Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Ms Lewell.
The nature of warfare has changed. During the last three years of conflict driven by the war in Ukraine and, perhaps controversially, two years of Israel Defence Forces operations in Gaza, we have seen a paradigm shift in the nature of warfare—a tangential move away from the manoeuvre warfare that has shaped military thinking since the blitzkrieg illustrated the potential of speed and firepower. The previous Conservative Government recognised the direction of travel and introduced the UK defence drone strategy prior to the election, in February last year. Backed by an investment of £4.5 billion, the intention was to enable the rapid experimentation, testing and evaluation of uncrewed platforms.
The past year has seen the publication of the strategic defence review, which reflects the continued change of focus. It makes much of the need to adopt a high-low mix, combining exquisite capability with attritable capability such as drones—for high-low, read “expensive-cheap”. At the recent Royal United Service Institute land warfare conference, the opening address of General Sir Roly Walker, Chief of the General Staff, directly referred to the change to a high-low mix in the British Army. He said:
“I want 20% of our lethality to come from the survivable layer, 40% from the attritable, and 40% from consumable. That does not mean I want 1/5th the number of crewed platforms in the Programme of Record, it’s that I want each one to be five times more lethal, survivable and sustainable…And I want to spend 50% of our money on the 20% of crewed and expensive, and 50% on the remaining 80% of attritable.”
We have all seen footage of first-person view drones and how they have been used in the Ukraine-Russia conflict. As a former infanteer, the sight of individual soldiers being stalked slowly by drones hovering just behind them, and menaced and killed at will, strikes fear into my heart for the future of being an infantryman. This is, hopefully, a temporary situation, and in much the same way that the improvised explosive device was in conflict with electronic countermeasures—ECMs—so too will drones find themselves, in time, at the mercy of counter-unmanned aircraft system solutions. Last week, there was an article in The Washington Post about the measures the Ukrainians are taking to combat Russian drone threats, which include going as far as using a biplane with a crew member firing them out of the air with a shotgun. That is the sort of inventive stuff that is currently going on in the east—we would not believe it if we saw it in a movie.
We have already seen the RAF and the Army begin to employ agile combat employment such as the penetrative threat of drones, as illustrated by the bold attack by Ukraine on airfields deep inside Russian territory mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Biggin Hill (Peter Fortune). There is, however, very little in place to prevent a copycat attack against our forces in the UK. If RAF Brize Norton can be breached by civilians on scooters, it can be easily breached by a swarm of drones. What price our air-to-air refuelling or heavy lift capability? That is not easily replaced and fairly easily defeated on the ground. What efforts are the Government making to ensure that we have permanent counter-unmanned aircraft systems capability at all operational flying bases? Agile combat employment will get us only so far and, as we have seen, it takes only a couple of litres of red paint to destroy a jet engine.
In Ukraine, we have seen that survivability is key: how we fight a vehicle is as important as how we physically protect it or conceal it. Before any talk about thermal camouflage or, increasingly, multispectral camouflage, we should consider how the age and capability of the kit we have makes it vulnerable to a drone threat it was never designed to encounter.
The strategic defence review outlines the British Army’s intention to move to a dynamic high-low capability mix, as I alluded to earlier, of 20-40-40: that is 20% crewed platforms to control 40% attritable—preferably survivable—platforms, and 40% consumables such as shells and missiles, also including attritable one-way effector drones. For such a fundamental doctrinal shift in manoeuvre warfare around which the entire Army would need to be restructured, a single sub-paragraph on page 110 of the SDR does not really cut it. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s view on how he plans to extrapolate such a paucity of strategic intent.
At the lowest consumable level, handheld off-the-shelf drones are a plentiful, cheap and effective tool. They are low cost and high volume. Our funding of capability in Ukraine should really be seen as an investment; it is not cynical to suggest that the current conflict is a helpful proving ground for our own future capability. First-person view drones have quickly become a stalwart of the modern battlefield and sit within what the Ministry of Defence considers to be tier 1 and tier 2—those that are consumable or attritable. It is those drones that will see the quickest development, the biggest leaps in capability, and the most effort going into combating them from an anti-personnel perspective. We have already seen the development of a counter-UAS ECM that has led to the impractical horizontal development of fibre-optic drones. The pace of development should force us to ask what the capability will be like by the time British troops are required to use them in anger.