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Sidharth Kaushal, an air defence expert at the Royal United Services Institute, a think-tank, said the system would add “pretty much no value” to defending the territory of western European countries. The system is designed to intercept short-range weapons such as rockets, artillery and drones, with a range of up to about 70km. There could be a case for use by Baltic or Scandinavian states that are within rocket-firing range of Russia or Belarus, Kaushal said. Western European nations could also adopt the highly mobile system to defend expeditionary forces or foreign deployments such as the German brigade being built up in Lithuania, on Nato’s eastern flank. Yet Kaushal questioned if demand would be strong enough to sustain the factory and “keep that number of people on the payroll”.

We are stretching a relative decent amount of money in NATO terms trying to be like the US – for the past 30 years we have tried to be like the American military but a bit smaller – and that means we have tried to do something of everything.”