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In fact, I genuinely believe that British legislators have to start lawmaking on this specific matter now. British businesses may one day have to pay for their own protection from drone attacks.

I can already hear the response. This is Britain, we do not do private air defence, but I am afraid we have to reconsider our collective belief in the invincibility of our island. Britain has long been within the range of Russian drones, so the battle we should be preparing for is not a form of ground invasion - it is a ‘battle in the sky’.

In his most recent interview with the Financial Times, Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr  Zelenskyy decisively says that the war has moved to the air domain. And no country in Europe is immune to that, including Britain.

The British public is still some distance from this conversation. Perhaps geography has explained part of it for many centuries. Britain has become accustomed to the idea of the sea sitting between everyday life and continental war. That instinct remains powerful even as the technologies of attack have changed beyond recognition. Modern drones do not care about the English Channel.

They are cheap enough to launch in numbers, adaptable enough to evolve quickly and capable of reaching deep into civilian systems. The same broad family of technologies now threatens airfields, power infrastructure, ports and communications networks across Europe.

I am not predicting Russian drones over London next month. I am saying that Britain has time to decide what preparedness looks like before events narrow its choices. This is a privilege Ukraine lost.

Germany’s defence minister, Boris Pistorius, has spent months pushing his country towards greater war readiness. Britain, meanwhile, is trying to rebuild defence capacity after decades of contraction while arguing over where the money will come from. The latest Defence Investment Plan contains serious commitments, including billions for drones and autonomous systems, but every new promise runs into the same physical limit: money, equipment and trained people are finite.

Air defence makes that limit impossible to disguise. No government can provide continuous protection to every power facility, warehouse, port,........

© LBC