The Ministry of Defence has confirmed it will spend over £4 billion on uncrewed and autonomous military systems during this Parliament, as part of a major shift in how the UK Armed Forces fight future wars.
The funding, detailed in a written parliamentary response, follows recommendations from the Strategic Defence Review that call for rapid force transformation, with autonomy and artificial intelligence (AI) playing a central role across land, sea and air domains.
Maria Eagle, Minister of State at the Ministry of Defence, said that the UK would increasingly adopt a “high-low mix of capabilities”—combining high-end crewed platforms with more affordable uncrewed systems to boost combat mass and resilience. This includes unmanned systems operating “undersea, at sea, on land, or over land.”
Responding to questions from Helen Maguire MP (Liberal Democrat – Epsom and Ewell), the minister declined to specify how many unmanned systems are currently in service or how many will be procured over the next three years, stating instead that “further details will be set out as part of the Defence Investment Plan.”
The plan is expected to outline how the £4 billion will be allocated across unmanned air, ground, underwater, and surface platforms. It also comes amid growing international interest in drone warfare and autonomous technology, following high-profile use cases in Ukraine and the Middle East.
While the exact platforms have not been confirmed, the funding is expected to support programmes such as uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), underwater autonomous gliders, robotic ground vehicles, and optionally crewed naval vessels, all aligned with the vision of an “Integrated Force.”
The announcement reflects growing recognition within government that technological superiority, and the ability to scale it rapidly, is essential to maintaining military relevance.
The Defence Investment Plan, due later this year, is expected to clarify procurement timelines, quantities, and integration strategies for these systems.
Please dear god can we stop all the drone evaluations and actually go out and buy some drone’s. £4 billion if it’s real seems like a substantially amount if we are going out and buying some readily available systems while maybe developing a couple of new ones like the type 92/93 for navy, BAE ACP for the RAF and jackal for the Army. Plenty of great OTC solutions like MQ9 Sea Guardian/AEW that can also substantially boost our combat capabilities.
Just go and buy something.
Whilst I share your obvious frustration I would like to see a procurement / operational strategy that recognises the rapid rate of development in the this technology, otherwise we will buy a load of stuff that will be past it’s use by date before we have even got the paperwork sorted.
The military will need to understand that in some areas they will have to have a number of generations of drones in service at the same time. So today’s gucci kit will be mid level kit in 4 or 5 years time and disposable kit in 7 or 8 years time… So in peacetime small(ish) numbers delivered delivered every year on an on-going rolling contract with a recognised system development path included to support the growth of a suitable industrial base capable of gearing up in a hurry if needed.
So yeh, for gods sake buy something but lets be clear, any future war with the CRINK nations will be WW3 and that will be an industrial war so who and where from, you buy from is as important as what you buy…
By the way, I hope they buy some carrier capable drones to fly along side the F-35’s that can carry UK weapons. It’ll be a much quicker way to give the carriers real hitting power than waiting for LM to integrate our weapons on F-35…
We are in an arms race, and those in power don’t seem know it or want to recognise the fact. Which means we are getting off to a really slow and very late start. Precisely, the wrong place to be if you want to maintain deterrence.
Cheers CR
Chuck the procurement rules away. Just buy some kit and guarantee loans for those companies with good ideas. We have no time to mess about and the less Government involvement in the production the quicker things will happen.
Some have indicated that every three weeks, a new technology is born within the drone community……alarming! F35, Tempest, Ajax family, and Boxer might all have the capability to be converted into an autonomous vehicle or plane within five years. However, I believe the RN will see the greatest deployment of surface and submersible autonomous vehicles and principal surface ships, witnessing significant reductions in manpower.
I think drones are inevitably going to be like the Bi plane in the early 20th century, they will move on rapidly and change a lot and for many of them you might just get a few years before we need to purchase something else. So we need to stop thinking in 30 year cycles, like we do for manned planes and go for rapid 80% solutions that can be discarded.
4billion quid!? That could buy another 3 T26s, 4 T31s and maybe with some change. 40 F35As, 30 F35Bs. Lots of IFVs (tracked)…lol. Hope the MOD is getting real value for money for all this drone stuff and not just splashing out in the toy store!
Trouble is all of those pieces of kit are going to need drones riding shotgun otherwise they are going to be in trouble.
