Defence ministry blames ‘administrative error’ for failure to list thousands of UK drones

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The UK Ministry of Defence has been told to “get a grip” after blaming an “administrative error” for excluding thousands of drones from the annual update of its equipment inventory.

The MoD only realised it had failed to account for almost all the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) after the Financial Times pointed out that the official statistics detailing its weapon systems and other hardware suggested the British military had just 55 drones.

The 2023 edition of the UK armed forces equipment and formations statistics only listed the two largest types of drones operated by the air force and army, respectively: 10 hunter-killer Reaper aircraft and 45 Watchkeeper surveillance systems.

The document, published in September, states: “There were 55 Unmanned Aircraft Systems as at 1 April 2023, a decrease of 230 since 2022.” The accompanying spreadsheet has entries for two other types of drones previously operated by the army showing they had been taken out of service in recent years.

The Black Hornet rotary nano-drone used for surveillance by troops in combat in Afghanistan was retired in 2016, while last year the army lost all 230 Desert Hawk III small, fixed-wing surveillance drones that it had operated since 2005.

The MoD said its latest official statistics listing just 55 drones was “based on an administrative error” adding: “In fact, we have invested heavily in over 30 such programmes over the last several years and have thousands of cutting edge aerial vehicles that are designed to make our armed forces more lethal and effective.”

The opposition Labour party said the omission epitomised the failures of the Conservative government since it came to power in 2010.

“That the MoD can’t reliably report the number of drones it owns is symptomatic of 13 years of Conservative mismanagement in defence,” said John Healey, Labour’s shadow defence secretary. At a time of rising threats with a full-scale war in Ukraine, he urged the government to “get a grip on defence budgets and its weapons inventory”.

Drones have become an increasingly important feature of warfare. “We’ve talked about drones for years — they’re here. There are tens of thousands of drones in Ukraine, and they’re really significant on the battlefield,” Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, chief of the UK defence staff, said earlier this year.

Francis Tusa, an analyst and editor of the Defence Analysis newsletter, said the initial error and the MoD’s failure to identify or correct it almost three months after publication cast doubt on the veracity of the other statistics published by the department.

“If the data is not true for the UAVs, how convinced is anyone that the data for tanks or frigates is still accurate?” he said, adding that he had made a complaint to the Office for Statistics Regulation. The OSR told the FT it was looking into the matter.

Sidharth Kaushal, a research fellow in military sciences at Rusi, said the Ukraine conflict had demonstrated that drones would be a “crucial feature of future warfare”.

He said the UK had the same “ballpark capability” in drone warfare as other similarly sized European nations, but was far behind the large military powers of US, China and Russia in the size of fleet and types available.

The UK has had mixed results with its drone programmes in recent years. The programme to replace its ageing Reaper fleet with 16 new large armed drones, dubbed Protector, has been hit by delays and the costs have jumped more than 40 per cent to £1.76bn. They were due to enter service towards the end of the last decade but the first is now not due to enter service until late next year.

Last December, the MoD announced a £129mn replacement contract for the Desert Hawks, with a mix of more than 250 fixed-wing Stalker and Indago multi-rotor drones, mainly for the army, which are due to enter service in late 2024.

In September, the Royal Navy announced a large UAV had landed autonomously on one of its two aircraft carriers for the first time. The UK is one of several countries working on sophisticated armed drones designed to operate alongside piloted aircraft.