Use of Drones in Defence

James Cartlidge Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Westminster Hall

[James Cartlidge (South Suffolk) (Con)]

It is a real pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell. I know you take a great interest in these matters because you served on the Defence Committee when I was a Minister, and I am sure you regard this debate with great interest.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) on introducing this debate, because the issue of drones is so timely, interesting and, I dare say, urgent for defence procurement, defence training and all aspects of defence. He made a brilliant speech. It was not only delivered well but made some important and substantive points on, for example, countering drones, which should be considered as important in this debate as the acquisition of our own strike-reconnaissance capabilities and so on. I am pleased that we have the Veterans Minister here, and I know he is also very passionate about this subject.

I quickly say, especially as the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) is here, that people are still the most important capability, despite everything we will say in this debate. I hope he will be as robust as possible in standing up for our veterans in the weeks ahead, because this stuff will come to a head. All of us who care about the British armed forces have to stand by those who served all those years ago, so that we do not undermine the morale of those who serve today.

On the key subject of drones, my main argument is that they are an amazing opportunity for the United Kingdom to fundamentally modernise its armed forces in a way we have not done for a long time. In many ways, we are quite lucky, because drones bring mass and lethality to our existing forces relatively cheaply and relatively quickly. Above all, and this is underestimated, we are in an amazing position to capitalise on that in many ways, for reasons that have not been fully shared with the public. I will now try to do that.

The day I became Defence Procurement Minister in April 2023, there was a vote in the House of Commons. People came up to congratulate me as I walked through the Lobby, and every other colleague said, “By the way, you’ve got Ajax,” which is what defence procurement was known for at the time. Two months later, I made a statement to the House about Ajax resuming field training with the Army and the Household Cavalry, and how it is a highly capable vehicle.

However, I had a sense, as Defence Procurement Minister, that there was a parallel universe. There was business as usual, with long procurement times and many delays under successive Governments—the old way. On the other hand, there was what we were doing in the MOD for Ukraine. It was like a parallel universe. We acted at pace for Ukraine with incredible scale and innovation. We got thousands and thousands of shells from around the world and delivered them to Ukraine. It was an incredible exercise, of which I am very proud. I am also very proud that the current Government have continued it.

Nowhere was this difference more striking than in drones. I would not quite call it an epiphany—I do not know the right word—but my most memorable moment as Defence Procurement Minister came in the autumn of 2023, when I visited an SME in the south of England. It had developed a drone—at the time it was highly sensitive, dare I say classified—that went on to be used in Ukraine. It was a highly effective long-range, one-way attack drone, now a matter of public record. This SME, not a big prime, had developed a drone relatively cheaply and very quickly, and it made an impact on the frontline against a peer military of Europe.

That was extraordinary. Revolutionary. I was so struck by it, but what really got me—the thing that is most important about the uncrewed area—is that the SME was getting feedback from the frontline within days, if not hours. It was using that feedback to immediately upgrade the capability by changing various important but relatively subtle parameters. I was immersed, as all Defence Procurement Ministers are, in the endless emails about delays to the latest big platform, or whatever it was, so I was struck that there is a different way.

What did I do about it? As my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) and the hon. Member for Strangford said, I launched the drone strategy in February 2024. It was relatively simple. The Secretary of State always says it was only 12 pages, but the truth is that it was a lot shorter when it was first presented to me. I was pretty furious about that, because to me drones are a fundamental part of defence. The key point is that I wanted it to reverse the sense of living in a parallel universe. I wanted us to embrace what we were doing for Ukraine so that our armed forces could benefit in the same way. It is simple to summarise the strategy: to continue delivering drones at scale for Ukraine—thousands of them, as we did and as the current Government have done—but, in parallel, to develop our own SME drone ecosystem for the British armed forces. That is what I wanted to do.

In February 2024, I also announced the integrated procurement model, which I am very grateful that you mentioned in the recent Defence Committee debate, Ms Lewell. The key thing is that it was also relatively straightforward. Instead of these very long development times for new equipment, it is about setting minimum deployable capability—to get things into use as quickly as possible, where they can be used if the balloon goes up, to put it bluntly—and then to develop them spirally in service. That is how the modern world works, and it is how software companies have always sought to work: get it going, and then constantly upgrade. That is the only way to keep pace with technology. That procurement model went live in April 2024, and the general election was called in May, so it is fair to say that there was not a huge amount of time to introduce some of it, but we made some progress.

