Some can fly 10 miles high. Others hover a few feet above the ground. They might weigh less than a mobile phone, fitted with cameras to nimbly spy on trenches a few metres away – or be the size of small planes, armed with missiles to destroy buildings deep in enemy territory.
Military drone technology and tactics have evolved rapidly following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the determined fightback. Many are now designed to only be used once – the suicide drone. Soon they may be thinking for themselves, kitted out with artificial intelligence.
As well as revolutionising how armies fight, the drone race is sparking sudden changes to the industry that produces these weapons. Almost all have become cheaper and quicker to build, yet also require constant updates – and armed forces need more of them. A lot more.
With the UK Government announcing another £2.2bn increase in defence spending this week, ministers and military chiefs are considering what types of drones the country will need over the next few years, and how many.
The Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, pledged in her Spring Statement that drone development will be central in ambitions to make the UK a “defence industrial superpower“. But does Britain have the right expertise, facilities and environment for innovation?
This matters. Both to ensure the nation is able to independently protect itself – and potentially Ukraine, if British peacekeeping troops are sent there – and to sustain jobs in one of this decade’s biggest growth sectors. “As defence spending rises, I want the whole country to feel the benefits,” Reeves said on Wednesday.
The prospect of the US military tech start-up Anduril opening a huge factory in the UK, revealed by The i Paper last week, promises a welcome boost.
The Government’s new defence innovation body, and its pledge to spend 10 per cent of the equipment budget on new technologies, should also help.
For these investments to be effective, however, insiders say things need to change fast.
Start-up frustrations
Despite its long history designing groundbreaking military aircraft – from the Sopwith Camel to the Eurofighter Typhoon – the UK is yet to conduct any armed missions using a drone built here.
The UK’s biggest sovereign defence contractor, BAE, boasts it “leads the world” in developing aircraft that can “fly and think for themselves.” But so far its work has centred around two prototypes, the Mantis and Taranis, which have never been used in combat.
Following the RAF’s first drone strike, believed to have been in Afghanistan in 2008, the air force has launched thousands of attacks against militants in Iraq and Syria over the last decade. However, these have all involved Reaper and Predator drones made by American firm General Atomics.
Predators are impressive: 8m long, able to fly for over 30 hours, and armed with laser-guided bombs and missiles. They are also expensive: the total cost of buying and operating 16 of these machines across their lifetime will be £1.76bn.
While these have been useful in fighting Isis, many of the drones proving effective in Ukraine are much smaller, far less costly, and designed to be “attritable” – used just once like a bomb or a missile.
These are the ideal kinds of technology for a new generation of tech start-ups to design and build. But entrepreneur Rohan Silva, a former adviser to David Cameron while he was prime minister, is among those worried such firms are being held back.
“In the UK, military procurement is a closed shop,” he said recently. “Contracts go to an oligopoly of lumbering and inefficient corporations – many of them foreign – while emerging British tech businesses are largely shut out.”
The Chancellor seems to agree, calling the procurement system “broken” and promising better access for small firms.
There is a long list of UK companies producing drones in the defence sector, including Hydra, Overwatch, UAVTEK and Copterz. However, most seem to be focusing on ISR – short for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance – rather than fighting machines.
A senior figure at one British drone manufacturer, who asks not to be identified, claims the MoD has stifled start-ups, because its processes are “biased towards big contractors”.
He argues “prime” defence companies tend to wait for the MoD to say what it wants a weapon to do, then rush to design a concept that meets those specifications but does no more. “Everyone wants innovation, but the large primes won’t risk building something unless someone is paying for it… They don’t come forward with ideas.”
Although new types of stealth jets and warships might be too complex and expensive for companies to develop independently, without guarantees they will be bought, he argues this isn’t the case with drones.
However, officials must be careful about who they buy from. “The industry is full of snake oil,” he warns, claiming that some companies simply buy Chinese-made drones via the internet, fit them with Israeli cameras and American radios, and then charge hundreds of thousands of pounds for units which they boast are assembled in the UK.
Secretive businesses
Perhaps more is going on within the industry than we know about. Prof Peter Lee of Portsmouth University explains that many firms are secretive about their work because they “are desperate to protect their intellectual property and really don’t want to lose their place in the market by releasing information about what they can do, or put ideas in the heads of their competitors.”
They also want to avoid demonstrations by anti-arms protesters outside their offices, and fear becoming assassination targets. “If Russia knew of a company making drones used in Ukraine, it’s not averse to killing people on foreign soil,” says Lee, author of Reaper Force: The Inside Inside Story of Britain’s Drone Wars.
Some British firms have opened factories and workshops in Ukraine. No doubt they are genuinely motivated by helping to repel Putin’s invasion, but Lee says commercial reasons can’t be ignored.
Acknowledging with sadness that “it’s an ugly thing to say, a terrible thing,” he explains the invasion provides Western drone manufacturers with the ultimate “test bed for new weapon technology”. Missions in which people live and die, where Ukraine’s fate is at stake, also serve as “very brutal market tests” for companies to prove their technology works or adapt to failures.
