Starmer backs 5 billion drone overhaul for UK forces in DIP

The Prime Minister will launch the Defence Investment Plan with more than £5 billion over four years for drones and autonomous systems across the Royal Navy, Army and RAF, in what the government calls the largest such investment yet.

More than £5 billion will be spent over the next four years on drones and autonomous systems across the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force, in what the government has called the largest such investment in the history of the UK Armed Forces, the Ministry of Defence said.

The money forms the centrepiece of the Defence Investment Plan, which Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is due to launch on Tuesday in a speech at a British defence firm. The plan, being set out ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara next month, is the government’s blueprint for implementing last year’s Strategic Defence Review, and the drone package is the first major element to be trailed. Defence Secretary Dan Jarvis has spent the past fortnight refocusing the plan on getting equipment to frontline units.

The investment is framed around lessons from recent conflicts, with the department pointing to Ukraine, which it said uses roughly 200,000 drones a month against Russian forces, and to the war in Iran, where at the height of the fighting some 700 attack drones were being launched each day. Cheap systems are destroying high-value targets and innovation is now measured in weeks rather than years, according to the Ministry of Defence, which said the funding would build a flexible, integrated force spanning attack drones flying alongside Army helicopters, RAF jets shielded from enemy detection, and a Royal Navy mixing crewed and uncrewed vessels.

Starmer described the spending as transformative. “This game-changing investment will strengthen our Armed Forces on land, at sea and in the air,” he said in a statement, adding that the government was “backing British innovation, British industry and British jobs” and giving the defence industrial base the certainty to scale new technologies

Jarvis said the nature of conflict was shifting quickly. “The character of warfare is rapidly changing,” he said, describing uncrewed systems as “defining conflicts” in Ukraine and the Middle East and casting the money as the largest UK investment yet in the field. The plan funds the Uncrewed Systems Centre in Swindon, billed as Europe’s largest drone testing site and opened earlier this month, along with a new Uncrewed Systems Taskforce to develop and field capabilities with industry.

The capabilities range from autonomous mine-hunting drones to small quadcopters and low-cost one-way attack drones, with separate programmes for each service. The main efforts set out across the three services include:

Royal Navy

• At least six Common Combat Vessels, hybrid warships billed as the brain of a networked maritime air-defence system and the replacement for the cancelled Type 83 destroyer
• Type 91 uncrewed missile platforms to add firepower to the fleet
• Type 92 uncrewed sensing platforms to hunt submarines across the North Atlantic in support of the new frigates
• Type 93 extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicles to work alongside crewed hunter-killer submarines
• Type 94 uncrewed platforms to scan the skies for threats to the fleet or the homeland
• Project PANTHEON, a Hybrid Carrier Air Wing trialling jet-powered drones to fly with the F-35B force
• New high-speed boats and the latest drones for the Royal Marine Commandos

British Army

• Project NYX, up to 24 armed autonomous drones by 2030 flying alongside upgraded Apache helicopters and tasked with reconnaissance, precision strikes and electronic warfare
• Project Corvus, up to 24 surveillance drones to replace the Watchkeeper system
• A new uncrewed ground vehicles programme delivered through British industry
• A £50 million boost over the next year for the RAPSTONE programme, funding first-person-view and interceptor drones, as part of wider investment in expendable systems and loitering munitions

Royal Air Force

• A national Collaborative Combat Air programme developing autonomous fighter jets, with a demonstrator due to fly by at least 2030
• The Storm Shroud uncrewed electronic-warfare drone, entering service this year

The full Defence Investment Plan, and the efficiency savings needed to pay for it, will become clearer when Starmer sets it out on Tuesday.