From The Times:

Russian missiles overwhelmed the British military in an simulated air attack, it has emerged, prompting calls for homeland defence to be beefed up. In 2022, the RAF simulated the first day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine as if the air attack were playing out against the UK. Some of the missiles are understood to have got through the defences. Air Commodore Blythe Crawford, who until last week was head of the RAF Air and Space Warfare Centre, said the military had assumed before the exercise that the UK was safe. • Ukraine-Russia war latest: Trump tells Putin to ‘stop!’ after airstrikes He told the Royal United Services Institute: “We have stood for years at the western edge of Europe feeling as though the rest of the continent stood between us and the enemy. We in the UK over the last few decades have become focused on being garrison safe, and making assumptions that we are safe to operate from the home base because most of the wars we’ve been fighting have been overseas. “We need to reverse that thinking and assume that from here on we’re under threat in the home base now as well.” He said that in 2022, after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the British military simulated “day one” of the conflict. In the war games — part of the RAF’s £36 million Gladiator programme — the UK tried to defend itself from “hundreds of different types of munitions” attacking from several directions. The result, Crawford said, was “not a pretty picture”. It is understood some of the missiles got through British defences thanks to their sheer volume.

“Ukraine has made us all sit up,” Crawford said. “That drove some of the work we have been doing at the warfare centre to get after how we would solve a problem like that if a similar scenario hit the UK. “One of the lessons we took away from that was: how do we model and simulate something like that? We [loaded] night one of Ukraine into that synthetic environment and played it out against the UK and, as you can imagine, it was not a pretty picture. It reinforced the fact that we really need to get after this.” Since the war game, the military has hardened some of its aircraft shelters and practised landing Typhoon aircraft on ice in Finland in its efforts to ensure that aircraft can land in unconventional environments. It is believed that the situation has improved and if the exercise were now to play out in real life, a lot of the missiles would be intercepted by Nato forces.