Great Britain, together with Latvia, launched the "drone coalition" in support of Ukraine in February 2024, planning to spend 200 million pounds (about $252 mln) in the first tranche allocated for production of FPV drones. But the main question was, how to budget these funds effectively because one thing is to award the production order to a local manufacturer demanding that drones would be made only out of Western components, and a completely different angle is to allow them to use Chinese pieces in manufacturing.
In practice, the difference in the cost of these parts is approximately 10 times. Within the limited budget, it means, purely tentatively, half a million FPV drones against only 50,000. Not only that, the decision to use Chinese parts in production is so important because ultimately, FPV drones are only effective when they are cheap and expendable.
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Having discussed this issue with an anonymous British official, Defense One concludes the scale tilts toward quantity over quality. London doesn't want to "pay ten times the amount" for simple FPV drones just because they have no Chinese components. At the same time, the United Kingdom is generally still reluctant to the idea of buying anything directly from China, therefore, the official says, the money will be sent to Ukrainian manufacturers. Besides the money, the UK might also contribute technology to drone development, particularly software or radios, the Defense One journalists note.
Both software and communication are essential, for instance, in implementation of UAV swarm attack tactics. Defense Express reminds that immediately after the "drone coalition" was established in February 2024, reports suggested Britain was considering a supply of drones with artificial intelligence to Ukraine. The Alvina project was a British experiment aiming to integrate AI-powered swarm operations, some technologies developed by the UK Ministry of Defense in the framework of this program can be useful to Ukrainian drone makers.
On the flip side, the trend persisting across Western defense departments to refrain from using Chinese components in domestic manufacture is completely reasonable. Even Ukrainian drone manufacturers face the same dilemma, as Chinese companies are not always reliable partners; and the United States is especially wary of letting its defense companies be dependent on the potential adversary.
Therefore, the Western defense industry prefers not to use Chinese components, and the defense ministries prohibit purchase of ready-made Chinese drones for military needs. In particular, the Pentagon has introduced the so-called Blue UAS Cleared List — or rather, a whitelist of manufacturers and unmanned systems. The allowed models, despite having roughly the same specifications and capabilities, could be 3–5 times or more expensive than some well-known Chinese counterparts.
Thus, the decision of Great Britain to follow a more pragmatic path regarding FPV drones for Ukraine, on the one hand, is as positive as it can get, for it means more drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces. But on the other hand, it shows how far the situation has gone when China is the "world's factory" and the Western defense industry, on the contrary, is only starting to wake from its decades-long slumber.
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