Seventy years in the past, Britain confronted a dilemma. It needed to stay a number one navy energy however not had the financial assets to maintain all the traditional capabilities it had inherited from the second world warfare.
The answer proposed within the 1957 Sandys defence white paper was technological. Guided missiles, Duncan Sandys argued, have been reworking warfare so essentially that many conventional capabilities, together with some crewed fight plane, would change into out of date.
In different phrases, by embracing this technological revolution, Britain might obtain defence on a budget. Britain’s new Defence Funding Plan (DIP) displays an analogous strategic intuition. The applied sciences might have modified however the underlying dilemma has not.
Asserting the DIP within the Home of Commons, Dan Jarvis, the defence secretary, mentioned the UK could be making its “largest ever funding in drone warfare: £5 billion for strike, protector and surveillance drones throughout the Royal Navy, the Military and the Royal Air Power.”
Listed below are a number of the key applied sciences mentioned within the Dip.
Drone ships
No less than 1 / 4 of the £5 billion introduced for drone warfare goes in the direction of a “hybrid fleet,” a basic re-imagining of the Royal Navy. The UK’s sole ballistic missile defence functionality – the Sort 45 destroyers – will not get replaced by a like-for-like. As an alternative, a community of Crewed Fight Vessels (CCVs) will act as management hubs for specialised, uncrewed boats.
These would come with Sort 91 missile barges, Sort 92 and Sort 93 anti-submarine and underwater surveillance platforms, and Sort 94 radar vessels. In precept, distributing the sense, resolve and strike capabilities throughout the navy gives a number of benefits.
It might ease continual personnel shortages by decreasing crew necessities, prolong radar and sonar protection over a wider space, and make the fleet extra resilient by dispersing fight energy relatively than concentrating it in a handful of pricy warships.
UK MOD / Crown Copyright
Uncrewed vessels is also rearmed or maintained independently and with out the
design constraints of supporting sailors at sea. Nevertheless, the challenges are important.
The DIP envisages this idea changing into confirmed and operational earlier than the Sort 45 retires within the mid-2030s, although resilient communications and digital warfare safety for autonomous warships stay immature.
Neither is Ukraine’s use of naval drones a simple template. The Royal Navy’s principal duties – significantly anti-submarine warfare within the Excessive North and North Atlantic – are way more demanding than Ukraine’s use of maritime drones within the Black Sea.
Whereas experiments corresponding to utilizing RFA Lyme Bay as a mothership for autonomous mine countermeasures (together with drone minesweepers) are encouraging, retiring Britain’s solely ballistic missile defence destroyers earlier than the broader structure has been confirmed would entail important operational threat.
AI concentrating on community
The military’s Undertaking Asgard illustrates the identical technological philosophy in a special area. Asgard goals to remodel how – and the way rapidly – the military identifies and strikes targets, by linking sensors, armoured automobiles, drones and long-range weapons right into a single, AI-enabled concentrating on community.
First trialled in 2025, Asgard is now receiving £370 million to develop an operational functionality, reflecting the Military’s ambition to obtain a tenfold enhance in fight energy primarily by way of automation relatively than expanded forces.
This concept has an vital mental historical past. Through the Nineteen Nineties, the US championed the idea of network-centric warfare: the proposition that superior data sharing would allow smaller, extra agile forces to defeat numerically superior opponents. However Britain was quickly involved concerning the affordability and technological problem of making such extremely related forces, adopting as a substitute a lighter model: network-enabled capabilities.
The DIP means that the federal government now believes the know-how is catching up with the speculation. However outdated weaknesses stay. Networks solely work in the event that they survive. Communications will be jammed, satellites disrupted and software program attacked, and Russia has the digital warfare capabilities that would, with out ample safeguards, do all three.
‘Loyal wingmen’
It is usually the case that what has labored at smaller ranges now must be scaled throughout Nato. If it really works, Undertaking Asgard would supply Nato land forces with the flexibility to regulate long-range weapons of their very own, decreasing their reliance on air forces which can have to focus on supressing and destroying enemy air defences.
That process is motivating the DIP’s funding in Collaborative Fight Plane (CCAs) – uncrewed platforms that can fly alongside the RAF’s Typhoons and F-35s.
US Air Power / Senior Airman Adrien Tran
These “loyal wingmen” drones would assist crewed plane by performing as scouts, decoys, absorbing enemy hearth or jamming enemy radars. They might be managed by the pilot of the fight jet, or work autonomously.
Techniques such because the MQ-28 Ghost Bat are at an early stage of growth. To be militarily helpful CCAs should mix lengthy vary, excessive velocity, low observability, resilient knowledge hyperlinks and significant payloads, necessities that rapidly strategy the complexity, and probably the fee, of the crewed plane they’re meant to enrich.
Will or not it’s cheaper?
Towards these challenges, the federal government’s headline dedication of £5 billion on these techniques due to this fact appears extra like a down cost than the total mortgage. Unfold throughout 4 years, three armed companies and an exceptionally numerous vary of programmes, it’s much less transformative than some might imagine, and positively not on the timelines some assume are obligatory as tensions proceed with Russia.
The unit prices of what’s going to be specialist gear might stay prohibitively costly. Take the hybrid Navy for instance. The autonomous techniques in query require resilient communications, subtle sensors, digital warfare safety and excessive engineering reliability, that means the mixed price of CCVs and their uncrewed flotillas might strategy that of the destroyers they exchange.
Even when the funding will be discovered – and there are good causes to query whether or not it could – Britain should nonetheless exhibit that its defence trade can ship this technology-intensive drive. Increasing navy output requires way over bigger budgets: it calls for extra manufacturing unit capability, expert employees, shipbuilding infrastructure and resilient provide chains. That is significantly true for autonomous techniques whose navy worth depends upon being produced, sustained and changed at scale.
The DIP rests on three assumptions: that autonomous techniques mature rapidly, show reasonably priced and will be produced at scale. The Sandys Overview rightly foresaw the missile age however underestimated the endurance of standard forces; new applied sciences reshape warfare however they not often exchange its enduring fundamentals.
If Britain is to wager on autonomy, due to this fact, it additionally wants the spending profile to make that wager credible. In any case, a very powerful judgement on the DIP won’t be that of future historians, however of the occupant of the Kremlin immediately.
