Built for Yesterday's War: How Wartime Airfields Continue to Govern Britain's Air Defence Today

There is a particular irony embedded in the geography of British air power. Whilst the RAF operates some of the most sophisticated combat aircraft in the world — platforms capable of defeating threats that could not have been imagined in 1943 — it does so from soil that was first broken for military purposes during the Second World War. The runways, dispersal pans, and hardened shelters that define the physical character of Britain's principal air bases were not designed for the F-35B or the Poseidon MRA1. They were built for a different kind of war, against a different kind of enemy. That they remain central to Britain's defence posture in 2024 is less a tribute to foresight than a consequence of economics, inertia, and the extraordinary difficulty of building anything new.

The Concrete Legacy

RAF Lossiemouth, RAF Marham, RAF Brize Norton — each of these stations carries within its layout the fingerprints of wartime and early Cold War planners. The dispersal systems at Lossiemouth, for instance, were substantially reconfigured during the Cold War to reduce the vulnerability of aircraft to a Soviet first strike, spreading hardened aircraft shelters across the airfield perimeter in a pattern designed to complicate targeting calculations. That logic remains partially valid today. Dispersal still matters. Hardening still matters. But the threat has evolved considerably, and infrastructure conceived to survive a Soviet bomber raid or a theatre ballistic missile is now being evaluated against hypersonic glide vehicles and co-ordinated drone swarms — categories of threat for which no runway built in the 1940s was ever engineered.

The age of much of this infrastructure creates practical complications that rarely feature in public debate. Runway surfaces require constant maintenance, and the sub-base layers beneath them — laid when aircraft weighed a fraction of what they do today — sometimes prove inadequate for the demands of modern fast jets or heavy transport aircraft. The F-35B, for all its technological sophistication, places specific and exacting demands on the surfaces it operates from. Marham's runway has undergone substantial work in recent years, and the costs involved are not trivial. Across the estate, the bill for maintaining ageing concrete and asphalt runs into tens of millions annually — expenditure that delivers no new capability, merely the preservation of existing access.

Repurposed, Retired, and Retained

Not every wartime airfield remains in active service. Britain's post-war defence reviews — most notably the 1957 Sandys review and the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review — closed dozens of stations, returning land to agriculture, industrial use, or residential development. Familiar names from wartime RAF history — Duxford, Biggin Hill, Tangmere — now serve as museums, private aviation facilities, or heritage sites. Their loss from the operational inventory was, at the time, considered acceptable given the shift toward a smaller, nuclear-armed force. Whether that judgement looks quite so comfortable in 2024, with a resurgent Russia on NATO's eastern flank and an increasingly assertive China reshaping the Indo-Pacific, is a question that some defence analysts are beginning to ask with greater urgency.

Those stations that were retained have, in many cases, been substantially adapted. The hardened aircraft shelters at several RAF bases — structures built to NATO specifications during the 1970s and 1980s to protect aircraft from conventional and nuclear blast — have been modified to accommodate aircraft with very different physical and logistical profiles than the Tornado or Jaguar for which they were originally configured. Some shelters are simply too narrow for modern aircraft wingspans. Others lack the internal infrastructure required to support the complex ground support equipment that accompanies fifth-generation platforms. Adaptation is possible, but it is expensive, and it is never quite as efficient as purpose-built facilities would be.

The Hypersonic Dimension

The emergence of hypersonic missile technology introduces a challenge for which Cold War infrastructure offers limited comfort. Hardened shelters designed to resist conventional blast may provide some protection against certain warhead types, but the kinetic energy delivered by a hypersonic strike — travelling at Mach 5 or beyond — is of a categorically different order. Dispersal remains the most reliable mitigation, and here the geography of Britain's airfield estate becomes strategically significant. The concentration of frontline fast jet capability at a relatively small number of primary stations creates a targeting problem that planners are aware of, even if public discussion of specific vulnerabilities is necessarily limited.

Drone swarms present a different but equally serious challenge. The perimeter security and point-defence systems at most RAF stations were not designed to cope with simultaneous, co-ordinated attacks by large numbers of small unmanned systems. Upgrades are underway, and the RAF Regiment has been developing its counter-UAS doctrine with some urgency, but the physical layout of airfields — with their long, open perimeters and extensive exposed infrastructure — creates inherent vulnerabilities that cannot be fully resolved by doctrine alone.

What Comes Next

The Ministry of Defence's Defence Estate Optimisation programme has sought to rationalise the RAF's physical footprint, concentrating investment in fewer, better-equipped stations rather than spreading limited resources across a larger number of sites in varying states of repair. The logic is sound in budgetary terms, but it carries strategic risk. Concentration reduces resilience. A force that can only operate from three or four principal stations is more vulnerable to disruption — whether from enemy action, infrastructure failure, or extreme weather events — than one distributed across a broader base.

The honest answer, which defence planners are unlikely to state publicly, is that Britain's airfield infrastructure represents a compromise between what is strategically desirable and what is financially achievable. The wartime airfields that remain in service do so not because they are optimal for the threats of 2024, but because replacing them would cost more than the defence budget can presently accommodate. They are, in the most literal sense, an unwanted inheritance — one that the RAF maintains with considerable professionalism, but which shapes and constrains the nation's air power in ways that are not always visible from the outside.