I now want to talk about some key points about how to ensure that the UK seizes this opportunity so that our armed forces are world leaders in the use of drones. The first point is the most important. This has not been a political debate, and I am not trying to play party politics, but I have also been a Treasury Minister. When I was the Minister for Defence Procurement, I was in all the discussions about how to get to 2.5%, so I know what it is like to deal with the Treasury. What happened is that when the new Government came in—they are not the first to do this—the Treasury put a clamp on procurement as a way of controlling in-year budgets. It is very common. The Treasury frequently tried to do it with us, but Ben Wallace and Grant Shapps, the Secretaries of State, always pushed back. I tried to work with the Treasury to find compromises and to prioritise the procurements that were most important to the Department.

The consequence is that, for months, there has been an effective procurement freeze. Defence companies tell us that they are waiting and waiting. They were waiting for the SDR, and now they are waiting for the defence investment plan, which will put in place the decisions of the SDR. They have been waiting for the defence industrial strategy. They have been waiting for the appointment of a national armaments director, who will come in as a great white knight and solve all these problems. By the way, when the problems are really tough, the companies will turn around to the Defence Procurement Minister, who earns about a thirtieth of what they do, and ask them to solve it because it is political, which it always ends up being.

In the meantime, we need to get on with it, so let me suggest an idea. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill said that when we tabled a written question asking how many drones have been ordered since the general election, we were told three, which is extraordinary. When I raised the matter with the Secretary of State, he said that it was a specific answer to a specific question. It certainly is, but it is still fairly shocking. What we have found, particularly when we talk to those in the Army, is that there are drones coming into their units, but they are, for example, through sports—they do drone sports. There is not yet a central push to transform the forces to fight with uncrewed systems.

So where could we get the money? My personal view is that the Chagos deal is basically bonkers. Next year, we as a country will spend £250 million leasing back a base that we currently own freehold—the islands too, of course. Half that budget could transform the UK drone ecosystem, because tens of millions of pounds would make a difference.

There is one risk: how do we buy drones when, in theory, they go out of date so quickly? There is no risk to what I would call a training order. We should buy enough drones from British companies so that the Army can start training with them at scale. But the crucial thing is not the manufacture or the initial buy; it is establishing the relationship between our forces and those SMEs so that they are constantly developing them in service. That is how new technology works. That is a relatively inexpensive step to take; it just needs leadership, and I know the Minister wants to make it happen.

Another key point is testing. In June 2023—two months after I became Defence Procurement Minister— I held a roundtable in Larkhill with what were then the main UK defence drone SMEs. It was a really fascinating meeting. I went round the table and said to all of them, “Name the one thing the Government could do to help you,” and they all came up with the acronyms CAA and MAA—in other words, the Civil Aviation Authority and the Military Aviation Authority. They all wanted it to be easier to test drones, particularly kinetic drones, in the UK.

I was encouraged recently when I attended the Royal International Air Tattoo and was told by a relatively senior military officer that there will be testing on the Outer Hebrides range—in Benbecula, I think, which I visited when I was a Minister—for firing what are still dummy drones, but testing them as far as we can in the UK. I fully accept that there is a limit to how we can test, particularly if the drones have explosives, but we have to be able to test more than we currently do.

It is not just testing for the SMEs. My team met some reservists recently who talked about the red tape and what they have to fill in even to be able to use a reconnaissance drone for Army training. As is so often the case in the MOD, others will assure us, “It’s all fine, Minister.” On the MAA and the CAA—we set up a working group with the Department for Transport—I remember being told, “Minister, it’s all sorted. It’s all fine,” but then the SMEs told me something different. We have to grip this competition because we want to win it and it is vital to our prosperity.

Colleagues talked about training. The hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Helen Maguire) made a very good point about making drone use part of regular training. This is not so much my area of expertise. The Minister obviously has great expertise in this area, and I hope he will touch on how we are bringing forward training in the use of drones at a unit level.

My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon, having served in the infantry, obviously speaks with massive experience. He made the point that we need an Army that can fight with these things. It is all well and good talking about procurement, which is the side I have seen, but how do we get them into the Army to rapidly boost its lethality and survivability? That is what we all want to see, and it is what the new head of the Army, the Chief of the General Staff, will deliver.

My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon raised an important point about GCAP. When I worked on GCAP as a Minister, it was primarily on the diplomatic side. [Interruption.] The roof is creaking slightly. Hopefully that is merely the power of my oratory and rhetoric, and nothing to be concerned about.

On GCAP, I will refer to a couple of points I made last September when we were invited to make submissions to the SDR. At the time, I was merely the interim shadow Defence Secretary while my party awaited a new leader. I do not know if anyone read our submissions—I think AI read a lot of the submissions—but my two points are still worth considering.