This level of competition means “there are so many new weapons appearing on the battlefield, it’s changing almost by the week.”
Contractors have been particularly keen to learn how to overcome signal jamming. “Both sides are tremendously effective at this,” says Lee.
Some drones are now being operated via thin fibre-optic cables, rendering radio scrambling useless. These wires can stretch more than five miles, says Lee. “They can snag and break, but drone operators get skilled very quickly at carefully navigating to lay out the cable.”
This is also why AI could be transformative, because it would allow a drone to launch attacks without instruction or approval.
Lee, who originally trained as an engineer but is now a professor of applied ethics, says there are profound Terminator-esque questions about unleashing this technology. “What happens if a drone with machine learning decides on a direction of travel, either literal or metaphorical, that was not intended?”
Royal Navy warships are being equipped with laser weapons that can destroy drones. But Lee suspects UK firms must be trying to create drones that can chase and shoot down rivals, leading to pilotless versions of Battle of Britain dogfights.
Worldwide competition
Among the British firms aiding Kyiv is the Surrey-based Evolve Dynamics, which produces unarmed drones. Its flagship product is the Sky Mantis, which is used for reconnaissance and has also been sold to British emergency services.
“What’s going on at the front line has been really eye-opening,” says its interim CEO, Tom Redman. GPS signals are commonly being blocked or “spoofed,” he explains, forcing them to crash unless their radio links use advanced algorithms. Drones already had to be stable and rugged to survive bad weather, but now they also need greater stealth capabilities.
Another key lesson is that machines must be easily repairable at the frontline, so that forces don’t waste time and manpower sending complex machines far away to be patched up. Soldiers should be able “to replace propellers and implement software upgrades in the field”.
Although it intends to stay focused on unarmed technology, Evolve hopes to be a “supportive partner” for the MoD in years to come.
“Being a sovereign provider doesn’t just mean that we’ve got a little office somewhere in the UK,” says Redman. “It’s the whole supply chain – this is where we do the manufacturing and the assembly.”
The big challenge is being profitable in the face of overseas competition, he admits. Globally, production of smaller machines “is completely dominated by two Chinese firms – DJI and Autel Robotics – which have 70 per cent of the market,” he says. “There’s been a huge suppression of the market price because of this… We’re positioning ourselves as the best of the West, on capability and price.”
Helsing, which is headquartered in Munich but has a separate UK arm, has been supplying Ukraine with strike drones that can fly more than 60 miles to destroy tanks and artillery. A spokesperson says: “The Ukrainians have ordered another 6,000, which we think demonstrates their value and makes Helsing one of the biggest providers globally.”
That batch will be made elsewhere, but Helsing is investing £350m in the UK over five years – and says attack drones like its HX-2 model will be manufactured in Britain in future. “The UK is a real talent centre for AI and tech engineers,” the spokesperson says.
Beautiful simplicity
These are promising signs, but the UK’s defence sector needs to evolve further, according to an industry source.
He reasons that there is little point in Britain spending years trying to design a universal drone that looks perfect on paper, ordering vast numbers of it, waiting years for these complex machines to be built, but then finding they are obsolete by the time they are in service – when they might need to be stored in hangars for years until a war erupts, in any case.
Instead, it makes sense to develop a variety of simpler designs that could be built in vast numbers very quickly, if and when they are needed, and could be easily modified as technology improves.
“It’s not really weapons that win wars or deter wars,” he argues. “It’s their production systems.”
The Second World War illustrates this. The Nazis led tank innovation with the Panther and the Tiger, but could only build about 8,000 of these. Its rivals – the American Sherman and the Soviet T-34 – were both inferior designs but a combined total of 100,000 were built.
The German V2 rocket and Me-262 fighter jet were also major technological leaps, but they arrived too late in the conflict to be decisive.
The insider believes the MoD “is getting a lot better,” and is impressed by its advertisement for a new National Armaments Director. With a salary of up to £400,000, plus a potential 60 per cent bonus, much will be expected of whoever is hired.
Maria Eagle, Minister for Defence Procurement and Industry, has pledged this role will “optimise investment” by encouraging more “harmony” between the Government, industry, academia and international partners.
The MoD is already “engaging industry earlier in the procurement process,” Eagle said last week, to see “what is readily available from the supply chains or quickly adaptable from existing capabilities,” before deciding if it needs brand-new products to be designed.
BAE is also making strides forward, having bought and absorbed two drone start-ups – Malloy and Callen-Lenz – last year.
It also established a new research and development incubator in 2023 named FalconWorks. This was inspired by Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works unit, famed for creating the U2 spy plane which flew on the edge of space, the SR-71 Blackbird that could top 2,000mph, and most recently the F-35 stealth fighter.
Those aircraft were all at the cutting edge of technology. But when it comes to drones, many experts think the UK needs to embrace the beauty of simplicity.
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