Totally agree – we need kit. A relatively small amount of money should buy some good kit. Forget the purchasing rules and just buy fifty of each and try them out. We also need anti-drone drones otherwise come a conflict we will be swamped with enemy drones with little way to deal with them.
Parliament was on about this last year telling the MOD it should make better use of the UoR framework to rapidly purchase stuff in smallish quantities and quickly rather than fannying about with four letter acronym multi decade programs.
You will see this in the Autumn statement, they promised 😉
I just don’t think they’ve got fully past the gold-plating of “traditional” procurement. That’s in part a symptom of ever decreasing numbers and becoming risk averse. Want 1000 tanks, well if the first prototype isn’t perfect so needs more dev money you can now get 750, need an upgrade worked in based on new information, 500 max. Now you want an APS? Are you having a laugh, 150 final offer. Now you want ammo? i swear if Capita buys some Leopards we are outsourcing.
Do that a few times there will be a 5-year study first and they’ll know the end number will be far lower than required. So, it’ll enter production as an all singing, all dancing, high-maintenance monster.
There’ll be some high-end expensive kit in this mix that will need refit and upgrade cycles that could be in service for a decade or more, these will need a bit more time and planning to bring in (although taking the **** at this point). Also, plenty of “cheap and cheerful” kit that should be treated as disposable. With numbers so low across every single area in defense the latter is a very hard concept for military leaders to get their head around.
There is no fleshy bit to protect. you can have a mix that includes very low-end and minimally protected. Buy 2000 of those disposable drones from an SME for “peanuts” and then replace next year with new improved versions, no big deal that’s 2000 in storage to throw at the enemy first day to keep them busy.
Find a common UI/Controller for the operators to keep training as simple as possible, the image will get better each iteration, the green button that did nothing last year now fires a laser or drops a net etc. if it’s broken beyond a fix that an Ikea instruction booklet could cover, bin it and order another.
I wonder how much of this is them trying to keep with the times and how much is them thinking, that is cheaper than employing people and buying ships, planes, helicopters, we shall do that.
Leaving us still threadbare.
I trust HMG about as far as I can toss them.
As for all this kit. So far. Informing decisions, trials, greater understandings, and endless talk.
And the small amounts we buy all seem to be foreign, like the 2 new Army Drones, Reaper, Protector, and so on.
Don’t HMG like the kit BAES have made, and where did it all go?
BAE and all the other big defence contractors have stayed out of drones for the most part. Only General Atomics which is pretty small but US standards has gone into drones much.
No money in drones and a limited number thus far.
The effort in Tarranis has been carried over to tempest but most of the rest has been wasted. Large MALE UAV’s didn’t last long in the first battlefield they encountered and now they are not very popular.
Hi Mate,
Hope you well.
You are undoubtedly correct at least in part, but I would reiterate the need to develop our home grown drone industrial base and fast. No one in the West has the capacity, as yet, to build drones in sufficient numbers across all domains and at all levels of capability. Ukrainian and Russia have massively ramped up their production capabilities especially when it comes to the FPV battlefield drones and those things are dominating the battlefield. Similar will happen in the air and maritime domains when the right kind of drones come long, as they inevitably will.
I think £4B to be spent on drones should include a good dollop for UK developed systems as the conflict we are trying to deter is WW3 and those kinds of calamitous wars are as much about industrial strength as military strength. Good case in point was the UK’s response to the German Spring Offensive in 1918. Haig wrote a rallying call to the home front and the response was staggering, production of everything from SE5 fighters to coal went threw the roof. In Germany, the home front collapsed…
Industry matters and we should never ever have allowed so much of it to be off-shored, especially to China. Globalisation has really backfired in that regard. I am not very keen on buying everything from our allies either for reasons that have been discussed in length in recent months…
Having said all of that we really, really do need a bigger navy, air force and army as someone needs to control, guide and maintain said drones. A T26 to control a ASW drone ship group or a MBT controlling a small group of ATGW or SHORAD equipped ground drones. It will take people, so we still need to sort out recruitment and retention. Drones will make the crewing issue worse not better as there will be significantly more to do. Take a T26 with a drone ASW group around it – they will need a bigger CIC crew as a minimum! A tank sitting in the center of a few networked drones is a long way off yet, but the MBT will need a very capable C2 system that enables the crew to deal with priority tasks and the tank would probably need to hang back and use the drones as an extension of itself or the crew would be overwhelmed trying to fight their own vehicle while controlling drones..! In other words, doctrine and training is heading for a massive shake as well.
