Grant Shapps on board the RAF aircraft (Image: MoD)
The RAF aircraft that the Defence Secretary was flying in when its signals were jammed was left vulnerable as it flew near a Russian exclave because the military could not afford to pay for protective systems.
Russia is believed to have jammed the GPS and comms signal for half an hour as Grant Shapps travelled close to Kaliningrad on a trip to Poland.
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Defence sources branded the incident involving the Dassault 900LX Falcon jet as a “wildly irresponsible” act of electronic warfare.
On Friday, it emerged the Government chose not to give the new VIP jets protective systems such as anti-missile jammers, jam-proof communications or military-standard avionics to save as much as ￡200million. Experts told The Times the aircraft had been left “vulnerable to surprise attack”.
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Former defence secretary Ben Wallace, who held the position when the decision was made, defended the move, saying he believed that taking millions away from military programmes for a “vanity project” when the RAF was “already overspent” would have been wrong.
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Mr Shapps has reversed the move.
Tim Ripley, editor of the news website Defence Eye, said that the decision not to have the defensive aids, which would have prevented Mr Shapps’s aircraft from being jammed, was a “classic example of short-sighted MoD penny-pinching”.
He said: “These critical aircraft, which are used to fly members of the royal family, government ministers and service chiefs on high-profile missions, are effectively defenceless until protection systems are fitted.”
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Mr Shapps, who was travelling with his team and a group of journalists including the Daily Express, was assured the electronic attack did not threaten the safety of the aircraft.
Despite GPS navigation being down, pilots assured the team that multiple other means of navigating remained on the jet.
The Defence Secretary was returning from a visit to Poland where he watched hundreds of troops taking part in Steadfast Defender, the biggest exercise since the Cold War.
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