Rishi Sunak has called on the UK to step up its drone production to enable it to operate effectively on a modern day battlefield. The former prime minister made the statement after meeting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference, where he was told that 80% of casualties currently inflicted on Russia are via unmanned systems.
Sunak, who remains a Conservative MP, called on the UK to “change how we plan, procure and practise war.” Writing in the Times, he said: “What’s happened in the Black Sea shows how bewilderingly fast warfare is changing. European nations must adapt to this new way of fighting.”
He added: “A priority must be to strengthen NATO’s defences by establishing a drone wall in the Baltics. It is imperative that we can scale production, too: 10,000 drones a day are being used in Ukraine.
“It is not as simple as stockpiling them either. The pace of adaptation means that these drones can be out of date within three months.”
The former prime minister urged NATO to work together to procure kit that is interoperable between nations whilst developing frameworks that allows production to be scaled and become iterative.
His comments come after NATO’s lack of ability to operate on a battlefield dominated by drone warfare was laid bare on a recent exercise, where just 10 battle-hardened Ukrainian drone operators demonstrated an ability “to eliminate two battalions in a day.”
A battalion ordinarily consists of around 300 to 500 troops.
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The exercise known as Hedgehog 2025, was conducted in May and involved more than 16,000 troops from 12 NATO countries who trained alongside their Ukrainian counterparts to learn from the realities of war in a simulated “contested and congested” battlefield.
Lt. Col. Arbo Probal, head of the unmanned systems program for the Estonian Defence Forces, said: “The aim was really to create friction, the stress for units, and the cognitive overload as soon as possible.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, during one scenario, a battle group of several thousand troops, including a British brigade and an Estonian division, sought to conduct an attack.
Sources who spoke to the organisation said that as troops manoeuvred around the battlefield, soldiers failed to understand how drones had made the battlefield more transparent, making traditional means of concealment less effective or obsolete.