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Paul O’Neill, a senior research fellow at RUSI, said Britain’s defenses were “quite a long way behind” those of many Baltic and Nordic nations, like Finland, that have long run military service programs and trained civilians for conflict. A former Royal Air Force officer, Mr. O’Neill expressed concern about training capacity and said that a sell-off of Ministry of Defense bases and housing in the 2010s could make it difficult for Britain to quickly muster a home defense force. “It will be a long slog, I think, for the U.K. to actually really turn this into something that is meaningful,” he said.

Tom Keatinge, director of the Centre for Finance and Security (CFS) at defence thinktank Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), said that the UK and its allies must take more drastic action against the Russian war economy and had been too slow to originally impose the measures. “We continue to take sanctions enforcement less seriously than the Kremlin takes sanctions evasion,” he said, saying the West should impose an all-out ban on Russian oil exports. “In a way, we’ve missed the opportunity to really damage the Russian economy because we moved so slowly originally… and we’re now trying to play catch-up. They’ve now adapted in a way that means that we haven’t got that much to put the screws on anymore.”

Naval expert Sidharth Kaushal of the Royal United Services Institute points out that the "Sea Baby" may have covered part of the distance on the surface and could have dived to the target on the last part of the route: "Such drones are more difficult to control because communication under water is complicated."