Something genuinely new entered RAF service in 2025 – and it didn’t make nearly enough noise about it. StormShroud, the RAF’s first operational autonomous collaborative platform, has been quietly flying missions out of RAF Waddington since May of last year, carrying the UK’s first combat-deployed electronic warfare drone payload. Now, with the June Defence Investment Plan committing £300 million to a follow-on Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme and the formal naming of Storm Fighter as the RAF’s future drone wingman, the full shape of UK combat air autonomy is starting to come into focus.
It’s a significant moment – and one that deserves more than a footnote in the DIP coverage.
What StormShroud actually does
StormShroud is based on the Tekever AR3, a small catapult-launched fixed-wing UAV with a 3.5-metre wingspan, 16-hour endurance, and a service ceiling of around 3,600 metres. In isolation, it looks modest – hardly the stuff of airpower doctrine. What elevates it is the payload: Leonardo UK’s BriteStorm electronic warfare system, a sophisticated jamming and deception suite designed to suppress enemy integrated air defence networks.
The concept is straightforward in principle, harder to execute in practice. StormShroud flies ahead of crewed strike packages – RAF Typhoons and F-35Bs – blinding hostile radars and disrupting the air defence picture before the manned jets arrive. It’s an autonomous SEAD platform (Suppression of Enemy Air Defences), doing the most dangerous part of the mission without putting aircrew at risk. For a fraction of the cost of a crewed aircraft, and in sufficient numbers, it can degrade an adversary’s ability to detect, track and engage allied aircraft at the moment it matters most.
The RAF procured an initial batch of around two dozen platforms at a reported cost of £19 million – a remarkably low price for a capability that would previously have required dedicated crewed electronic warfare aircraft. It is operated by 216 Squadron at RAF Waddington, a unit that was reformed in 2020 specifically to develop future UAV capabilities, staffed by a mix of Regular RAF, Royal Auxiliary Air Force, and DE&S personnel trained to operate in high-threat environments.
Manufactured in West Wales and Southampton, with Leonardo’s BriteStorm payload built in Luton, it is a meaningfully UK-sovereign programme – developed in under six months, shaped explicitly by lessons observed in Ukraine.
Enter Storm Fighter
The Defence Investment Plan, published on 29 June 2026, committed £300 million to a new Collaborative Combat Aircraft programme – and in July, the RAF named it: Storm Fighter. It will operate alongside Typhoon, F-35B, and eventually GCAP/Tempest, acting as an autonomous wingman capable of carrying weapons, sensors, or electronic warfare payloads, and deploying from land bases as well as the Royal Navy’s carriers.
A demonstrator is expected by at least 2030. The language around it – “loyal wingman,” “collaborative combat aircraft,” “manned-unmanned teaming” – is familiar from US and Australian programmes, but the UK is, to its credit, moving faster than many expected. The broader naming convention (Storm Shroud, Storm Fighter, with others likely to follow) suggests a deliberate family architecture rather than a collection of one-off programmes.
Why this matters more than the numbers suggest
The UK has historically been slow to commit to unmanned combat air – a domain where the US, China, and increasingly Turkey have moved with far more urgency. StormShroud’s entry into service, modest as the platform itself is, represents a doctrinal shift: the RAF is now operationally comfortable with autonomous aircraft performing mission-critical roles in contested environments. That’s a threshold crossed, not just a capability procured.
Storm Fighter will be a more complex proposition – autonomous strike decision-making, rules of engagement, air traffic integration – but the conceptual groundwork is laid. And unlike the US’s increasingly expensive autonomous combat aircraft programmes, the UK approach seems deliberately cost-conscious. StormShroud cost less than a single Typhoon. If Storm Fighter can maintain anything like that value calculus while delivering genuine combat capability, the RAF will have found an approach worth watching.
The war in Ukraine has demonstrated, repeatedly and at scale, what cheap autonomous systems can do to expensive conventional forces. The RAF has been paying attention. StormShroud is the evidence.
