The RAF’s Shadow R1 surveillance aircraft are among older ISR platforms to be retired under the Defence Investment Plan, with the MoD planning to hand much of the role to uncrewed systems over time.
The Royal Air Force’s Shadow surveillance aircraft are to be retired under the Defence Investment Plan, with the Ministry of Defence saying that uncrewed systems will increasingly take on the intelligence and reconnaissance work currently done by crewed planes, officials said.
Officials setting out the plan said the department would withdraw some of its older surveillance platforms and named the Shadow Mark 1 as the principal type to go, adding that it would look to autonomy to perform functions presently carried out by crewed aircraft, and they described the change as one that would be phased in over time as part of a wider investment in uncrewed systems meant to deliver intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance more cheaply and without exposing crews to the same risk. Launching the plan, Sir Keir Starmer said the forces would gain “a new fleet of surveillance drones, collecting intelligence and finding targets,” which is much the work the Shadow and platforms like it have carried out from the air for years.
The Shadow R1, a militarised King Air turboprop packed with sensors, has flown intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for the RAF for more than a decade, including over operations in the Middle East and Africa, and its withdrawal fits a pattern running right through the plan in which manned roles are handed to drones wherever the department judges that autonomous platforms can shoulder the job, a shift officials returned to repeatedly and tied each time to the lessons of recent conflicts.
The handover is rather less straightforward than the headline decision makes it sound, because a crewed aircraft of the Shadow’s kind carries a substantial sensor payload along with a trained crew able to read and interpret what they are seeing in real time, and replacing all of that with uncrewed systems will depend on those drones being available in sufficient numbers, capable enough for the task and properly woven into the wider intelligence network before the manned aircraft actually leave.
Officials said the broader investment in autonomy was intended to cover precisely that work and that ISR was one of the areas where uncrewed platforms could increasingly stand in for crewed craft, while accepting that the transition would take time, and the Shadow’s withdrawal comes in company with the retirement of other ageing platforms as the department deliberately concentrates its spending on the capabilities it regards as most important against the threat.
In principal this is obviously a good candidate for automation. However, there is a great deal more to surveillance than sticking a camera on the front of a drone. Whether they can get all the kit into a reasonably priced drone to make it worthwhile remains to be see.
Sensible move retiring the R1 and the Wildcats for the army. Neither will be survivable outside of colonial policing tasks and their roles can be done far better by drones.
Any increase of orders for MQ-9Bs to take up this aircraft’s role… or no.
It’s not a defence investment plan it’s cost cutting, drones and these planes are doing different jobs and have different capabilities, we need both. We need to scrap millibrains net zero catastrophe, the entire overseas aid budget, cut the civil service by ninety percent, tax corporations in their income in the UK not profit after they have shipped profit to tax free Cayman islands etc. and tax the rich (anyone over a million) properly, so anything over a million at 150 percent and any wealth over a million by 50 percent a year