a gamble if it thinks it can get away without a coherent military response from Europe is huge, since such an outcome would fatally undermine the credibility of collective defence through NATO on which the whole European security architecture is based. 

Politically, defence may not have been a key vote-winner at the last election, but the scale and potential imminence of the threat to European security from Russia means that this government may be tested on the readiness of the UK’s defences within the term of this Parliament in a way that has not been seen since the Falklands War. Being perceived as having failed such a test in the face of Russian aggression is one of the few foreseeable scenarios that could all-but-guarantee a defeat at the next election. 

Fortunately, investing in regenerating the combat power of the UK’s existing combat aircraft fleets offers a route to rapid increases in meaningful combat capabilities that Russia would have to take significant account of in any decision to risk war with NATO. Russian military strategists and leaders alike rightly fear NATO airpower, because they understand that the Russian Army would be rapidly and decisively destroyed by multirole fighters and attack helicopters if NATO was able to gain air superiority over a contested area. The Russian Army is not some insurgent force that can try to hide from air strikes among the civilian population; to pose a threat it must deploy its tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery, logistics and electronic warfare equipment in the field and keep them there. If air superiority can be gained and exploited, Europe’s relatively large numbers of fourth-generation jets and helicopters could efficiently conduct close air support and interdiction missions to rapidly destroy the Russian Army in any contested territory. While the specialised standoff weapons needed to gain air superiority are very expensive, direct-attack munitions such as Paveway and JDAM series bombs cost only a few tens of thousands of pounds per weapon, and each fighter can use them to destroy multiple Russian vehicles per sortie once air superiority is achieved. 

This threat is why Russia has invested so much resource and effort in developing its formidable ground-based air defence (GBAD) network. Currently, only the US has the capacity to conduct a full suppression/destruction of enemy air defences (SEAD/DEAD) campaign against that GBAD network, so Europe on its own would struggle to win air superiority against Russian forces. However, these GBAD systems are finite, have suffered some attrition in Ukraine already and have known weaknesses. They also represent a target set that NATO Air Command fundamentally understands how to defeat in technical and operational terms. The problem is not that solutions are not available, but rather that no European member states have yet invested in the necessary combination of suitable aircraft, weapons, specialist training and enablers, although some are making progress in this area. As one of the leading European NATO members, the UK can and should help plug this gap. Doing so would help rapidly reestablish Europe’s ability to fight for, win and exploit air superiority in a way that would mean Russia would be highly unlikely to risk a direct military clash. Achieving the same deterrent effect with UK land forces or maritime assets is almost certainly impossible, at least this decade. 

Compared to the British Army, which has struggled to effectively design and procure replacement vehicles for its Warfighting Division after configuring for counterinsurgency, the RAF has already been largely recapitalised with a balanced mix of relatively modern platforms across all its core mission sets. In a somewhat ironic twist, the slow nature of defence procurement programmes – especially in the air domain – now makes it easier to adapt the RAF to the new Russian threat paradigm. This is because many RAF aircraft and weapons systems were originally designed for Cold War scenarios against Russia’s currently deployed capabilities. 

The Typhoon FGR.4 was designed specifically to overmatch Russian ‘Flanker’ family fighters in air-to-air combat, especially using the very long-range European Meteor air-to-air missile, which was also designed with the same threats in mind. In addition, it is a capable close-air-support and long-range cruise missile launch asset. Its primary weakness is that as a multirole aircraft that forms the bulk of UK combat air capability, the fleet is constantly deployed all over the world for a range of operations, international exercises and standing commitments. Pilots also fly significantly less than they did a decade ago, and much of the flying that they do get is on long transits or patrols as part of overseas deployments that provide little training value for high-intensity mission sets. With so many mission sets to train to, even modernised and well-employed synthetic training in the simulator cannot allow the Typhoon crews to be adequately trained and ready across the board with such a task load. To regain the very high levels of capability in the air-to-air domain that they had in the mid-to-late 2010s, the Typhoon force needs additional financial and maintenance resources to increase core flying training hours; additional stocks of AIM-132 ASRAAM, AIM-120 ARMAAM and Meteor air to air missiles; and above all a reduction in discretionary overseas activity to allow the Force to focus on training for high-intensity mission sets. 

Similarly, the F-35B flown by the RAF and Royal Navy was designed specifically to destroy Russian GBAD networks. It features a combination of stealth, onboard electronic attack capabilities and unmatched sensors and software that can rapidly identify, locate and designate hostile radars for attacks. Despite drawbacks including high operating costs, and delays to new deliveries and retrofit schedules for important TR3 hardware and software upgrades within the programme, in the air the aircraft already provides genuinely unmatched combat capability against high-end Russian threats. The author has seen both from the ground and from the cockpit during NATO exercises how even a few F-35s can greatly enhance the survivability and lethality of the fourth-generation fighters around them by providing electronic attack support and real-time situational awareness on threats, as well as using their own limited internal weapons capacity to destroy particularly serious threats. However, the RAF/RN F-35B fleet is very small, with only 34 aircraft at the time of writing, and 48 due to be in service by the end of 2025. Royal Navy Carrier Strike Group deployments also take the bulk of the operational fleet far from the UK for months at a time every few years. Plans were at an advanced stage under the previous government to purchase 27 additional F-35Bs, but with delivery spread out over dates up until 2033. The UK has a high level of dependency on the F-35 not only for the Carrier Strike Group, but also as an essential force multiplier and SEAD/DEAD asset for the RAF against Russia in Europe, and for the British Army to provide targeting data for its planned long-range precision strike assets. Therefore, since the fleet is manifestly too small to meet the many requirements of it, there is a strong argument for the planned additional tranche of aircraft to be acquired as fast as possible, in order to deliver increased capacity in the mid-to-late 2020s. 

