British and French Defence Ministers Phillip Hammond and Jean-Yves Le Drian met in London on Tuesday to discuss progress of the Anglo-French defence treaty signed in 2010. A key element of the treaty was to work jointly on unmanned drones… Read More ›
Future Drone Development 
Latest news on British drones
Some new information has emerged this week about future British drone programmes as BAE Systems held a media briefing at their Warton site to talk about their unmanned projects (our invitation was presumably lost in the post). According to the report by… Read More ›
UK-France declaration on drones
At the UK-French summit in Paris today, David Cameron and President Sarkozy agree a new Declaration on security and defence. The relevant section on drones (paragraph 16) reads: Unmanned air systems are crucial to success in the battlefield, as the… Read More ›
Anglo-French drone takes another step forward
Summary: Drones are the latest ‘must have’ weapon systems and the big military companies are desperate to be part of what is beginning to be called ‘the drones gold-rush’. While Cameron is keen to emphasize that only a ‘few tens… Read More ›
The big problem of arming small drones
One of the key concerns about the growing use of unmanned drones by the military is that as there is no risk to your own forces they make launching armed attacks much easier and therefore more likely. A separate but related… Read More ›
'An Unmanned Combat Air Systems Concept of Use' : A case study in drone secrecy
A little over a year ago I discovered someone in the MoD had written a document called ‘An Unmanned Combat Air Systems Concept of Use’. It was mentioned in Defence Reporter, a useful bi-annual bulletin on research being carried out by… Read More ›
The French drone 'crisis'
Prime Minister David Cameron will meet French President Nicolas Sarkozy today in Paris for bilateral talks. While the agenda will no doubt be dominated by the Euro crisis, they may well have a quick word about drones too. Last November the UK and France signed… Read More ›
USAF presentation on future of drones (RPA)
Last week I posted two presentations by the RAF on British drones. Here is a presentation by Dr Mark Maybury, USAF Chief Scientist on the future development of USAF drones or Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) as he prefers to call them. The presentation… Read More ›
MoD unit seeks hunter-killer tech for UK drones
The Centre for Defence Enterprise (CDE) is a bit like the Ministry of Defence’s very own Dragon Den. It bills itself as “the first point of contact for anyone with a disruptive technology, new process or innovation that has a potential… Read More ›
Drones at DSEi 2011
Drones were big news at this year’s DSEi arms fair, with many of the smaller ‘niche’ players launching new product and the ‘big boys’ showing off their wares and engaging in verbal fisticuffs about whose drone was biggest/ brightest/best. BAE… Read More ›
DSEi Does Drones
Thousands of military buyers will descend on London next week to be wooed, wined and dined by military salesmen from the world’s largest arms companies. Many of those buyers will arrive with the same item at the top of their… Read More ›
Doubling the Drones
The rise of the drone seems to know no bounds. Just months after David Cameron’s pledge to double the UK’s Reaper drone fleet, the latest US military aircraft procurement plan shows that the Pentagon is also planning to double number of large… Read More ›
