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I have never in my quarter of a century of journalism seen a greater effort to criminalise and demonise speaking to the other side of America’s wars.
Jeremy Seahill Drop Site News
Lockheed Martin secures massive recurring sustainment contracts that completely insulate its cash flow from unpredictable global geopolitical fluctuations. The underlying backlog of existing orders is phenomenal and heavily outweighs the current market capitalization, providing tremendous fundamental business value.
Alpha Signals Newsletter
Keir Starmer travels the world and he makes promises about Britain’s contribution to its defence and that of its allies. He says that British armed forces will be part of a reassurance force in the event of a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. He says that Britain’s armed forces will be part of securing the Strait of Hormuz. He goes to the High North and makes promises there too. Then at home he makes promises about tax and spend that cannot be reconciled with those defence commitments. And the story of the Starmer government is that sooner or later these contradictions become unsustainable.
Stephen Bush FT 15 June
On Sunday 4 October 2026, the most powerful forward-based bomber force of the world’s only military superpower had to retreat thousands of miles from its station in a friendly state to its own safe territory at a few hours’ notice. That alone should make the date one for every self-respecting student of international security to remember.
Paul Rogers “Did Iranian Drones Drive US bombers out of Fairford?” Open Democracy October 2026.
Earlier this year I decided to subscribe to and join the anti-war coalition and support the international conference organised for Saturday 20 June. My memories of teenage activism in CND influenced this, as they addressed the shocking prospect of a nuclear war in Europe and the horror of the return of conscription. I agreed with Andrew Murray when he identified the “absolutely critical” role the trade unions have to play in the struggle against war and the rejection of the “the idea that increasing defence spending is the route to prosperity”. All this compounded by the day-to-day news and repeated discoveries.
One discovery came when watching Sky News one evening listening to Vicky Ford – who briefly served as a junior minister for Africa in the Johnson government – mention in passing that, as a minister, she regularly had security briefings from MI6 the CIA and Mossad. I thought I should follow up on this and discovered that Britain has a military agreement with Israel dating back to 2020 when it was signed by the chief of defence staff Sir Nick Carter and Israel’s chief of general staff Lieutenant General Aviv Kahavri. In explaining this to the House of Commons, James Heappey MP noted that “the security implications of this work warrant the agreement been kept at a higher security classification and therefore will not be made public”.
However, knowledge of it goes a long way towards explaining the presence of Mossad in Whitehall. It adds to our understanding of the activities of the RAF base in Cyprus in reconnaissance flights over Gaza throughout the period of the Genocide. It is also important background to the way in which the Starmer government labelled Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation and the way the courts and Judge Johnson treated their activists in the Filton trial. Britain has a special relationship with Israel which is not openly declared but nevertheless obvious.
But Britain is not alone in this, as Sir Christian Turner UK Ambassador to the US explained in December 2025 “I think there is probably one country that has a special relationship with the United States, and that is probably Israel,” US special relationship is ‘probably Israel’, says UK ambassador – BBC News. This is borne out in the National Defence Authorisation act 2026 in which Section 224 aims to extend and deepen the linkage between the military of Israel and the US as well as the research development and production of weapons and war in both countries. These aims are also found in the bipartisan United States-Israel Futures Act. This emphasis on cooperation and consolidation of links adds to the many told stories of Mossad officials appearing at high level meetings in the Pentagon as a matter of course.
So here we have the US, UK and Israel joined together militarily for their mutual defence, but with the UK as very much the junior partner. Which invites discussion of the war in Iran.
In April, Adm. Brad Cooper, head of U.S. Central Command, told Congress that the more than 13,500 U.S. airstrikes demolished more than 85 percent of Iran’s military industrial base, taking out the factories and degrading the technical workforce that produced the regime’s missiles, drones and ships. According to an assessment by an Israeli research group, the Israel Defence Forces struck over 8,500 additional targets, including at least 1,500 Iranian missiles that were in the production process, as well as over 700 missiles in storage facilities. The sheer scale of this is disturbing the more so given Iran’s location half way around the world from the US.
