A British guided-missile destroyer deployed to Cyprus to bolster air defences following a drone strike on RAF Akrotiri broke down shortly after arriving — and remains moored with no clear timeline for resuming its mission.
HMS Dragon, a Type 45 destroyer, suffered a serious malfunction in early April, weeks after reaching the Eastern Mediterranean following a rushed departure from Portsmouth.
The UK Ministry of Defence described the problem as “short-term maintenance” related to the ship’s water supply system. However, Defence Express reported that available information and analysis point to a deeper problem — one consistent with a long-running series of technical failures that have afflicted the Type 45 class for years.
The deployment had been expedited in direct response to the Shahed drone attack on Akrotiri on 2 March. HMS Dragon’s primary mission was to reinforce anti-aircraft and anti-missile defences around the base.
The ship left Portsmouth on 10 March but encountered adverse weather and technical difficulties on the passage towards Gibraltar. It did not arrive in the operational area near Cyprus until 24 March, before being stood down again in early April.
The Ministry of Defence has maintained a measured public stance, attributing the situation to the complexity of operational deployments. In the UK, criticism of the government over the state of the fleet has intensified.
The problems facing the Type 45 class are not new. Since the destroyers entered service in 2010, they have been dogged by faults in their Rolls-Royce WR-21 gas turbines, which had design weaknesses in the cooling system.
The issue led to an extensive upgrade programme — the Power Improvement Project (PIP) — involving generator replacement and improvements to the ships’ power generation capacity. Despite those interventions, only two of the six Type 45 destroyers are considered fully operational without restrictions, a figure that reflects the structural pressure on the Royal Navy.
Analysts have described the HMS Dragon episode as symptomatic of wider problems rather than an isolated incident, pointing to the limited number of ships in the class as a constraint on Britain’s ability to meet its growing international operational commitments.
The deployment also throws into relief a separate capability gap. The ship was sent to Cyprus primarily to provide anti-aircraft and anti-ballistic protection — yet the UK currently has no land-based air defence systems capable of intercepting ballistic missiles.
That gap, analysts note, has been brought back into focus by the Dragon’s absence from active duty.