By BBC Verify
Nick Forienza, a defence analyst from Janes, a military think tank, said the money committed by the government to missile defence under the Defence Investment Plan “is only a fraction of what other countries have declared”.
He said the Conservatives’ plan to invest £10bn “sounds comparable to what other small countries are doing”.
He continued: “Not as small as the Netherlands or Belgium, but let’s say Germany or Turkey and now the Greeks are working on something called Achilles Shield.
“That’s the kind of magnitude [spending £10bn] that would be required for a serious missile defence system.”
Germany is leading the European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI), a 24‑nation effort to jointly procure air and missile defence systems (IRIS‑T, Patriot, Arrow 3).
Berlin has committed roughly €4bn (£3.4bn) for Arrow 3 alone and is also part of a €5.1bn (£4.3bn) plan to share up to 1,000 Patriot GEM‑T interceptors with Romania, Spain and the Netherlands.
In France, budgets show an “Air and Air Defence” spend of about €4.4bn (£3.7bn) in 2026, but this covers all air force air defence activities, not just missile defence.
Poland, which spends more on defence as a share of its economy than the UK, is building an air and missile defence system worth more than PLN 200bn (£39bn) which will be spent over a number of years.
