TL;DR

The head of the Royal Air Force said on Monday 26 October that its future depends on “autonomy, not flesh”. In a London lecture hosted by RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth described plans for four armed, AI-enabled drones to fly with every Typhoon, and said the role of aircrew would shift towards oversight.

What Smyth set out

The phrase reworks the Second World War doctrine of “steel, not flesh”, in which Britain and the US leaned on tanks and aircraft to avoid repeating the trench slaughter of the first world war. Smyth argued that AI now makes the next step possible. “AI will enable warfare that speeds well beyond human comprehension,” he said, adding that the human role would be “controlling the activity and setting the guardrails”.

He gave few concrete examples but pointed to Storm Fighter, the £300m loyal-wingman drone programme announced in July within the delayed defence investment plan. First tests are due in 2027, with the drones meant to be operational as the decade closes, in step with Nato’s directive that alliance members, the UK included, be able to fight Russia by then if they must. The Guardian describes one possible use: drones shadowing Russian aircraft heading into the north Atlantic, directed from a Typhoon flying over Scotland hundreds of miles away.

Why now

Recruitment is part of the case. The RAF’s fully trained strength has fallen to 27,850, against 29,800 in 2020, according to the Guardian, and has only begun to recover in the past 18 months. Drones, Smyth argued, supply “the affordable mass we so definitely require”.

The Guardian’s report also sets out how other militaries already use AI in targeting. It reports that the US Maven Smart System, built with Palantir, picked out and hit 1,000 Iranian targets within a day of that war starting in the spring, and that the Israeli military used AI databases to speed up strikes in Gaza.

Looking Forward

Smyth’s framing puts humans “towards the outside” of decisions that move faster than people can follow. In our view, the obvious next question for UK policy is what “setting the guardrails” means in practice for armed autonomous systems, and who answers for it when a drone acts. For UK defence suppliers, Storm Fighter’s 2027 test schedule is the near-term marker to watch.