The greatest limitation for the UK’s F-35Bs at present, however, is the lack of suitable weapons. For ground attack the fleet only has Paveway IV free-fall bombs, which are totally unsuitable for use against high-end Russian GBAD systems or targets protected by them. No other F-35 operator has such illogically constrained air-to-ground weapons options, and the SDR should prioritise fixing this deficit as fast as possible. The UK has developed the MBDA SPEAR 3 missile, designed specifically to work with the F-35’s sensor suite to reliably destroy Russian air defence targets from safe stand-off ranges even when those targets have ceased emitting and are repositioning. It is an almost ideal weapon to allow UK F-35s to address the core challenge preventing European NATO forces from gaining air superiority over a Russian force by destroying their GBAD network. However, in classic UK fashion a combination of very small order quantities, slow development and disagreements between industry and the Ministry of Defence has led to a very high cost-per-weapon. Large-scale orders in exchange for aggressive investment by MBDA in speeding up deliveries and increasing production capacity should be explored. Multinational production deals with allies should also be explored, since the weapon is not only ideal for the F-35 but could also provide significant SEAD/DEAD capabilities for Typhoon and potentially other fourth-generation jets due to its powered standoff range. In the interim, the UK should procure an urgent stopgap order of the US-made GBU-53/B. This is a relatively affordable glide bomb with an active millimetric radar seeker for terminal guidance against hostile vehicles like SAM systems, and is available quickly. 

The E-7A Wedgetail airborne warning and control system is ideally suited for providing early detection and wide-area tracking of incoming Russian cruise missiles fired from bombers in the Arctic. However, too few have been ordered to guarantee one on station for the medium term – a task which requires at least four and ideally five, rather than the three on order. The P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft is the finest airborne anti-submarine asset available today, and is already operated by the UK’s most important allies in the task of tracking Russian submarines in the North Atlantic and the Arctic – the US and Norway. The RC-135W Rivet Joint reconnaissance aircraft, meanwhile, has been instrumental in collecting vital signals and electronic intelligence on Russian forces in the Black Sea. 

In other words, there is very significant combat potential that could be rapidly unlocked with the right investments in core aircraft fleets that the RAF and Royal Navy already have. The fleets are smaller than they would ideally be, almost across the board, but the more urgent problem is a lack of sufficient weapons stocks to fulfil the RAF’s key potential combat roles within NATO against Russia in a conflict. By investing urgently in procuring significantly increased numbers of key weapon types, increased spares and maintenance capacity to enable more flying hours and focusing training time on core high-intensity mission sets, the combat power of the RAF in a NATO context could be greatly enhanced in just a few years.

Inevitably, combat capability is not the only consideration for the government when looking at balance of investment choices. There will be a natural desire to invest in long-term programmes that bring value to the UK defence industry, international partnerships and trade. The most obvious and high-profile of these is the Global Combat Aircraft Programme (GCAP) with Japan and Italy. Perhaps the defining political choice of this SDR will be the degree to which the government invests limited resources in these long-term projects as opposed to plugging the capability gaps in the current force to enable it to play a core role in defending NATO against Russian aggression this decade. 

However, to those for whom long-term ambitions such as GCAP or AUKUS submarines are the top priority, it is worth stressing that those programmes are themselves dependent on avoiding a wider war with Russia in Europe this decade. Unless swiftly and decisively repelled, a Russian attack on NATO territory would see a scramble to desperately shore up national defences with whatever was immediately or rapidly available, coupled with serious economic destabilisation. Such an outcome would almost certainly spell disaster for long-term industrial programmes like GCAP that aim to deliver capability in the mid-to-late 2030s. Furthermore, if the UK’s current fast jet fleets fail to perform as they should against the Russian threat they were designed to fight due to inadequate weapons and core flying training resources, it would undermine the political narratives in the UK and elsewhere about the unique edge that such combat aircraft supposedly bring to defending countries against aggression. That too could be devastating for the long-term prospects of the UK’s combat aircraft industry. 

The SDR should prioritise investment in weapons, maintenance capacity and high-end training to regenerate the combat power of the RAF and Fleet Air Arm as part of NATO over the coming years. The UK will then be able to look to future programmes from a position of much greater strength and security against the enduring belligerence of Russia and its allies. 

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

Have an idea for a Commentary you’d like to write for us? Send a short pitch to commentaries@rusi.org and we’ll get back to you if it fits into our research interests. Full guidelines for contributors can be found here.