Colonel Andrew Jones, the Army's aviation program director, told a major military and defence industry gathering in Adelaide this week that Defence wanted Australian firms to help build a small, tough drone that soldiers can fit in backpacks and send out to spy on enemies on the battlefield.

Colonel Jones indicated it would be just a first step in what he called "sovereign" drone technology - or unmanned aerial vehicles as Defence prefers to call them. He said it could be the "start of something big" that included "more than just intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance".

Beyond being eyes in the sky for soldiers, drones are most typically used to fire missiles on enemies such as terrorist organisations, and Australia has signalled plans to start using such weaponised unmanned vehicles.

Underscoring the widespread feeling within military circles that drone technology is streaking ahead, Sir Angus, who was Chief of the Defence Force from 2005 to 2011, told the Land Forces 2016 conference that Australia had been too slow to take up unmanned military systems such as aerial drones during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

"If you look forward, 50 years from now … I think all the platforms that will be out there on the battlefield, the vast majority of them, will be unmanned and we need to basically embrace that future with enthusiasm and with a great deal of innovation because if we don't, we're going to get left behind and we're going to be caught short," he said.

Sir Angus, who now heads the advisory board of the South Australian government's defence industry organisation, said the Australian Defence Force had not been forward-thinking enough. While the ADF had rented "rudimentary" drones in the early stages of the wars, "I would submit that we were underdone in that area", he said.

"We need to learn the lessons of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan because next time the conflict might be much more challenging than the ones we've just experienced," he said.

He said unmanned underwater and land military vehicles were also going to be "crucially important", and the Army "must get into" drone attack helicopters because to do otherwise would be too dangerous in the kind of lightning-fast firepower of future conflicts.

"When you look at the lethality of the battlefield that we face in the future, you wouldn't want to be sending people in manned helicopters into that environment. The unmanned vehicle is the way to go … because you're not going to last very long in the lethal battlefield that we envisage for the future," he said.

Defence Industry Minister Christopher Pyne told the conference this week that "remotely operated platforms" - another term for drones - was going to be a priority of the government's $640 million Defence Innovation Hub.

Colonel Jones said the government was currently operating about 20 American-made Wasp AE small drones, which are backpack-sized, weigh 1.3 kilograms and can fly for up to 50 minutes at a range of five kilometres while streaming live colour and infrared video back to soldiers on the battlefield.

He said the second stage of the same program was aimed at "learning how much can we do in Australia". It will be the first time Australia has built military drones.

"We think all those sort of things are well within the capacity of Australian industry, with a little bit of focus," he said.

Currently drones are remotely piloted from the ground. Group Captain Guy Adams, the RAAF's director of unmanned systems, said there was a "fair amount of work to be done" before drones could be made more autonomous but he said that the Defence Science and Technology Group was working on a "trusted autonomy system".

Reece Clothier, president of the Australian Association for Unmanned Systems, said: "It's great to have this coming from the government that there is a desire and a push for industry-based capability in niche areas. There's a significant amount of money being invested by Defence in this area."

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