RAF chief: future warfare will run on 'autonomy, not flesh'

The Royal Air Force plans to fly four armed, AI-enabled drones alongside every Typhoon fighter, with the first tests scheduled for next year. Air Chief Marshal Harv Smyth, the chief of air staff, laid out the vision in a speech in London on Monday, and he framed it in blunt terms. The future RAF will rely on "autonomy not flesh," he said.

The shift would push military personnel "towards the outside" of combat, Smyth told an audience at the Royal United Services Institute, the London-based defence think tank. His lecture set out a strategy for an air force that has been told it must be ready to fight against Russia by 2030.

Why does this matter now?

The context is a war cycle that has already normalized AI on the battlefield. The US, Israel, Russia and Ukraine have all used artificial intelligence to make warfare more deadly, and the pace is accelerating.

"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.

His argument reaches back to the Second World War for its logic. Then, the Anglo-American model relied on "steam, not flesh" — tanks and combat aircraft rather than infantry — to avoid repeating the trench warfare that killed millions in the First World War. Smyth wants a modern update of that doctrine.

"Given today's changing character of war, I would argue strongly that the modern paradigm must now become autonomy, not flesh," he said.

What is the RAF actually building?

Smyth pointed to the £300m Storm Fighter programme of "loyal wingman" drones, announced in July as part of the delayed defence investment plan. The programme gives the clearest picture yet of what he means in practice.

The plan, as described in his speech:

• Four armed, AI-enabled uncrewed craft would work alongside every RAF Typhoon.
• The first tests are to be conducted next year.
• The drones should be in service by the end of the decade.

That timeline aligns with a Nato directive for the UK and other alliance members to be ready to fight Russia if necessary by 2030. Over the weekend, 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."

"Crewed platforms are no longer enough," Smyth said.

The drones would "provide force multiplier function and the affordable mass we so definitely require," he added, and would be "placing sensors, weapons, and unite warfare capabilities well within contested airspace."

How would the drones be used?

One concrete scenario came up in the speech. The drones could track Russian aircraft seeking to cross the Greenland-Ireland-UK gap into the north Atlantic, with a pilot controlling them from the cockpit of a Typhoon flying over Scotland, several hundred miles away.

The aircraft would be capable of patrolling hundreds of miles in the distance from their crewed leader, according to Smyth's description of the concept.

Smyth gave few other examples of how the air force would use AI. But the recruitment math behind the push is not abstract. The RAF's fully trained personnel numbers have fallen from 29,800 in 2020 to 27,850 today, and the total has only begun to increase over the last 18 months. Drones would allow the RAF to increase its ability to strike at a time when recruitment has been challenging.

What has AI already done on the battlefield?

The technology Smyth wants to adopt is not theoretical. It has already reshaped several active conflicts.

AI has been used by the Israeli and US military to dramatically increase the pace of target selection in the wars in Gaza and Iran, allowing them to run more bombing missions. The Israeli Defense Forces used two databases, Lavender and Habsora (also known as the Gospel), to accelerate attacks on people and buildings during the war in Gaza.

The US military's Maven Smart System, developed in conjunction with Palantir, was used to identify and strike 1,000 targets in Iran in the first 24 hours of the war this spring. That figure is the clearest measure of what AI-assisted targeting can do at scale.

Russia and Ukraine have also entered the race. Both have begun to use AI to identify and strike targets on the ground, eliminating the need for satellite or radio communication as drones descend on their bombing missions. In July, Ukrainian investigators concluded that a drone that killed a person near a Zaporizhzhia gas station that month was relying on AI for its attack.

Smyth cited Ukraine's long-range campaign as direct evidence of the trend. "Autonomous air systems penetrate Russia's perceived sense of sanctuary on a routine basis," he said, describing how Ukrainian drones conduct long-range strikes against targets inside Russia, such as oil refineries.

What changes for the people in the loop?

Smyth's speech sketches a different job for military personnel rather than a smaller one. AI, in his telling, will push humans toward supervision — controlling the activity and setting the guardrails — while machines operate at a speed "well beyond human comprehension." That shift, he argued, would revolutionise warfare, limit the exposure of military personnel and ease the pressure on recruitment that the RAF's own numbers make plain.

The stakes sit at the intersection of technology, policy and doctrine. Britain is committing to a model of airpower built around affordable mass — cheap, autonomous aircraft in numbers — at precisely the moment allies and adversaries are demonstrating what AI-enabled targeting can do in Gaza, Iran and Ukraine. Smyth offered few operational details beyond the loyal wingman programme, but the direction is fixed. The first tests next year will show whether the RAF's 2030 deadline for autonomy is a plan or an aspiration.