Britain has only a handful of minehunting drones in Gulf

Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow for sea power at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank, said Remus drones in Bahrain could be deployed and controlled from ships and coastal command centres. He said: “It’s not a necessity for it to be on a ship. You can deploy them from auxiliary vessels or from the shore.” However, he said: “If it was deployed for Hormuz, you would probably need a ship. If you were, on the other hand, surveying ports in Bahrain where the Iranian subs had laid mines, you could do that from the shore.”