The decision on the US military’s planned DARC radar array in Pembrokeshire has been taken out of the county council’s hands.
Siân Gwenllian MS, the Cabinet Minister for Local Government, Housing and Planning, has “called in” the planning application (ref 25/1101/PA) for the Deep Space Advanced Radar Concept site at Cawdor Barracks, Brawdy, near St Davids — meaning it will now be decided by Welsh ministers rather than Pembrokeshire County Council.
The council’s planning committee had been due to determine the application for 27 giant radar dishes at its meeting next Tuesday, 28 July.
The direction, issued by the Welsh Government’s planning directorate under the Cabinet Minister’s authority on Monday, says she concluded the proposed development “raises national security issues given the strategic defence nature of the proposal and is a novel planning issue”.
The letter says the proposal “potentially conflicts with national policy in relation to landscape, ecology, sustainability and placemaking”, and that a decision “may be controversial beyond the immediate locality”.
“All these matters lead the Cabinet Minister to conclude the development is of more than local importance and the application should be determined by the Welsh Ministers,” it concludes.
The letter stresses that the call-in “does not imply or infer any view from the Welsh Ministers about the merits of the application” — under Welsh Government policy, a call-in decides who determines an application, not whether permission should be granted.
The letter also lists the concerns raised by those requesting the call-in — including fears the development would make the area a military target, claims the county council is “not suitably equipped” to decide an application of this nature, and the effect on an “irreplaceable habitat” for grassland fungi.
The intervention is exactly what campaigners asked the new Plaid Cymru-led government to do — a demand put to ministers in May as the campaign warned of a Wales versus Westminster showdown over the scheme.
The pressure on ministers had been building for months: in April, the then first minister called for a halt to the project, citing Donald Trump’s “contempt for our country”.
PARC Against DARC, the campaign group set up in 2024 to fight the proposal, described the call-in as a “seismic and significant step”.
A spokesperson for the campaign said DARC was “a proposal for a huge 27-dish radar array overlooking the St Davids Peninsula of the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park”, pointing to objections the group says have been lodged by the National Park Authority and Natural Resources Wales over its visual impact and harm to tourism.
The campaign says a freedom of information request showed the council received 1,121 objections to the scheme — and just one submission in favour — while almost 20,000 people have signed a petition against it.
The group claims the radar is part of a “weapons system designed to track and target satellites”, developed for the US Space Force, and could form part of Donald Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile-defence programme — describing it as an escalation in the militarisation of space.
The Ministry of Defence has said DARC will detect, track and identify objects in deep space, with the Brawdy site forming part of a three-nation network alongside installations in the US and Australia under the Aukus partnership.
DARC would keep Cawdor Barracks open beyond its planned 2028 closure date — an extension of the base’s life that was welcomed locally when first proposed.
Opposition to the plans has drawn wider attention, with Game of Thrones actor Jerome Flynn backing the campaign during this year’s Senedd election.
The campaign also says it holds a letter of support sent by Neil Kinnock during a similar anti-radar fight at Brawdy in the 1990s — noting that his son, Stephen Kinnock, is now Welsh Secretary as the scheme heads for a decision at government level.
A demonstration planned for outside Tuesday’s planning committee meeting will now go ahead as a vigil “in support of Welsh Government’s call-in decision”, campaigners said.
The application now passes to Planning and Environment Decisions Wales, with the council to be told the process for the decision “as soon as possible”.
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