The Home Guard Britain Needs Now
By Mark Allatt, UK Defence First
This recent major incident at RAF Fairford is the argument in miniature. Several men were arrested on suspicion of explosives offences in Whelford, on the edge of a base hosting American B-1 bombers. Homes were evacuated. Army bomb-disposal teams examined vehicles. Counter-terrorism police are in the lead. The base was already at the highest American force-protection level after a threat judged imminent. That is not a protest at the gate. It is what a thin homeland looks like when war and sabotage arrive together. UK Defence First’s case is simple: regulars and police cannot guard every airfield, factory and cable landing at once. Britain needs a locally recruited Home Guard that can hold a perimeter, watch for drones and buy time until the professionals arrive.
The original Home Guard was mocked as Dad’s Army. That joke has outlived its usefulness. Britain is not facing an amphibious landing on the south coast by a hostile foreign state. It is facing attacks on bases and suppliers, cheap drones that can wreck expensive aircraft, hostile states probing infrastructure, and a border that still cannot say with certainty who is coming in. Regular forces and the police are too thin to cover all of that at once. A properly designed Home Guard is no longer wartime nostalgia. It is a practical answer to a homeland left under-protected.
Bases and suppliers are already being tested
In June 2025 activists from Palestine Action cut into RAF Brize Norton and damaged two Voyager refuelling aircraft. The group was later proscribed. The breach itself was the point. A wooden fence and a gap in night security were enough to reach aircraft that keep the RAF in the air. At Larkhill a fence was cut in daylight and fuel was stolen from a contractor’s tanker. Courts have heard of a planned attack on the Defence Academy at Shrivenham and of a plot against soldiers at Victoria Barracks in Windsor. A warehouse holding aid bound for Ukraine was set on fire by men recruited, prosecutors said, on behalf of the Wagner Group.
The industrial base has been hit in the same spirit. In August 2026 activists from People Against Genocide - a successor-style group that appeared after Palestine Action was banned - occupied the roof of Martin-Baker’s factory at Denham. They poured red paint, smashed solar panels and shut a plant that makes ejection seats for the F-35 and for air forces worldwide. Martin-Baker is a world leading British firm whose seats have saved more than 7,800 aircrew. Attacking it is an attack on the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm as much as on any foreign customer. Proscription has not stopped the method: break the fence, film the damage, move to the next site.
Hostile states have taken note. Russia has threatened British military facilities and used proxies for sabotage on British soil. Iran has tried to kidnap or kill people here and has described British bases used by American forces as legitimate targets. In March 2026 an Iranian-made Shahed drone hit RAF Akrotiri. There were no deaths, but the runway was struck. China, Russia and Iran account for the bulk of serious cyber activity against British critical national infrastructure. The National Cyber Security Centre has warned that adversaries are pre-positioning inside the systems that keep power, water and communications running. Bases, ports, energy sites and undersea-cable landings sit in the same picture.
Drones have collapsed the old perimeter
Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb in June 2025 showed what cheap first-person-view drones can do when they are smuggled close to their targets. More than a hundred small aircraft, hidden in ordinary trucks, were launched against Russian bomber bases far from the front. Strategic aircraft that cannot be replaced were left burning. Germany has had its own warning: an explosive-laden drone at Leipzig/Halle in August 2026, then drones over a Bundeswehr site that supports Patriot batteries. These machines cost a fraction of the jets and runways they threaten. Fairford’s jump to the highest alert, followed by arrests in the next village, is that lesson arriving on British soil.
The lesson is sharper because the UK’s borders remain porous. Channel crossings may have fallen from the 2025 peak but remain far above the levels of a decade ago, and boats now often carry sixty or more people at a time. Most of those detected are adult men, including from Eritrea, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia and Iran. The honest problem is not that every arrival is a terrorist. It is that the state cannot reliably know who is who. A Home Guard cannot replace a working border. It can notice unusual activity around bases, ports and depots when the professionals are elsewhere.
Polite debate prefers to skip the next risk. Rapid demographic change and failed integration have already produced serious disorder. Add a large cohort of unvetted military-age men from conflict regions, and the possibility that weapons, criminal networks or hostile services find them, and you have a civil contingency problem as well as an immigration one. The threat is not that every migrant is armed. The threat is that a minority can be, and that the police would struggle if unrest and sabotage arrived together.
Forces too thin to do every job
They would struggle because the armed forces and the police are already overstretched. Regular strength is well under 150,000. The Army’s trained strength is around 70,000, still short of official targets. The 2025 Strategic Defence Review itself spoke of a workforce crisis. If Britain had to reinforce NATO in Europe, few spare units would remain to guard power stations, airfields and cable landings at home. Police neighbourhood patrols are a shadow of what they were fifteen years ago. You cannot ask the same thin army and the same depleted constabularies to fight a war, stop Channel crossings, police riots and sit on every vulnerable site in the United Kingdom.
That is the case for a reformed Home Guard. The government’s own review floated a locally recruited force with a narrow remit, basic arms, communications and drones. That is the right direction, but it must not become another paper reserve. A serious Home Guard should be built around veterans, reservists and screened volunteers who live near the sites they would protect. Its job should be static defence and early warning: bases, munitions stores, energy plants, ports, data centres, defence factories such as Martin-Baker, and cable landings. It should be trained to spot and defeat small drones, hold a perimeter until regulars arrive, and feed intelligence to the police and the military. It needs a legal status that allows it to act, and vetting high enough that it does not become a playground for extremists of any kind.
This is not a substitute for larger regular forces, higher defence spending or a border that works. UK Defence First has argued for all three: a minimum of 5 per cent of national income actually spent on defence and security, the industrial capacity to supply UK forces, and the ability to act alone. The Home Guard is the missing local layer. It is cheaper than another brigade and faster to raise than a new regiment. It uses people who already know the ground.
Britain has spent years assuming that war happens somewhere else. The breach at Brize Norton, the occupation of Martin-Baker, the drone strike on Akrotiri and the evacuations beside Fairford say otherwise. We can wait for the next breach and write another review. Or we can raise a Home Guard fit for the country we actually live in, not the one we still like to imagine.