"Panic At The Pentagon"?
On Radio 4’s Today programme, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said: “The unexpected mass withdrawal of America’s heavy bombers from RAF Fairford has happened so suddenly, it hints at something approaching panic in the Pentagon.
“There must be concerns in Washington that the US cannot risk catastrophic damage to another one of its high-value aircraft.”
Gardner said the US decision to remove its bombers suggested there was “clearly a new threat on top of the existing one”.
He said: “The US is still heavily bruised about the damage done to its high value aircraft in the Middle East by Iranian precision strikes.
“This must be a huge shock to it that bases in its closest ally, the UK, are not as safe as they thought they were. So they’ve pulled them all the way back to the continent of the United States.”
Gardner said it “will be a loss to the US and an embarrassment to the UK”.
"Former British diplomats" say it's success for Iran:
The withdrawal of US bombers from UK military base RAF Fairford will be seen as a “success by Iran”, amid a series of security threats to Britain, former British diplomats have said.
. . . Former diplomat Edmund Fitton-Brown said Iran could interpret the withdrawal as a weakening of the US deterrent and its alliance with Britain.
“From the Iranian point of view, its already a win if they’re driving a wedge between two Nato allies. They might think we need to do more of this,” he told The National.
The withdrawal showed the “weakening of a US defence position by removing assets from a strategically significant base”, Mr Fitton-Brown said.
Peter Ricketts, who served as the UK’s first national security adviser between 2010 and 2012, said: “I think it's hard to conclude anything other than that this will be seen as a success by Iran.
“Whether it was the intention or whether it's the inadvertent outcome, it is certainly the outcome that they have now forced the US into a public bring-back of their forces from one of their allies,” Lord Ricketts told the BBC. “That what we thought were secure areas in the UK can no longer be considered entirely secure.”
So, those Yanks have gone weak at the knees, right? We're best off without those fair weather friends if a few van dudes send them packing! Except,
Mr Fitton-Brown said the UK’s next steps would be to reassure the Americans that it can handle terrorist threats on British soil, or that the threat represented in this instance was low.
But another UK expert talks to Time:
David Dunn, a professor of international politics at the University of Birmingham, says the U.S. withdrawal from Fairford is “historic, unprecedented, and an indication of the sense of vulnerability” surrounding U.S. military assets abroad.
“Fairford is normally the place during a crisis where America sends bombers to beef up America's military capability and its formal operating bases, whether that's for operations in Europe, like the Kosovo campaign, or for operations in the Gulf through 2003 onwards, or indeed for operations in Iran,” Dunn tells TIME. “This [removal] is an indication of concerns about the safety of those assets in their forward operating bases.”
. . . RAF Fairford is a NATO-designated standby deployment and a U.S. forward operating base for U.S. Global Strike Command, according to U.K. government records. The base, which opened in 1944, has been used extensively by U.S. military aircraft in previous conflicts, including "Operation Iraqi Freedom" in 2003.
The U.S. Air Force describes RAF Fairford as its “preferred” European “bomber forward operating location” and previously said it has used Fairford “nearly continuously” since the base was constructed.
Former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer initially refused to allow U.S. access to U.K. military bases in its offensive strikes against Iran—a move that earned him the wrath of Trump. Starmer changed his position in March, authorizing the U.S. to use bombers based at RAF Fairford to carry out strikes on Iranian missile sites used to attack ships in the Strait of Hormuz.
Prof Dunn's implication is clear: the action is "historic" and "unprecedented", because it shows the US can no longer assume the UK can control its borders, but it also comes in the context of Labour's extreme reluctance to honor its NATO commitment. Clearly this represents a practical change in the US-UK-NATO relationship, despite claims that there's been no change:
The US removed its bombers from RAF Fairford partly because of a reported threat of a possible Iranian drone attack against the base, American officials have said.
. . . A third official said the US can deploy the bombers from anywhere, so it made sense to move them out of an abundance of caution.
. . . Asked if there was a "specific threat" that led to the removal of the US bombers, Mr Trump replied: "Yeah I think we can say that. They didn't fly out by accident.
"There were some threats. And rather than tempting the enemy, we'll capture the enemy and beat the enemy. But why should we leave them there? So we moved them around a little bit. Not very far."
. . . It comes after US secretary of state Marco Rubio said the removal of the US bombers was not directly connected to the arrests of five men near the base.
"The Department of War is constantly reallocating resources where they need to be. There are regular rotations that happen as well," Mr Rubio said.
This has a lot to say about the future of NATO, and I'm not sure if the UK is adjusting to it yet.