Hmm, heading towards another book, I’ll stop there.
Cheers CR
Hi mate.
Well a few years ago the Army was talking of Army 2035, and entire Corps!
Single Tanks with several UGV, and types that are disposable and those that are not.
As always, it is all talk and all tomorrow, or decades from now, and never arrives.
I’m sick and tired of the gravy train going to industry while the military wither and die, no matter how vital home grown is.
It isn’t filtering through.
When industry gets orders and the military gets kit, I’ll support it of course.
Globalists? Oh they’ve had their profits and are over the hills and far away. One of the points of the brevity vote, all the globalists were against it.
I don’t think so much that there is the perception that this is cheaper than people, but more that many small contracts- a few drones here, a feasibility study there- will somehow add up to less than making a couple of really solid purchases of useful enablers and kit.
BAE build big stuff, which means big purchases and big single contracts, but at least this way the ground level industry is sustained.
My worry is, we end up spending most of that on a catapult and recovery system for the carriers and a ‘small’ fleet of AEW/AAR craft to put on them. Whilst I’m a big advocate for that kind of system, I see them as critical to the protection of any CSG and range extension of our F-35Bs, will that leave little cash for the ‘real meat’? I see the need for ‘000s of Shahed-like, low-end but equally-critical drones that might augment or even replace (in some cases) artillery shells and high-end guided missiles. It’s also a fair point CR makes, whilst we could pile-in now and buy thousands of pieces of hardware, are these only going to be obsolete in 5-10 years time, when something altogether more effective is in place? Tricky, trying to find the balance! Separate point, can we not put the, now retired, Banshees to good use? Surely as continuing to support FOST in-place of Hawk T1s or Typhoons?
Maria Eagles has got a clue what she is talking about. Clueless I tell you.
What’s the thoughts of all on here? £4 billion on drones or 4 more type 26 frigates that can deliver actual hard power? I think Id rather have the frigates as no doubt this £4 billion budget will be pissed up and along a wall and disappear into nothing, no tangible actual hardware.
Right across the spectrum of what constitutes a drone, the Ukraine War has shown they are an absolutely necessity for any modern armed forces. In their more complex form, NATO can snoop on what is going on in Crimea and the like. In their less complex form, they can supplement/replace artillery as an accurate way of hitting targets. In this form, they are susceptible to surface-to-air defenses but, on-masse, can overwhelm them so are an absolute must IMHO. I’d love to see more T26 and T31 but we need to find room in any budget for a significant expansion in drone numbers, right across the spectrum of capabilities and costs.
Agreed. Drones are game changers.
I read recently that until the Ukrainians could get the counters to fiber optic drones deployed in quantity it was getting so difficult to move around some troops were stuff in the trenches for 2 or 3 times the normal roulement period, and it wasn’t good for moral… Then there are the maritime drones. Bridges, ships, subs and shore targets have all been engaged by the Ukrainians using drones, a mix of suicide and shooter drones. Got to be the first time in history a formed fleet has been beaten back, chased and sunk by a country that doesn’t have a navy!
However, I do agree with Mr Bell. We need more escorts for the simple reason current and near future drones will need to operate from and with crewed ships and a RN fleet of 13 ships is wholly inadequate on every level.
Cheers CR
Short term I’d tend to agree, but drones is where things are heading fast. We ignore them at our peril.
Tough choices, but it seems they have come down on the side of drones. My guess is that they can’t solve the recruitment problem so they are dodging it and going for drones… well in part at least.
Cheers CR
I agree.
I see the military still with you few conventional assets as billions are pissed up the wall, or given to industry.
The results will be the same, too little kit, too few people.
Yes, buy Drones, but buy ships planes, Armoured vehicles and helicopters too.
Boxer is half what it should be.
CH3 is too few.
Typhoon too few.
NMH non existent.
Frigates too few, even when back to 13.
Why is all other countries making in roads to civil defence Norway Sweden we have not done anything in the UK we have no Iron Dome no defence for any UK Cities PM is depending on Type 45 to cover the UK. We have a PM like Neville Chamberlain who has no plans to save the UK
He’s too busy doing U turns to try and secure the next election.
No different from Sunak.or any other of the last few decades.
Though I did read his X post about how he’s making the UK safe with buying 12 F35A…..🙄