News & Comment

We need to stand back and look at the big picture here, which is that at some point you can say that a lot of microchips that can be used in deadly drones are dual use, and that will be very difficult to control the supply of those pieces of technology. They have legitimate civilian use when it comes to a jet engine that might have 50 or 150 kilogram force of thrust, so it's a powerful system that you could say, oh, you know, well this is eccentric hobbyist equipment somewhere. Well, no, in my mind this is essentially a weapon. There is a large volume of this material that appears to be coming from China. The Chinese, of course, deny it. The companies in some instances say they can't control where this equipment ends up, and that is increasingly looking paper thin to me."

I think it's very important, as we do hear more information, that this [incident] is actually used as a bit of a test case to just show how heightened we need to be to the threat of sabotage in the UK...it just shows that vigilance and protection of these sites is very complicated."

At the foundational level it is about physical security - making sure that everything inside the wire is protected from external threats...Fairford would have been one of the most well-protected sites in the UK."