First, instead of focusing on 10-year equipment plans, which would become the defence investment plan, we need much more focus on a three-year war readiness plan in each of the forces. That is something that the Chief of the General Staff has, in effect, been talking about. If that were done with the RAF, it would be much harder for it to meld all the elements of GCAP into one. The other point I made is that we really need a two-pillar GCAP—a bit like AUKUS.

The first pillar is the platform, which is where the focus inevitably always is in defence—that is the old, platform-focused procurement model. Instead, we should have a second pillar with all the ancillary stuff. That would include, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon said, the “system of systems,” particularly electronic warfare capability and drones. That needs to come into service much faster.

The key thing to all of this is the threat. If the threat really is only two or three years away, we have to be stronger in two or three years. The aspects of RAF development that are to do with loyal wingman are about helping our current aircraft. Forget about the stuff that will arrive in 2040, important though that is; it is about the capabilities that can help the current Typhoon fleet and the F-35s to be even more lethal and capable. We know that drones can fly with them. We need to accelerate all of that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill made an important point about the Red sea, which has also been a key testing ground for drones. The key point is that the drones were not only threatening Ukraine; they were threatening our own Royal Navy. HMS Diamond was attacked. As a Minister at the time, I had a real sense that this was a clear and present danger because the drone attacks had to be thwarted with much more expensive missiles, which is the key issue.

However, we know that Iran was supplying more and more sophisticated ballistic missiles to the Houthis. That is on public record. How could we defend against all those things? I therefore felt we needed to accelerate all ranges of technology that could help to intercept drones relatively cheaply, so that we could keep our missile stocks for the really exquisite threats. We need a balance between expensive and cheap capabilities, which is why DragonFire is a good example of something we should take forward.

All Members have focused on the counter-drone point. I cannot think of a better symbol of the parallel universe—the way we have delivered for Ukraine but not for our own armed forces—than the fact that, if we visit the Army today, its electronic countermeasures will be the box that was used in Afghanistan. That was very good at the time, but it is not up to date. Nevertheless, a British company has been delivering, in real time, countermeasure kits to Ukraine that have been incredibly successful and are saving lives on a real frontline. We should be buying those for our Army at the same time. That is why I say it feels like a parallel universe, which is what we need to break. I know the Minister understands that and is as passionate about it as I am.

The hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) spoke about how to defend against the drone threat, and he particularly spoke about armour. My hon. Friend the Member for Huntingdon spoke about tanks and the need to protect their tracks. I do not have that level of battlefield experience, but it is true to say that we must move quickly on lasers, directed energy weapons and, particularly, sound weapons that use radio frequencies—they are currently a bit indiscriminate, but they have a lot of potential if they are refined. We have to go at these things as fast as possible. Britain has an amazing science base.

That brings me to my final point, which is about autonomy. This is really about technology and the need to outthink one’s opponent, as much as anything. If we are honest, we will never have every aspect of every drone made in the UK. The areas where we really need to lead are the brain—the science. Britain has an amazing science base. I always found the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory’s advice fascinating. The DSTL has huge experience and works well with the military. We could go further on the way in which DSTL and the defence science base link in with SMEs. There has been a lot of progress on that, but we can go further. Going back to the drone I was talking about, the company was successful because its link to the data really gave it the edge. That is what we have to do: we have to enable SMEs to come into Main Building or other secure environments and to be constantly fed the battlefield data—what is really happening in warfare—so that they can respond quickly.

This is really about autonomy. The hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Apsana Begum) spoke about the situation in Gaza. I know that there are people who are worried about the ethics of the autonomous use of weapons, and I understand that. I appeared before the AI in Weapons Systems Committee in the House of Lords, where the Bishop of Coventry asked me some interesting questions about the ethics of all this. I would simply say—okay, this is a defence point of view—that we should be very wary of in any way tying our hands on the use of autonomy, because you can bet your bottom dollar that the Chinese and the Russians will not be doing that. We have to maintain our ability to compete with them.

Phalanx is the gun on the side of some of our ships. When it is on, it is effectively autonomous. If something flies into its sight that fits certain parameters, it will fire. No one presses a button. The point, though, is that there is a chain of command and a way back that will have been built by someone from a country with a democracy and so on. So it is the whole life cycle that we have to take into account. We should really invest in autonomy. We should back our science base, working closely with our SMEs.

I finish by saying to the Minister that we are all patriots here. We want to succeed. We want to have the world’s best armed forces. We want to lead in this. We know we can. We have done amazing things. When we supply Storm Shadows and leading drones to Ukraine, we are going to know a bit about how to use them. We have never been directly involved, but we have done so much that we are well placed to learn from it. I hope the Minister can drive this forward. He knows he has our backing in doing so, but we need to see greater pace and urgency and, ultimately, not just big defence documents, but kit in the hands of those who serve our country.

