Exclusive
LBC visits laser defence site as £1billion pledged to protect British ships
3 June 2025, 12:55 | Updated: 3 June 2025, 15:51
LBC has been given exclusive access to a UK facility developing advanced laser systems, as another £1billion is pledged to protect British ships with the technology.
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Defence Secretary John Healey has announced the funding following the publication of the Strategic Defence Review on Monday which recommended a greater focus on new technology, including artificial intelligence and drones, as an "immediate priority".
It's part of a £5billion pledge which also includes cash for drones and autonomous systems as well as lasers.
And we visited one of the companies developing advanced tech to see what sort of products that money might be invested in.
Read More: Russia promises 'retribution' after Ukraine launches unprecedented drone attack on Kremlin bombers
Leonardo's Edinburgh facility employs around 1800 employees specialising in the provision and development of surveillance radars and laser-based countermeasure systems.
Campaign Manager David Brown showed us one of them, the Miysis DIRCM, billed as one of the world’s most advanced operational Directed Infrared Countermeasures system.
He said: "The unit you're looking at right here, this small compact unit with the dome, this is a DIRCM. We've all seen these shoulder launched surface to air heat seeking missiles. This system is a countermeasure against those type of missiles.
"It can be fitted onto a wide range of aircraft, from small helicopters to the largest transport aircraft, and it uses a laser to fire a code into the guidance system of those missiles and throw them off course. When you consider the range of things the UK government wants its platforms to do, which include often things like humanitarian relief, then clearly the importance of a system like this on an aircraft is not just to protect the people who are on the aircraft, as important as that is, but also the purpose of that aircraft, which might be delivering aid. If the aircraft is lost, then what is on that aircraft is lost, and everything that aircraft was going to deliver in the future is also lost."
We then met Mark Stead, Senior VP for Radar & Advanced Targeting, who spoke to us about the DragonFire system currently being developed for Royal Navy use by Leonardo as part of a UK consortium including MBDA and QinetiQ.
It's intended to provide a lower-cost form of air defence against targets including drones, costing just £10 per shot compared with the thousands of pounds it costs to fire existing weapons.
Mr Stead said: "Dragonfire is the name of the experimental laser directed energy weapon using laser energy at range to defeat in particular, airborne threats. It's been stated that it can hit a pound coin four kilometres away.
"I was tying to explain this to my children as being something akin to running around one end of a football pitch with a laser pointer and there's a wasp at the other end of the football pitch buzzing around, and you have to keep that laser pointer trained on that wasp, even though you're running up and down the football pitch and the wasp is running up and down the football pitch, and you imagine just how hard that is. You can't quite get your head around even being able to do that at all, let alone coming close to that. And yet the Dragonfire capability does exactly that at much vaster ranges. It's mind blowing.
"It has been going through some really exciting trials...and we're rapidly pulling the capability to be deployed onto Royal Navy frigates in the next couple of years.
"Things like Ukraine have shown not just UK government, but governments around the world, how technology is changing the warfare and battlefield strategies. So firing a quarter of a million pound missile against, say a 500 pound drone just doesn't make any sense. It's not sustainable. And things like Dragonfire allow us to layer defence capability against sort of asymmetric threats like that."
The next part of our tour took us to the site's futuristic looking Compact Antenna Test Range (CATR) - a specialised testing chamber designed to minimise reflections and echoes of sound and electromagnetic waves.
Chief Antenna Engineer Craig Gibson spoke about its capabilities: "This all around us is Radiation Absorbing Material and what this does is it's absorbing the RF radiation from the antenna. So it's making it as clean a facility as it can be.
"The reason it's called a compact antenna test range is that although the distance from the antenna to the horn is about 60 metres because of the facility and the way it's set up, that's representing equivalent of about 12 to 14 kilometres. The other big thing in this is it's all enclosed. It's a big metal box with the radiation absorption metre. Nothing's getting out of this facility. So it means that we can do measurements in here and nobody outside of here knows exactly what we're testing. And it's all kept in here. "
Iain Scott, VP Capability and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) for Radar & Advanced Targeting (RATS), then spoke to us about what increased demand means for the company.
"I think we've seen definitely an increase in our overall demand, just with the geopolitics, the increased use of unmanned platforms calling for our ISR surveillance radar. So we definitely seen an uptick in that. It makes us a growing business. It's given us the ability to invest to increase our production capacity, but also it's giving the demand signal to get the next generation of engineers and talent into the business. From us, it's both a business opportunity, but it's also exciting from a people perspective."
And we met three of those newer employees, apprentices, Sean, Marina and Evan, who told us they'd worked on preparing DragonFire for its latest trials and with teams creating Directed Infrared Counter Measure systems.
The Government will point to that an example of how it wants its defence strategy to work, investing to make our armed forces "ten times more lethal" while also creating growth and jobs.
It's been based on the current plans to increase our defence spending budget to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027 - announced by the PM earlier this year.
Sir Keir Starmer has said there will be an "ambition" to get it up to three per cent in the next parliament - though there's no date on when that might be.
