The British Army’s next generation of land forces will include investment in uncrewed ground vehicles, Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis told defence audiences at the Royal United Services Institute.

In his first major address since taking on the defence brief twelve days earlier, Jarvis told the RUSI Land Warfare Conference on 23 June that the forthcoming Defence Investment Plan would put resources behind the Army’s modernisation ambitions, including investment in robotic ground platforms. “The DIP will make real those ambitions, and that includes investing in the uncrewed ground vehicles the Army requires to build the next generation of land forces,” he said.

The commitment here is one of the clearer public signals to date that the British Army intends to field uncrewed ground systems as a recognised investment line rather than as a series of niche experiments. Trials and demonstrations involving robotic platforms have featured in recent Army activity, including work conducted under the Robotic Platoon Vehicle programme, and concept development continues across the Future Soldier framework. The remarks indicate that those efforts will move beyond experimentation and into formal programme investment.

Jarvis credited General Sir Roly Walker, the Chief of the General Staff, with driving the modernisation effort. “The land forces which prevail tomorrow will be those who combine high-end platforms with mass, agility and considerable expertise,” he said. “General Walker has achieved this. He has done more to modernise the British Army than any other Chief of the General Staff in living memory. You heard his vision earlier. The DIP will make real those ambitions.”

Walker’s modernisation agenda has placed considerable push on what the Army terms a recce-strike complex, integrating uncrewed aerial, ground and undersea systems with longer-range artillery, electronic warfare and precision fires. The recce-strike concept draws heavily on observed Ukrainian practice and on lessons emerging from broader trials work across NATO armies, and it has formed the intellectual backbone of much of the Army’s recent equipment and doctrine work.

Jarvis set the investment in uncrewed ground vehicles within a wider discussion of the lessons emerging from the war in Ukraine. “It would be reckless to ignore the lessons of Ukraine,” he said. “Artificial intelligence, autonomy and uncrewed systems are no longer capabilities of the future. They will receive investment that reflects their strategic importance.” He described the pace of innovation in defence as having accelerated in a way he had not seen during his earlier time in the military, with development cycles now measured in months rather than years.

The Defence Secretary, a former Parachute Regiment officer who served in Afghanistan, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, was at pains to caution against an over-correction toward uncrewed platforms. “There are some who hold the view that we should trade everything in the locker for drones,” he said. “I understand the temptation, but there are important distinctions to make. For as long as we remain a member of NATO, we won’t fight alone. And for as long as we maintain our independent nuclear deterrent, we will always command our own destiny.” He added that even in Ukraine, conflict was still being fought in the trenches where ground was held street by street and where artillery and deep precision strike had proven invaluable.

The reference to uncrewed ground vehicles is one of several capability indicators Jarvis gave during the address. He listed recent and prospective tasks the armed forces had been required to handle, including protecting the seabed in the High North, securing the skies in the Middle East, preparing for the regeneration of Ukraine’s forces and readying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and he said Britain needed a flexible, hybrid, integrated force that could deter and fight across every domain.

The detail of the Army’s robotic ground vehicle plans, including platform selection, numbers, timelines and the units that will field them, has yet to be set out publicly and will turn on the contents of the Defence Investment Plan. Jarvis said the document remained his immediate priority and that he was working to finalise and publish it, having taken on the defence brief twelve days earlier following the departure of John Healey.