The spread of localised electronic warfare across the front in Ukraine is what is pushing drones towards autonomy, the head of UK land at Helsing told the Apex Europe conference in London on Wednesday.
Mike Wilmot said: “We see the action of denial of GPS leads to the reaction of flying by FPV, so you don’t need GPS. That sees the counteraction of localised EW that denies comms, and with that exponential increase of EW, we see a corresponding move towards greater autonomy.”
Full autonomy is not there yet, he said, agreeing with the Ukrainian officer who spoke before him, and most Western militaries are watching the same sequence and working out how to respond to it. The British Army’s answer is its 20-40-40 construct, which moves the balance away from exquisite survivable platforms and towards the attritable and the consumable.
What that means for suppliers is more software-defined systems and lower unit prices. “It also means what the army calls affordable mass, and what most economists call value, much cheaper systems, where the expectation isn’t necessarily that it will return,” he said, describing the question Helsing is working on as how to deliver more platforms at a lower price per unit that still do what is asked of them in a heavily contested electronic warfare environment.
“One of the points that is not actually often discussed there is the ethical element of being able to send a platform forward without a human operator, as well as the efficiency element,” he said.
“There isn’t just a financial expense of sending an F-35 across the forward line of enemy troops. There is also a potential human expense, and if we have that safety confidence in a platform to be able to deliver its task, then there does become an ethical consideration of why send a human pilot or a collection of human pilots when you could first send autonomous platforms,” he said.
Safety works the same way in his account, since there are tasks where an automated process earns more confidence than a person, air defence engagement being the obvious case.
Helsing has about fifty people in an office in Ukraine, set up in response to feedback from the Ukrainian armed forces, and runs a monthly software update to the hardware platforms it has fielded. “The hardware isn’t necessarily changing very much over a protracted period of time, but the software is, and it’s only through that proximity to the end users,” he said. “They’re not going to be pushing much feedback for us. We need to be pulling it from them.”
Western militaries will have to get comfortable with contractors working closer to the fighting than they have in recent conflicts, he suggested, which is a commercial problem as much as a military one and an area where Ukraine offers a working example.
Asked what he would tell a national armaments director, he reached for a high street. “If people buy sweets, sweet shops will open on a high street. If they buy enough sweets, a sweet factory will open nearby. And if they buy even more, then someone will open a sugar refinery, and even dentists will start popping up,” he said, citing the phrase capital follows contracts from reflections on the writing of the strategic defence review.
