Mon 05 October 2026:
A Pentagon official has told Al Jazeera the US has removed all of its bomber aircraft from the UK’s Fairford airbase after five men were arrested on suspicion of plotting attacks on the facility.
“While operational security precluded us from confirming the movement of our assets and forces in real-time, we can acknowledge now that all U.S. bombers that were deployed to RAF Fairford have re-deployed to their home stations in the United States,” the official said.
“The Airmen that operate America’s bomber force, including B-1s, B-2s, and B-52s, remain ready to deliver precision global strike capabilities – including through operations that launch and recover from the continental United States – anywhere, anytime,” the official added.
The five men arrested near the base have been released on bail, and Iran has denied any involvement in the alleged plot. UK investigators discovered petrol in the men’s vans, but found no explosive devices. Still, officials in the UK say they remain under investigation.
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US bombers at UK’s Fairford base were ‘out in the open’ and ‘vulnerable to drone attacks’
David Des Roches, a professor at the Thayer Marshall Institute, says the Pentagon’s decision to remove its B-1 bombers from RAF Fairford in the UK “should have [been] done a while ago”.
The base is at the centre of an alleged security incident in which five men were arrested nearby on suspicion of plotting an attack. Des Roches, a former Pentagon official, said the arrests “exposed a vulnerability” as the aircraft were “out in the open” and only about 300 yards (275 metres) from where the public could see them.
“So they were very vulnerable to, say, drone attacks or other kind of mortar attacks,” he told Al Jazeera.
Des Roches said the US Air Force has been “very slow to learn the lessons” from the Ukrainian drone attacks on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet in 2025, when Kyiv claimed to have destroyed some 40 Russian military aircraft.
“We need to have overhead cover in some protection for these aircraft… Just a small drone or any kind of a drone with explosives on board could conceivably cause significant damage. We’ve seen that you can get to very close range of those,” he said.
Des Roches acknowledged that the deployment of the US bombers means “you lose a little bit of operational ability,” but said that given the threat seen at Fairford, “we should have had overhead cover for all of our aircraft, globally, years ago”.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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