British Army fields 10,000 drones in six months

The British Army has invested £300 million in attritable and consumable systems over the past six months, placing 10,000 small drones into soldiers’ hands, the UK Defence Journal understands.

General Sir Roly Walker, the Chief of the General Staff, set out the figures during his keynote at the RUSI Land Warfare Conference 2026 in London, an event the Army said drew army chiefs or their representatives from 42 countries. He described the spending as the product of Project AKSA, the programme driving a shift toward what the Army calls a 20:40:40 fighting system, three rings from which it intends to draw its modernised lethality.

This year’s emphasis, Walker said, fell on the attritable 40 per cent of that system: funding it, fielding it, training with it and deploying it. The money had not only been committed and contracted but delivered, he told the conference, and alongside the drones, thousands of autonomous systems were flowing into units. Fifty operational-level electronic warfare systems and a brigade’s worth of counter-uncrewed aircraft equipment, both proven in Ukraine, had also entered service, according to the General.

Project AKSA pairs every brigade with multiple industry partners and pushes development down to individual formations, an approach Walker described in the speech as a bottom-up revolution in warfare development. “From the factories to the foxholes,” he said of the closing distance between soldiers and the firms building their equipment, adding that tacticians and technicians were becoming harder to tell apart. The programme had moved the Army from episodic experimentation to continuous adaptation, he said, with capability trialled, refined and fielded inside a single financial cycle.

Walker linked the effort to lessons drawn from Ukraine, where, the General said, capability development was increasingly happening at the front rather than in the rear. The networks supporting these systems had been reinforced in parallel, with the £100 million of radios placed on contract in January now in the hands of the force. Soldiers themselves were shaping demand and working directly with industry, he said, rather than receiving equipment specified for them in the rear.

Underpinning AKSA is Task Force RAPSTONE, which Walker described as the Army’s entrepreneurial engine, combining intensified warfare development with rapid acquisition and channelling hundreds of millions of pounds each year. The General set out an aim for half of the Army’s annual capital expenditure to go on the most survivable and sophisticated 20 per cent of its systems, with the remaining half funding the other 80 per cent, a balance he said should be unmistakable by 2030.

He put the total addressable market for remote and autonomous systems at more than £100 billion over ten years, and pointed toward a future in which uncrewed ground vehicles accompany every crewed vehicle into the field, with the mission modules and software they carry, rather than the platforms themselves, holding the greatest value.