Britain put $160M on the table for new long-range strike drone

Britain’s Ministry of Defence has relaunched its search for a precision strike loitering munition under a new program name, issuing a fresh request for information in May 2026 under the designation Project INSTIGATOR, a renamed and restructured version of the Medium Range Precision Strike program that the MOD has been developing since late 2024 with a total budget of approximately £120 million ($160 million).

Defence Equipment and Support, the arm’s-length procurement body of the Ministry of Defence based at Abbey Wood in Bristol, published the INSTIGATOR RFI on May 15, 2026, with responses due by May 29. The document, obtained through the UK government’s defense sourcing portal, confirms that the program has moved from preliminary market engagement into a more structured procurement phase, with the MOD now seeking detailed technical and commercial responses from industry to inform both the requirement and the acquisition strategy. The renaming from MRPS to INSTIGATOR signals a program that has matured beyond initial concept exploration into something approaching formal procurement preparation.

The capability INSTIGATOR is designed to deliver sits at the intersection of loitering munition and precision strike, a category of weapon that has demonstrated its battlefield significance in Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh, and multiple Middle Eastern conflicts over the past several years. The requirement calls for a beyond-visual-line-of-sight system capable of engaging targets at ranges exceeding 80 kilometers with at least 45 minutes of loiter time, capable of being launched from both land and sea platforms without being integrated to a specific vehicle or vessel. That sea-launch requirement, combined with the need to operate from small surface craft moving at one to six knots in varying sea states, points toward a system designed for the kind of distributed maritime and littoral operations that the British military has been developing under its commando force restructuring and Royal Navy expeditionary concepts.

The original MRPS RFI, issued in February 2025, established the foundational requirements that INSTIGATOR now builds on. The total program budget of approximately $160 million covers munitions, equipment, training, and support through an assumed out-of-service date in the late 2030s, with the possibility of life extensions through system updates and munition surveillance activities, according to the original RFI documentation. The INSTIGATOR program has adopted what the MOD calls a Spiral acquisition and development approach, meaning it intends to field an initial minimum deployable capability rapidly and then evolve it through successive upgrades rather than waiting for a fully developed final design before any fielding occurs.

Phase 1 of INSTIGATOR will procure a three-year high-technology-readiness-level mature off-the-shelf or commercial-off-the-shelf capability as the initial baseline, prioritizing speed of delivery to front-line operators over comprehensive optimization. That approach reflects the urgency that British defense planners have absorbed from watching the war in Ukraine demonstrate how quickly battlefield conditions can make legacy capabilities obsolete and how much operational advantage accrues to forces that can field and iterate on new technology faster than their adversaries. The MOD explicitly describes the program as sitting within the direction set by both the Defence Command Paper and the Defence Industrial Strategy, with particular emphasis on accelerating capability delivery.

The technical requirements documented in the INSTIGATOR RFI are demanding across multiple dimensions. The munition must operate effectively in GPS-denied and electronically contested environments, with robust navigation solutions that function when adversary jamming and spoofing degrade satellite signals, a requirement that reflects the sophisticated electronic warfare environment Ukraine has encountered and that British planners assess as characteristic of peer-level conflict. The system must be capable of engaging the full range of peer and near-peer target sets including slow-moving and static armor, anti-personnel targets, and fast inshore attack craft, requiring a sensor suite and terminal guidance system capable of discriminating between target types across diverse environments. Automated object recognition capability is explicitly addressed, with the MOD requiring that any automated target recognition system operate within frameworks that ensure “context appropriate human involvement,” language that keeps the requirement within UK policy on human control of lethal force decisions.

Modularity is a recurring theme throughout the INSTIGATOR requirements. The MOD wants components including the warhead, battery, and communications systems to be separately storable and replaceable, with stable open interfaces between components that allow spiral development of individual subsystems without requiring full system requalification. That design philosophy would give the British military the ability to upgrade the munition’s guidance, warhead, or communications package as technology advances or as adversary countermeasures evolve, without procuring an entirely new system each time. It also reduces the logistical burden of managing a munition whose battery must be removable to enable safe charging in civilian depots, a practical operational constraint that reflects the realities of forward-deployed sustainment.

The program’s geographic and industrial ambitions are evident in the commercial questions the MOD is asking in the INSTIGATOR RFI. The document asks specifically about contributions to the UK defense industrial base, the role of small and medium enterprises in the supply chain, and whether candidate systems were developed with another nation’s capability requirements in mind, questions that collectively signal British intent to use INSTIGATOR as a vehicle for building or sustaining sovereign industrial capacity rather than simply buying a foreign system off the shelf. That tension between rapid fielding of a mature capability and investment in domestic industrial development is one the MOD is explicitly trying to structure its way through rather than resolve in advance.

Project INSTIGATOR’s May 2026 RFI represents the British military publicly stating that it needs a loitering precision strike capability that doesn’t yet exist in its inventory, at a time when every peer conflict in the world is demonstrating what happens to forces that don’t have one. The response deadline is May 29. Whatever the MOD learns from industry will shape a procurement that could ultimately put British munitions in the same target engagement category where Russian Lancets and Iranian-designed Shaheds have been reshaping battlefields for the past three years.