I’m moving on from focusing primarily on Australia in previous blogs, to now starting to compare Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. As the three Anglophone countries investing significantly in robotics and autonomous systems, and the three AUKUS countries trying to deepen interoperability – I feel they make for a fascinating comparison. This blog will be the first in a series where I compare how autonomy is being discussed in official defence documents across the three states.

This first blog is a very simple one – but nevertheless a good place to start. Here I am simply tracking mentions of autonomy-related words over time. The mentions are taken from all of the official defence concepts or doctrines I could find on Australian, US, and UK defence websites that had at least one relevant mention of autonomy/autonomous/autonomously (ie, not autonomous sanctions). All up, this comprised 63 documents – 13 Australian, 16 British, and 34 American.

On the one hand, the results may reflect most heavily the years in which particular states happened to release official defence documents discussing autonomy (hence a big surge in one year from one state, and little to nothing the next). On the other hand, there is a reasonably noticeable increase over time. Two things I see which jumped out to me – 1) the growing prevalence of Australia over time, and 2) the greater prevalence in Australia than the UK.

In the next blog I’ll be looking in more detail at some key features of these documents, including a comparison of air, ground, and sea. For now, I’ll leave you to explore the visualisation, and the list of sources used below ordered by total mentions of autonomy-related words.

— Sian