Britain Condemns New Meteor Air-to-Air Missiles to Early Retirement as Competition Spurs Need for a More Advanced Successor

The United Kingdom’s 2026 Defence Investment Plan has cancelled the planned Mid-Life Upgrade for the Meteor radar guided air-to-air missile, diverting investment away from plans to extend the missile’s service life and upgrading its electronics and seeker, and towards replacing the missile entirely with a new air-to-air missile type. This future missile is currently being developed under the Future Air Superiority Effectors (FASE) program. Defence sources indicated that existing Meteor stocks will remain in service until they reach the point at which the mid-life upgrade would normally have been required, after which they will gradually be replaced by the new missile type. 

The decision has provided a possible indication of dissatisfaction with the Meteor’s capabilities, with the missile’s high protracted development timeline having resulted in a far less outstanding capability when the missile was belatedly brought into service than was otherwise expected. Although very little has been officially disclosed regarding the new missile's characteristics, it is expected to be designed specifically for the threat environment of the 2030s and 2040s rather than the early 2000s, when Meteor was conceived. This is likely to require substantially greater range, improved seeker performance against low-observable aircraft, more sophisticated artificial intelligence for target discrimination, enhanced electronic counter-countermeasures, and greater networking capabilities allowing the missile to receive targeting data from multiple platforms throughout flight. 

The Meteor was developed under a joint program by the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, France, Italy and Spain, and was designed with the goal of outperforming the U.S. AIM-120, although it reportedly benefited from significant U.S. technology transfers to achieve this. The missile gained an Initial Operating Capability in 2016, and introduced a superior range and overall kinematic performance to the AIM-120. Due to European states’ more limited combined technological base and lack of experience in air-to-air missile development, the Meteor is not expected to match the performance of the AIM-260, nor to be competitive in terms of cost. The missile has yet to be made compatible with the United Kingdom’s most capable fighter type the F-35.

The new missile being developed under the Future Air Superiority Effectors is expected to place far greater emphasis on defeating increasingly capable Chinese and Russian aircraft. Since Meteor entered development, both countries have introduced much longer-range air-to-air missiles such as China's PL-15, PL-16 and PL-17 and Russia's new R-77M and R-37M. The next generation missile is expected to be relied on to provide modernised variants of the F-35, and possibly another fifth generation fighter developed under the GCAP program, to engage more advanced sixth generation fighters, which China is scheduled to begin bringing into service in the early 2030s. With the Meteor already costing close to $3 million per missile, however, the affordability of developing a more complex and sophisticated successor remains in serious question.