[The Minister for Veterans and People (Al Carns)]

I am truly grateful to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell. I thank the hon. Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune) for securing the debate—I genuinely believe that we are at a pivotal time, so having it today is poignant. The opportunity to discuss the critical importance of uncrewed systems to our armed forces and our national security is a continual requirement in this place.

It will not be lost on hon. Members that I am not the Minister for Defence Procurement, but I have a vested interest in this subject. I have been helping a cross-ministerial team to design our strategy as we move forward. Why am I passionate about this issue? Mentioned in dispatches, combat; Military Cross, combat; Distinguished Service Order, combat; OBE, combat—I spent a lot of time in combat. What we are seeing now in Ukraine gives the soldier, the airman or the sailor the ability to disengage from combat and to send technology forward. We are seeing a revolution in technological affairs in Ukraine, and it is of the utmost importance.

The devastation and horror of war provide an imperative for rapid innovation. Each side pitted, racing to gain decisive advantage by innovating faster than the other. These developments define an era of conflict and innovation. Think the Parthian shot, the longbow, the crossbow, the musket, the tank, the aeroplane and, as the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) mentioned, the Dreadnought. They have all marked a pivotal moment in technological change. Today, I would argue that it is uncrewed systems. The lesson for the UK is that we must be a leader in the revolution in uncrewed systems—which has not changed the nature of conflict, as Clausewitz would say, but changed its character forever—or be left behind.

In no small part, this understanding motivated me to enter politics, and it was one of the key reasons I left the military: to galvanise change and to do what I could to safeguard this great nation, because I saw war changing the entire character of conflict itself. Today’s discussion addresses an existential challenge, which this Government, the Defence team, and I are absolutely determined to grip.

Uncrewed systems have fundamentally changed the character of conflict—fact. In Ukraine, thousands of drones fill the skies every day and night. On average, thousands of drones a day—up to 2,000 or 3,000, and, at the very height, 6,000—are being flown on the frontline. A division has hundreds of drones that observe every section of the battlefield 24/7 and cue strike platforms at a moment’s notice. Drones are 22 times more lethal and accurate than an artillery round. For the first time since the first world war, more casualties have been caused by a system other than artillery or offensive support—that is, drones. Not training our people in drones would be like not training our people in artillery prior to the first world war.

A year ago, I was quoted as saying that uncrewed systems represent

“a machine gun moment for the Army, a submarine moment for the Navy and a jet engine moment for the Air Force.”

I also said that the inclusion of data, AI and quantum would only deepen the effects of this revolution. I would say now, one year later, that we are at an inflection point similar to the moment when armies fighting in world war one realised the utility of airpower. We know what happened then: the “Top Gun” generation was born, and airpower changed every nation’s way of fighting.

We are approaching the 85th anniversary of the battle of Britain, which is a poignant reminder of the significant impact of cutting-edge technology, such as the Spitfire, radar, importantly, or our very first computers, on the defence of our nation. Unlike those previous advances, the impact of uncrewed systems across air, land and sea is simultaneous, undermining many existing, exquisite and expensive capabilities.

As I reflect over 24 years of military service, I recognise just how much of what I did could now be done by uncrewed systems. I mean that, because about 75% of everything I have done could be done by uncrewed systems. That would have made my life a lot safer, although it would probably have reduced the medal count.

We have seen this revolution shape Putin’s war of aggression. On land, surveillance and attack drones stalk the battlefield around the clock. Thousands of drones, whether FPV—first-person-view—drones, surveillance drones or long-range strike drones, dominate the battlefield. There is a dead zone on the frontline, about 30 km deep, where no one moves: small teams or individuals are the only ones who survive, and they do not survive for long. Interestingly—the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Ben Obese-Jecty) mentioned tanks earlier—tanks’ sustainability on the battlefield is limited. Not K-kills but M-kills—mobility kills, taking off the tank’s tracks, immobilising its engine, or immobilising the crew, the sights and the sensors—happen relatively quickly. Perhaps we can allude to what that will look like in the future later in the debate.

In the Black sea, we have seen a navy without a navy sink a navy—that is, Ukraine’s unmanned vessels have sunk or scattered Russia’s once all-powerful Black sea fleet.

[James Cartlidge]

The Minister is making a fascinating speech, and he knows that I am as interested in this subject as anyone. On the naval point, it was an incredible moment in May when a Ukrainian naval drone downed a Russian Su-30, I think. Does that not point to some of our looming procurements—for example, future air dominance, the Type 83, and all those things in the Navy’s assumptions about how we defend this island in the future? We are an island, so the potential for us to be protected by uncrewed barges and sensors carrying effectors way out in our ocean is an exciting development.

