The U.S. rushed to evacuate its fleet of B-1 bombers from England’s Royal Air Force Fairford base.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the contingency was a necessary response to a “multifaceted Iranian plot to target the aircraft and kill personnel at RAF Fairford, including American pilots,” which could include a “complex drone attack ordered by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”
The scale of the operation that the Islamic Republic had planned is unclear. But thanks to the Ukrainians, we know precisely what a devastating indigenous drone-swarm attack on strategic bombers would look like. In June 2025, Kyiv pulled the trigger on a mission 18 months in the making when it unleashed attack drones skillfully infiltrated into Russia and placed in shipping containers adjacent to its airbases, each of which targeted the weakest elements of the airframes they crippled. The operation damaged 20 aircraft, ten of them permanently.
It’s unlikely that the Iranians could have pulled off an operation with that level of sophistication inside the United Kingdom. Still, the fact that the Islamic Republic could plausibly execute any such operation is sufficiently alarming. If British soil isn’t safe for America’s most complex and sensitive weapons platforms, that could have a profound impact on America’s deployment posture in Europe.
As the Washington Post pointed out, even a foiled plot has an effect. America’s long-range bombers will now have to burn more fuel if another round of strikes on Iranian targets is in the cards.
The evacuation of the U.S. bombers came in the wake of the arrest late last month of five masked individuals behaving suspiciously outside the base. The incident generated lots of confusion: Was it a terror plot? How serious was it? Was Iran involved, as President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said? The British were initially coy about it, before Prime Minister Andy Burnham told the BBC: “There are strong indications that Iran played a part in what happened over the weekend at RAF Fairford.”
The reaction to Burnham’s admission inside the U.K. was appropriately electric. “If confirmed, the U.K. should expel all Iranian ‘diplomats’ who have assisted acts of terror on U.K. soil,” said the left-of-center Liberal Democrats’ foreign affairs spokesman, Calum Miller, “up to and including the Iranian ambassador.” Tory leader Kemi Badenoch expressed a similar indignation. “Just a few days ago, our foreign secretary” — Ed Miliband — “was shaking hands with the Iranian foreign minister,” Badenoch observed. “Meanwhile, Iran is planning attacks on our country.”
What’s clear is that the U.K. needs to get its house in order, and soon. It has allowed its ability to project military power abroad to atrophy on the assumption that the United States will always be there to backstop its shortcomings; at the same time, it now apparently can’t even provide us with secure bases. NATO countries have legitimately complained about President Trump unnecessarily straining alliances, but it shouldn’t be too much to expect basic competence on the part of our friends.