Britain's Robot Army

For centuries, warfare was shaped by tanks, aircraft, and soldiers on the ground. Today, a soldier is as likely to be sitting behind a screen holding a controller that looks like a PlayStation's - and on the other side, a soldier can be seen, tracked, and killed by a machine that costs less than a laptop: the drone.

Presenter Will Robson, a former army officer, travels to Salisbury Plain and the factories building Britain's drones to understand what this shift means for British soldiers - and for society at large.

Ukraine has become the testing ground for this new kind of conflict, where cheap, mass-produced drones and AI-assisted targeting have transformed the front line into a place where almost nothing moves undetected. Soldiers who once relied on cover and speed now describe a battlefield where everything and everyone is constantly being watched.

Robson hears from those shaping and living through this transformation: one minister claims the British Army is being made 10 times more lethal by this technology; the UK's new DragonFire laser can shoot down a drone for about £10 in electricity, compared to hundreds of thousands of pounds for a traditional missile interceptor. It's a war being reshaped by economics as much as by weapons.

But the stakes go beyond the battlefield. At King's College London, Professor Kenneth Payne ran AI models through 21 nuclear crisis simulations - in 95% of them, the AI chose nuclear weapons, not once choosing to de-escalate.

But for all the talk of a "22 times more lethal" army, Britain's newly published Defence Investment Plan tells a more complicated story. Billions are going into drones and autonomous systems - but tanks, fighter jets, and ships still take the lion's share of the money.

As this programme reveals, the deeper question isn't just funding, but what it means to train, equip, and protect a generation of soldiers for a completely new type of war.

Presenter: Will Robson
Producer: Ilona Toller
Executive Producer: Robert Nicholson
A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4