War in the Middle East: Britain’s involvement so far, from sea to sky

Matthew Savill, the director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, a defence thinktank, said the UK could also be sharing intelligence with the US. “There might be a broader recognised air picture that we could be sharing,” he said. “We’ve got a radar up on the hill at Cyprus that will be looking out over the region. There’s obviously a US carrier group in the eastern Mediterranean. Would we be sharing our radar picture with them and in return receiving information from them? You don’t know what information sharing is going on behind the scenes.”... Savill said the UK’s maritime presence was far smaller today than in previous decades, when Britain had a “heavy presence”. He said the shift had taken place in recent years amid a transition period in the wider armed forces. He said: “The truth is that our presence in the Middle East, which previously was reasonably substantial, has been dwindling for a number of years and was largely maritime. We have a foundation there, we have a set of relationships, we have a set of facilities … but we’re moving from a much lower baseline than we’ve had previously.”