U.S. allies race to deploy AI-powered drones, upending decades of weapons-buying practice

U.S. allies are pushing to revolutionize how they evaluate and buy next-generation autonomous weapons. 

During a panel at the Surface Navy Association’s Symposium on Tuesday, military speakers from the United Kingdom, Australia and Sweden discussed the immediate need for AI-equipped uncrewed autonomous vehicles on the world’s oceans.

Instead of waiting decades for one-off weapons with governments fronting the cash to develop them, the group stressed co-funded prototypes that can deploy in months — an approach similar to the Trump administration’s recent push to accelerate Pentagon purchasing.

Australia already started this process, inking a major “co-developed and co-funded” contract with defense technology firm Anduril for their Ghost Shark, an ‘extra large uncrewed underwater vehicle.’

“Talking to my international partners, to the United States Navy, the first question they always ask me with respect to Ghost Shark is ‘How did you do it? How did you introduce that capability so rapidly?’” Commodore David Frost, the Royal Australian Navy attache in Washington said of the autonomous submarine. The Australian Royal Navy and the larger government had to commit funds early on to make the project successful. An Anduril production facility that opened in October in Sydney is already producing Ghost Shark vehicles.

Now, it’s a challenge to build up trust in the system.

“It’s strewn across three core themes: data, risk and confidence,” the commodore said. “We’re collecting data, we’re analyzing that data there and then, and we’re feeding it into a risk assessment which enables us, as the warfighters, the ability to put a very good value proposition with a strong risk analysis to our political leaders.”

The Pacific theater isn’t the only region that’s finding autonomous drones useful. Colonel Anders Akermark, Sweden’s naval attache to the U.S., Canada and Mexico, said his country’s military is focused on moving faster in acquiring new systems as well.

“The requirement for perfection at every delivery, this must be broken,” the colonel said. “This is technically quite simple, but it’s very challenging when it comes to the attitude of personnel.”

Sweden is already working with defense manufacturer Saab on an uncrewed underwater vehicle set to start sea testing later this year that Col. Akermark hopes will become a useful tool in monitoring under the Arctic sea ice for adversaries.

“We traded time for money, now it’s the other way around,” he said. “We need to slash the time-consuming process and get these capabilities in the field faster.”

All the speakers acknowledged the U.S as taking important steps with that same attitude, one that’s been routinely touted by the Trump administration and the Pentagon. Cdre. Frost said the U.S. is “challenging your own acquisition cycles” to break “the glass ceiling” of getting new technology in the hands of service members faster.

“We are also really s— customers,” Commodore Gus Carnie, the naval attache at the British Embassy in Washington, said, echoing a similar statement made by Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll back in October. 

He emphasized that while buying and building new technology is important, the workforce needs to change as well in his assessment. He wants more young people in the service who “wake up and look at themselves in the morning and think about how they can best utilize these systems.”

The British Navy is looking to field more autonomous capability, especially for observation of the strategic corridor between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom.

“We’d think that, you know, we’ve got an aircraft carrier. That’s all you need. No, that’s not always the answer for everything,” Cdre. Carnie said. “All too often, the answer comes back: ‘We need you to be protecting the North Atlantic. We need you up in the high North. We need you laying that sonar buoy stream across the Iceland gap to protect and make sure the Russians aren’t coming out into the sea.”

“Strategically, we’re going to do that with autonomy.”