--- Later in debate ---

[Al Carns]

It is a combination of the two. Yes, it is a machine gun moment for the Army, but it is also an Air Force moment for the whole military, so we need careful consideration of how we will integrate this. The Ukrainians, for example, have combat companies who will fly 150 FPV drone strikes a day. They will do that with separate teams flying in support of infantry, much as we would have had close air support in the past. A drone team may fly 50 drone missions a day with 80% lethality and accuracy.

I will leave it to the generals, the admirals and the air vice-marshals to work out how they integrate the system. However, it must be integrated at the section and infantry level all the way to the division level in the Army; from the single ship all the way to the fleet level in the Navy; and from the single aircraft, if not major drone, all the way to fighting formations in the Air Force. That is the level of integration that will be required—it is pretty seismic.

We talked earlier about the high-low end mix. We will help to deliver Europe’s first hybrid carrier air wing. The hon. Member for Huntingdon mentioned, and I agree, that GCAP and the loyal wingman programme are sophisticated capabilities, but there is nothing to say that it is not—no pun intended—a Russian doll method where something releases something smaller that becomes more attritable and more mass-produced. That is probably where we are going with many of these systems.

We are also enhancing our uncrewed naval platforms. The patrol of the north Atlantic, protecting our continuous at-sea deterrent can adopt some of that technology. We will also, as the hon. Member mentioned, move towards a 20:40:40 capability mix for the British Army, which I think is essential, as is being proven in Ukraine at the moment. As he mentioned, that is 20% crewed, 40% reusable and 40% disposable uncrewed systems. I would like to see a lot of those drones used as ammunition so that, much as we would have down the range with a magazine and 30 rounds of ammunition, we should be able to go down the range with 10 drones, fly them down, use them, get proficient in that and ensure that we are as accurate and lethal with a drone as we are with a rifle, if not more so.

It is a move to help deliver our goal of increasing the Army’s lethality tenfold. I argue that we need to move on that as fast as is feasible. The critical component is our partnership with industry, and not just the big primes but SMEs are key to delivering those ambitions. That is why we have established UK Defence Innovation to connect with investors and get those SMEs, innovators and start-ups able to break into the defence market, which we know has been a problem in the past. That will ensure that we can rapidly identify and back innovative products that will give us a military, and indeed an economic, edge.

To integrate these new technologies across three military services—I think this is the critical component—we are creating an uncrewed centre of excellence, alongside a range and testing facility. It will be surrounded by SMEs and industry, with the people who know what they are talking about, because there is a lot of snake oil out there. We must put them in one place and then, as I mentioned, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. We must allow them to help the Army, Navy and Air Force to contract different hardware that has simultaneous and integrated software. That is how we will create capabilities that will be able to talk to each other in the future.

[James Cartlidge]

I called my reform the integrated procurement model, because I think the Minister is right: integration is so important, and it has been a deficiency of our bottom-down approach. However, does that not mean that we will need some kind of C2 system for our military? When I was in post, there was a lot of talk about ACCS, which was the system developed for NATO, but frankly was not fit for purpose. That would be a very significant investment. Is it something that the MOD is currently looking at?

[Al Carns]

In the SDR, there was a £1 billion investment in an integrated targeting web, and that is what ties all these systems together. The only way it will tie together is if the software is interchangeable. Indeed, if we were then to lay on AI in quantum, we would be taking it to the next step of starting to remove people further back down the chain. I believe we will always have to be in the chain, but we will move back. Our adversaries may not. That will be a pivotal change in the way of warfare again.

The uncrewed centre of excellence is one to watch within the SDR. It will be in place by February. It will provide centralised expertise, funding and standards. The Military Aviation Authority and the Civilian Aviation Authority were mentioned. The centre will help them to develop and get through some of the bureaucracies while remaining in line with the rules and regulations. It will help to develop skills across defence. For example, drone qualifications across the Navy, Army and Air Force at the moment are all starting to move in different directions. We have to synthesise them, and make sure that they are correct and that everyone is doing the same, so that we can swap and interchange people. That will help to deliver a regulatory framework in which our companies can succeed.

In June, we announced a landmark partnership with Ukraine to share technology, harness the innovation expertise from the frontline and increase our industrial co-operation, which is critical because innovation is moving at such a pace on the frontline. Our plans are a shot in the arm. We need to continue to push as hard as is feasible for what is already one of the leading uncrewed systems sectors in the world.