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.
Does this mean we’re not sure how it works but we’re betting the kitchen sink on it..?
Nope. It means we accept the US sometimes make mistakes which we might learn from. 😀
An obvious lesson would be don’t rely excliusively on the US for anything at this point. Agreements we have with them are liable to last only as long as it takes for Trump to throw another tantrum.
The US is way behind the curve on this, just like the UK is. Always good to learn from others, but I suspect way more useful lessons to learn from Ukraine. Fundamental issue for both the UK and US and most of the western world is we have created defence giants that dominate procurement and propose massively expensive solutions to boost their profits. Resulting in innovation in warfare being slow very slow.
It is not only that. It is cultural. The warship. the aircraft. the tank are the knights… also the excellence in engineering, the ego of identity, humanity.
100000000 drones/ballistic missiles instead are the impersonal soulless of the digital world. You only buy them because you need. There is no fascination possible about them. Well maybe it is possible with another culture…
War is more than just war, it is also a culture, in the 50-60’s Royal Navy abandoned naval guns because missiles were the modernity and guns were the unsexy past…promotions were issued, maybe who defended guns saw their careers stall, pretense modernity is sometimes also a mechanism to push older people out…
We’ll have our cake an pay too much for it too.
The USA is no longer a reliable partner – the sooner we come to terms with that fact, the sooner we can begin the extremely painful process of reversing our position of absolute exposure to their filthy leverage.
Here is a country who’s foreign policy, in black and white, dictates its own strategic goals to include the undermining of our democracy. I taste vomit in my mouth every time I see a US soldier on our camps.
You might conclude that I disagree with this course.