Britain will engage closely with the United States as it establishes an Autonomous Warfare Command and will see what lessons apply here, while continuing to assess the most effective organisational arrangements of its own, according to a written answer in the House of Lords.
Lord Sarfraz, the Conservative peer, asked what assessment the government has made of the American decision and what consideration has been given to establishing an equivalent integrated capability within British defence.
Lord Coaker, the Minister of State for Defence, said: “Given the importance of autonomous systems to the future of warfare, we will continue to engage closely with our US counterparts as they establish an Autonomous Warfare Command and see what lessons apply to the UK Defence system.
“The UK’s approach reflects our own operating model and structure. Defence is developing an integrated approach to optimise the balance between crewed, uncrewed and autonomous systems across the Armed Forces. This includes the establishment of the Uncrewed Systems Centre as a Defence centre of excellence alongside Defence’s Rapid AI Delivery (RAID) taskforce, to accelerate the development, integration and adoption of these capabilities. This is backed by a defence investment plan commitment of over £5 billion by 2030 in autonomous systems across the Integrated Force. This investment will support capabilities including the Hybrid Navy, uncrewed ground vehicles and Collaborative Combat Aircraft, increasing the mass, lethality and readiness of the Armed Forces while retaining appropriate human responsibility and accountability. We will continue to assess the most effective organisational arrangements for delivering these capabilities.”
The Pentagon announced the new command at the start of October, putting a four-star officer in charge of artificial intelligence and uncrewed systems across the American services and consolidating work that had been spread between the individual branches and a set of separate offices. Standing up a command of that weight around autonomy goes further than anything Britain has done, and Coaker’s answer stops short of promising an equivalent while keeping the possibility in play.
Britain has instead built the Uncrewed Systems Centre as its centre of excellence, with the Rapid AI Delivery taskforce working alongside it. Neither carries command authority over operational units in the way an American combatant command does, and both are designed to coordinate and accelerate work that is still owned by the services. The Army conceded at Apex Europe this month that its a number of its own drones cannot talk to each other, which is precisely the fragmentation the centre was created to address.
