UK forces capture £1bn investment in AI battlefield targeting web tech
As Cyber and Electromagnetic Command raises the flag
News
The UK Ministry of Defence this week trumpeted a £1bn investment in AI powered battlefield systems, and a new Cyber and Electromagnetic Command.
The Digital Targeting Web was revealed as defence secretary John Healey visited the UK military’s cyber HQ at MOD Corsham, and as Whitehall gears up for the Labour government’s first strategic defence review.
According to an MOD statement, the technology will “give the UK a decisive advantage through greater integration across domains, new AI and software, and better communication between our Armed Forces.
It cited the example of a “threat” being identified by a sensor in space, “before being disabled by an F-35 aircraft, drone, or offensive cyber operation.”
The MOD added that the targeting web was part of UK efforts to learn from frontline experiences in Ukraine. “When the Ukrainians achieved a step-change in lethality early in the war – by being able to find the enemy, target them and attack quickly and at scale - it allowed them to stop the encircling Russian advance.”
It came days after the MOD announced the “largest ever UK defence AI trial” spanning land, sea and air. As well as military personnel, the trial involved 200 scientists from the Defence Science Technology Laboratory. The government said this had provided valuable data to develop and validate AI algorithms and strengthened the UK’s position as a leader in defence innovation.
Lessons in Ukrainian
Ukraine also highlighted the reality of cyber-attacks being more closely aligned with kinetic warfare, whether to sow misinformation or confusion, or to directly attack critical national infrastructure or government and military networks.
So, Healey’s visit coincided with the announcement of a Cyber and Electromagnetic Command. “It will sit under General Sir James Hockenhull’s Command and follows the MOD having to protect UK military networks against more than 90,000 ‘sub-threshold’ attacks in the last two years,” said the MOD.
Hockenhull is head of Strategic Command, which spans intelligence, digital and communications systems, cyber, and special forces – as well as medical services, support and logistics, and training and education.
As well as leading defensive cyber operations, the new command will coordinate offensive cyber ops with the National Cyber Force. The Electromagnetic tag covers “electromagnetic warfare” such as jamming signals to drones or “intercepting an adversary’s communications".
The MOD presented the announcements as “part of the publication” of the strategic defence review – although that review hasn’t actually been published yet.
Still, it seems inevitable that cyber and AI will be central planks, once it does appear.
But while £1bn is a serious chunk of change, even in military budgets, it’s peanuts in the context of the sort of sums big tech is lashing out on AI developments. And there’s a common view that big tech, like the more traditional defence suppliers, have form in bamboozling government and military procurement teams.
But Colin Hillier, a former Royal Navy officer and now CEO of Mission Decisions, a data intelligence company focused on Human-Machine Teaming, said the “new” platform and investment had likely been in the pipeline for some time.
And while there was a popular image of the military struggling to keep up with tech developments, he said it was worth remembering “The kids that grew up with computers are now majors and colonels. You’ve got this generation starting to be senior officers that actually understands these things.”
He said, “Even when you talk about AI, they’ve got their head screwed on with what it can do. It's not a mystery box. It's not magic.” Of course, he said, “Execution is everything.” So, AI could play a critical role in decision making and analysis, for example.
That analysis includes future threats and what resources would be needed to deal with them. Ukraine had changed everything, he said, with the impact of drones, electromagnetic warfare, and cyber. “We’ve talked about electromagnetic warfare, we’ve known that for years, and now it’s actually happening.”
Hillier said coordinating multiple “platforms” across land, sea and air had “always been a real challenge. I'm fighting the fight here. How do I get that aircraft to help me? Historically there’s no one system that centralizes that.” This had meant people on the ground working back up chains of command to the top end who can talk to each other.
There were other ways for AI to help the armed forces away from the “pointy end”, Hillier pointed out. “What a lot of the military is, is around paperwork. Streamlining the paperwork actually helps fight wars. If you have a guy in the military and all they do is a desk job, how can we get them off the desk job so they can go and do more valuable things?”
What to shoot for next?
One big challenge facing the defence establishment when it comes to AI and cyber is the sheer pace of development. While the UK armed forces are rushing through recruitment and training of cyber specialists – and not requiring them to undergo the full physical “beasting” frontline troops usually undergo, the battleground is arguably changing before they even step onto it.
Dr. Ali El Kaafarani, founder and CEO of UK-based post quantum cryptography specialist PQShield warned that “The constant wave of sophisticated cyberattacks targeting the supply chain makes it challenging to focus on threats that appear less immediate—like quantum attacks.”
Hostile actors were already stockpiling encrypted data that they can exploit once quantum compute technology is mature enough to undermine current asymmetric encryption algorithms.
This is viewed as a distant concern, he said. “This is quite misleading as the quantum threat is real and active as we speak. But so are the international post-quantum cryptographic standards that can mitigate the risk of “harvest now and decrypt later”, or forge later.”