UK must build drone manufacturing capacity before it is needed, Flyby warns

The UK needs to look beyond buying individual drone systems and consider how quickly its industrial base could increase production during a major conflict, according to York-based Flyby Technology.

The company argues that experience in Ukraine has demonstrated that modern warfare is as much a contest between industrial systems as between armed forces.

“Fighting a peer adversary is not just warfighter versus warfighter; it’s your industry, innovation and industrial might pitched against that of your enemy,” Flyby CEO Jon Parker told ADS Advance.

“But we are not building a defence industrial base. We’re just buying kit. The UK’s ability to ramp up production depends on industrial supply chains that we haven’t built.”

Parker argues that procurement is still geared towards relatively small production runs, even though the quantities required during a major war could be dramatically higher. He contrasted buying perhaps 200 systems in peacetime with a potential wartime requirement measured in the hundreds of thousands. ADVANCE_Aut26_Text_PRINT_V2

Building capacity before the crisis

Flyby chief strategy officer Annalisa Russell-Smith also warned that relying on overseas manufacturing could become a vulnerability if international demand surged simultaneously.

“When the chips are down, chances are their priorities are going to lie with their home nation,” she said. “One way to solve this problem is for the government to build capacity in anticipation of needing it, as we did before the Second World War.”

That creates an uncomfortable economic problem. Manufacturing facilities may operate below capacity in peacetime, while drones held in storage can quickly become obsolete as technology and countermeasures evolve.

But Ukraine has demonstrated how difficult it is to create industrial capacity once a conflict is already underway.

Russell-Smith argues that attention should therefore shift from debating money already allocated through the Defence Investment Plan towards understanding what the UK can manufacture now, and how rapidly output could be increased.

The warning forms part of ADS Advance‘s investigation into what Britain can learn from Ukraine’s rapidly evolving drone industry, including how procurement, regulation and supply chains must change if the UK is to produce uncrewed systems at meaningful scale.

Read the full From Ukraine, with urgency feature in the Autumn 2026 edition of ADS Advance.