Britain’s new EW drone has combat experience built in

“It Doesn’t Get Tougher Than That” – Combat-Hardened Drones and the RAF’s StormShroud.

When the RAF’s StormShroud drone programme was formally unveiled, questions quickly followed — particularly around the platform’s survivability in contested airspace.

At a media briefing this afternoon, I asked whether the AR3 airframe, used as the basis for StormShroud, had been significantly modified to enhance survivability as part of its adaptation into the RAF’s electronic warfare concept.

The response from Tekever CEO Ricardo Mendes was emphatic and wide-ranging. “So in terms of survivability, it’s one of the core aspects of the AR3,” he said. “Every day, we’re working towards changing the AR3 and adapting it to make it more survivable. Obviously, there’s been a lot of work in integrating with the RAF and with Leonardo to integrate the [BriteStorm] payload, and that changes the aircraft.”

Mendes went on to highlight the direct influence of operational experience on the platform’s robustness. “It’s building upon 10,000 hours in combat in Ukraine,” he said. “It doesn’t get tougher than that. The level of survivability is extremely high today to do deep missions where you’re hundreds of kilometres away and operating under very extreme, high-risk conditions.”

Britain’s new StormShroud drones to jam enemy radars

Mark, Tekever business development lead on the programme, reinforced that this wasn’t just rhetoric. He explained that lessons from Ukraine and other operational deployments had been absorbed into the base AR3 platform and carried into the StormShroud configuration. “All of the work we have been doing to enable AR3 to operate on a daily basis within integrated air defence systems has been brought into this programme,” he noted. “That will continue to develop over time.”

The StormShroud system, built around the Tekever AR3, is a product of extensive collaboration between the Royal Air Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office, DE&S’s Catalyst team, and industry partners including Leonardo. The platform entered service with 216 Squadron and is being operated by a mix of regular and reserve personnel. While the AR3 is traditionally a rail-launched drone, its modular design means it can be fitted with a VTOL kit or other swappable components as needed.

For now, the RAF appears to be using the rail-launch, parachute-recovery configuration, favouring endurance and simplicity in deployment.

New Leonardo jammer can create fleets of ‘ghost’ jets

StormShroud carries the BriteStorm payload, Leonardo’s latest electronic warfare system. Developed at the company’s Luton facility — a key UK hub for electronic warfare R&D — BriteStorm is a stand-in jammer designed to fly ahead of high-value assets and suppress enemy integrated air defence systems.

The payload combines a Miniature Techniques Generator with advanced Transmit Receive Modules, enabling high-powered digital jamming and deception across a wide range of threat profiles. Its software-defined architecture allows rapid reprogramming after missions and ensures operators can adapt it to evolving threats in real time.

The BriteStorm programme began in 2017 and has matured through years of collaboration with UK defence stakeholders, including DSTL and the RAF’s Air and Space Warfare Centre. Designed from the outset to be attritable, BriteStorm offers significant capability at acceptable risk: if lost in the defence of crewed platforms, the system is considered a tolerable loss, not a mission-critical failure.

I also asked about international interest in StormShroud and was told that conversations with allies are ongoing. Mendes also went on to describe interest cautiously but pointed to the broader strategic logic behind developing this type of capability. The importance of autonomous collaborative platforms, he suggested, is not just national but collective.

Shared concepts of employment, procurement, and industrial capacity will be essential to ensuring these types of systems can operate interoperably in joint environments like NATO or AUKUS.

Officials and developers also described the development pathway as deliberately agile. The RAF’s strategy is to field a minimum deployable capability and then evolve it continuously rather than waiting for traditional full operating capability declarations. StormShroud is not a “one stop buy” — it is intended to demonstrate effects today, while the design remains flexible enough to overmatch adversaries through ongoing updates.

Ultimately, this exchange captured a core theme of the StormShroud project: resilience is not an add-on — it’s embedded from the start. In an era of agile warfare and contested electromagnetic space, it’s not enough to build fast or flashy. As Mendes put it, when it comes to survivability, “there is no harder testbed than real war.”

StormShroud itself is not about conventional performance metrics. The platform may be slower than a Typhoon, and its payload modest in size compared to an F-35, but that misses the point entirely. What it offers is persistent, adaptive, autonomous disruption — in other words, a system built to endure where others might not.

Rather than replacing high-end munitions or platforms like SPEAR-EW, StormShroud complements them by providing a flexible and attritable layer in the broader air combat ecosystem.