This of course signals the extent of the British involvement. While Starmer – in his normal self-regarding way – was to repeat “I am not going to be dragged into a war which is not in our national interest”, this fell well short of the opposition shown by Spanish and Italian governments. While others blocked US military flights through their air space, the UK sanctioned bombers leaving to Iran from its own air bases on what were deemed to be “defensives” bombing missions. These continued even as the US President threatened that “a whole civilisation with die tonight, never to be brought back again”.
The processes whereby the UK government could intervene or engage with operational decisions to determine their “defensive” nature is unclear. This would be especially difficult if not impossible when decisions were made when the aircraft was in flight – the so-called “dynamic targeting”. The Campaign group Drone Wars raised the fundamental challenge to the very idea of “UK oversight.” In its report on the bombing war, and concluded that even if UK military personnel were embedded within … operations centres “the operational reality is that bombers from Fairford take off as part of a US-only chain of command, executing tasking orders generated thousands of miles away.”
Currently, there are more than 12,000 US military personnel stationed in the UK. They operate from 15 bases and facilities that misleadingly have “Royal Air Force” in their name. While on British soil, these are in many ways military outpost of another country under the control of the US president and commander-in-chief.
Lakenheath in Suffolk is the largest and home for the F15 and F35 fighter jets as part of the project “Ensuring Freedom’s Future”. It is here that the CND have raised concerns over the possible recent arrival of nuclear bombs. The oldest and now the most well-known is at Fairford in Gloucestershire. This base was established though the Churchill-Truman Communique of 1952. This gave the UK the right to veto or restrict missions operated by the US. It is a vital asset whose 3.046 metres runway enables heavy (B52 and B1B) bombers to land and take off. Until their sudden overnight departure twenty-four of these bombers were based there making Fairford the forward operating base for US Global Strike Command. Their removal was, in the view of the Washington Post, due to the “possibility of a swarm drone attack” on a par with the Ukrainian attach on Russia’s bomber fleet. Officials would have been keenly aware of how much damage an attack – by drones costing just a few thousand dollars and, in some cases, available for purchase on Amazon – could do to a $3.8 billion fleet of long-range bombers.
What remained understated in the reports was the role played by Welford in Berkshire. Often described as the “sleepy village” its location as the site of the munitions depot that serviced the bombers was unnoticed’. Here in this remote rural location is based one of the largest heavy ammunition compounds for the United States Air Force in Western Europe. Estimated as the size of 500 football pitches, Welford has been the site of anti-war protests for decades. Throughout the war on Iran CTS Logistics (“leader in the provision of reliable and compliant transportation of government, defense and secure cargo across land, sea and air”) has been involved in the daily movement of munitions from Welford to Fairford through its fleet of specialist security enhanced vehicles. Activists have been photographing the loading of 2,000lb bombs and monitoring the daily depletion and emptying of the enormous stocks of munitions.
For the moment this has gone silent, The B52 bombers are gone Paul Rogers considered their retreat from RAF Fairford serious enough to “damage Trump’s chances of the war with Iran ending on his terms”. However, that is to be seen, and now after the mid-term elections in the US, talk returns to the possibility of mains of another major assault. This could involve the UK’s Naval Support Facility Diago Garcia which came to operate as the US navy’s main logistics hub after the destruction of the base in Bahrain.
What is needed, of course, is a full revaluation of the UK’s international relations and its deep adherence to the USA and Israel’s strategic aims. This could lead to a new deference strategy, shorn of world-wide commitments to military engagements. I am sure that this is too much to hope for. Certainly, Burnham’s school yard reaction to the conflict in Ukraine (“they started it”) does little to suggest that a new fully thought-out approach to diplomacy and international relations might be on the cards. So, we will have to continue to struggle against wars and their senseless death toll.
