James Cartlidge: Drones are the future of warfare, and an Anglo-Ukranian industrial alliance can take us there

James Cartlidge is Shadow Defence Secretary and has been MP for South Suffolk since 2015.

It is estimated that attack drones have been responsible for 80 per cent of all battlefield casualties in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Given that artillery is likely to have been the greatest battlefield killer of the first and second world wars, this emphasises the fact we are seeing a revolution in warfare in Ukraine – and one we need to learn from if we are to ensure our own defences are fit to fight the latest threats.

Uncrewed warfare thus forms the subject of my fourth and final thought piece for ConHome in advance of the Government’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR), promised ‘by the spring’.

In October 2023, as minister for defence procurement, I first visited one of the companies making drones that would go on to do real damage against Russian forces in Ukraine. Two particular facets of the capability I witnessed stood out.

First, the long-range, one-way attack drone in question had good and bad days, as with all such systems. This is because evolution happens in drone wars at breathtaking speed and there is thus a need to constantly adjust the platform in question, in a process known as ‘spiral development’, so that it can maintain competitive edge.

As I visited, the company were receiving real-time feedback from the front line and adjusting their technology there and then. For a minister accustomed to the typically drawn-out procurement timescales of MoD ‘business as usual’, this was a revelation.

The other striking feature? The company was British, not Ukrainian. This was a start-up SME based in England that had produced a weapon that would have real impact in a European land war, against a peer military power, for a fraction of the cost and time associated with the missiles produced in such small numbers by the big defence companies (the ‘primes’).

This experience would serve as an inspiration when I launched the MoD’s first ever Defence Drone Strategy last February. Earlier this month Labour confirmed in a written answer that they would continue the Drone Strategy – so how are things progressing and what does this mean for the SDR?

There is no question that our armed forces possess a wide range of uncrewed capabilities. In ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance), the RAF’s Reaper drones have been in service since 2007, and though they represent a price point and capability redolent of the pre-Ukraine era (they were designed to survive) they have been highly successful in the Middle Eastern theatre.

On logistics, I launched the Drone Strategy at another British SME, Maidenhead-based Malloy Aeronautics, whose heavy-lift quadcopter drones have been used in Ukraine to resupply their army. It was recently confirmed that their T-150 model will be used by the Royal Navy to carry supplies between ships of the Carrier Strike Group – freeing up crewed helicopters to focus on other tasks.

A key benefit of uncrewed systems is taking our service personnel out of harm’s way; one of the last procurements I announced at the MoD was securing 50 T-4 bomb disposal robots, which are also able to deal with chemical threats.

Meanwhile the Royal Navy recently took delivery of its first uncrewed mine clearance vessel, another procurement built on considerable work undertaken by the previous Government and vital to protecting British interests given concerns over threats to cables and other subsea infrastructure.

If drones are becoming critical to warfighting, of course, then so too is effective counter-drone technology. I believe ‘Directed Energy Weapons’ could play a major role in protecting our people and platforms from drone threats, and I accelerated development of two: the DragonFire laser, to give our naval ships an anti-drone air defence by 2027, and the RF DEW kinetic soundwave weapon, potentially capable of knocking out multiple drones with one hit.

However, there is a glaring weakness with our inventory: lack of mass. In the Defence Drone Strategy’s foreword I wrote:

“It is in the uncrewed space that we will increasingly drive the mass of our forces, whilst in parallel strengthening the lethality and survivability of all our platforms and personnel”.

Whether we like it or not, no magic wand could deliver vastly more traditional tanks, ships and combat planes in the near term; it would take years, and would be beset by the usual challenges of cost and recruitment. Whereas, drones can be far more affordably produced (and spirally developed) at extraordinary scale and pace.

As with everything in British defence, drone procurement is largely on hold whilst we await the SDR. To illustrate, I recently tabled a Parliamentary Question asking the MoD how many military drones they had purchased since last July’s election.

The answer? Three. Not three million, three thousand or even three hundred. Just three – and all for reconnaissance. Zero for attack.

Ukraine will produce around three million drones this year. We may not be at war, but our military surely needs hundreds of drones, if not thousands, just for training.

Of course, the written answer stressed that – as we did – that Labour have been purchasing significant numbers of British-made attack drones for Ukraine. Yet the whole point of my Defence Drone Strategy was that whilst we would initially focus on providing drones to Ukraine, we would learn from that and develop our own domestic industrial base, to supply drones to the British armed forces at scale and at pace.

To understand the art of the possible, one only needs to see what is happening in Ukraine. Last week I visited a company in Kyiv producing vast numbers of lethal long-range one-way attack drones which rival far more expensive systems in terms of strike capability, but are produced in days rather than years – and at a far lower cost than traditional armaments manufacture.

The factory was abuzz with a workforce so obviously committed to the national endeavour of their country’s war effort. This was a recent start-up, producing a genuine mass of military effectors – piled high on over-brimming shelves, ready for the frontline – to an affordable budget and in rapid time.

Scale-up has been a traditional challenge for all British SMEs. How can our defence industrial sector deliver similar affordable mass?

One option is investment from a defence prime – and Malloy, together with other drone SMEs, have since been bought up by BAE Systems. But I happen to think one way to enable a step change in our munitions’ output is for British manufacturers, defence or otherwise, to team up with Ukrainian drone producers.

Of course, any new lines of production would require security of IP, and need to be genuine ‘additional’ capacity, as the Ukrainian authorities would rightly never permit diversion of home-grown drones to international export whilst they are at war.

But, if such capacity was completely new, Ukrainian firms would benefit from a secure alternative base, away from the bombing threat. Most importantly, for us and them, any order could be doubled up to include the British armed forces, who would gain rapid access to affordable battle-winning kit.

There are still drone sceptics, and it was recently put to me by one such expert that NATO would ‘fight differently’ to Ukraine, and that NATO’s far greater number of fighter jets would theoretically avoid the attritional conflict that has arguably made drones so important in Ukraine.

This is not, however, just about one aspect of land warfare. Ukraine arguably pulled off one of the greatest naval victories of modern times in the Black Sea, following devastating attacks on Russia’s ‘traditional’ naval vessels by cheap but deadly maritime attack drones. Our own fleet was recently challenged by Houthi drones in the Red Sea, presenting a dilemma: how to deploy air defence systems without denuding missiles for ‘cheap’ targets?

But when we talk about drones we are really, in the medium-term, talking about ‘autonomy’: robot warfare. From uncrewed air defence ‘arsenal barges’ for the Navy, to robotic land systems able to resupply armies in battle, I am convinced that such drones offer the potential to transform our fighting capability across the board, especially when coupled with AI.

So a top priority for the SDR must surely be to set out a path for the UK to become a leading nation in the use of autonomous, pan-domain uncrewed systems. To do that, we need mass, and to gear up our industrial base. I believe that partnering with Ukrainian firms who have done this in real time would be a great starting point.