‘Autonomy, not flesh’: RAF official outlines AI drone-powered future
The Royal Air Force will rely on “autonomy not flesh” and deploy four AI-enabled drones alongside every Typhoon fighter, Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth announced on Monday.
The RAF’s chief of air staff outlined a future in which manned aircraft are accompanied by four AI-enabled drones capable of patrolling hundreds of miles. The technological shift would revolutionise warfare, limit the role of military personnel towards the outside, and ease recruitment pressure.
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth said the RAF must be ready to fight Russia by 2030. He described the new strategy as a move from the Anglo-American World War II model of “steam, not flesh” to one of “autonomy, not flesh”.
“AI will enable warfare that speeds well beyond human comprehension, meaning that our role will shift towards the outside, and it will shift towards controlling the activity and setting the guardrails,” Smyth said.
The RAF’s fully trained personnel numbers have fallen from 29,800 in 2020 to 27,850 today. The total has only begun to increase over the last 18 months, creating a need for new force multipliers.
Storm Fighter programme
The core of the new strategy is the £300m Storm Fighter programme, announced in July. This initiative will develop “loyal wingman” drones that will be armed and AI-enabled. Crewed platforms are no longer enough, Smyth stated.
Four armed, AI-enabled uncrewed craft will work alongside every RAF Typhoon. The first tests are to be conducted next year, with the aim of having the drones in service by the end of the decade.
The drones will provide a force multiplier function and the affordable mass required. They will place sensors, weapons, and unite warfare capabilities well within contested airspace.
One possibility is to use the drones to track Russian aircraft seeking to cross the Greenland-Ireland-UK gap into the North Atlantic. A pilot in a Typhoon flying over Scotland could control them from several hundred miles away.
Global AI warfare context
The RAF’s move comes as AI has been used by the US, Israel, Russia and Ukraine to dramatically increase the pace of target selection. The US’s Maven Smart System was used to identify and strike 1,000 targets in Iran in the first 24 hours of a war this spring.
The Israeli military used two databases, Lavender and Habsora, to increase the pace of attacks during the war in Gaza. Russia and Ukraine have also begun to use AI to identify and strike targets on the ground.
In July, Ukrainian investigators concluded that a drone that killed a person near a Zaporizhzhia gas station was relying on AI for its attack. Autonomous air systems penetrate Russia’s perceived sense of sanctuary on a routine basis, Smyth noted.
The RAF’s drones will allow the service to increase its ability to strike at a time when recruitment has been challenging. The defence secretary, Wes Streeting, said the UK had “a little over 1,000 days to complete our mission: to be ready with our allies to fight and win”.
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