The Army has approved and is implementing a Deep Recce Strike Brigade to pull intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and precision strike together at corps level, including what the department calls novel one-way effectors, according to an answer given in Parliament.
Stuart Anderson, the Conservative member for South Shropshire, asked what progress had been made on accelerating the development and deployment of the new Recce-Strike approach set out on page 111 of the Strategic Defence Review.
Louise Sandher-Jones, Parliamentary Under-Secretary and Minister for the Armed Forces, said: “The Army has approved and is implementing a Deep Recce Strike Brigade to provide Corps-level (HQ ARRC) integration of intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and precision strike capabilities, including novel one-way effectors. The 5th Generation Land Force programme will increase human-machine teaming, autonomy and decision advantage, further accelerating recce-strike capability across the force.”
A one-way effector is a munition that does not come back, in practice a loitering munition or an attack drone, and the phrase has become the department’s preferred term for a class of weapon that Ukraine has turned into the dominant means of killing vehicles and artillery well behind the line of contact.
The headquarters named is the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps at Imjin Barracks in Gloucester, a NATO corps headquarters Britain provides and commands. The brigade’s output therefore arrives at the level where a corps commander shapes a battle, above divisional and brigade level.
The Strategic Defence Review published in June 2025 set out recce-strike as the organising idea for the future Army, describing a mix of sensors, long-range fires and autonomous systems connected by a digital targeting network. The Defence Investment Plan put £1.8 billion into that targeting web, and the Army has separately acknowledged that its existing drones cannot talk to each other, creating the Uncrewed Systems Centre to deal with that.
The 5th Generation Land Force programme covers the Army’s wider modernisation, including human-machine teaming and the mix of crewed and uncrewed platforms the service expects to field through the next decade.
