Media reports today (20 October 2025) indicate that the Defence Secretary, John Healey, will announce new powers that will allow military personnel to shoot down drones threatening military bases and possibly other sites.
Over the past year there has been a number of sightings of unidentified drones in the vicinity of military bases both within the UK and across Europe.
While its perfectly possible that these are drones flown carelessly by hobby pilots as their numbers rapidly increase, there has been speculation by some that these sightings are connected to a co-ordinated campaign by adversaries seeking intelligence or to simply to test military and security responses. No evidence for such a claim, however, has been presented.
The sightings, along with a number of cases of drones straying across borders from the war in Ukraine, have been taken up but those arguing that the UK is facing grave security threats now from state adversaries rather than terrorist groups and that the UK needs to rapidly increase military spending and accept that it is in a ‘pre-war situation’. However, calm heads need to prevail.
Campaigners have been arguing for 15 years that the advent of drone technology makes the world a much less safe place. Remote and autonomous drones enable the use of lethal force with virtual impunity and create real and genuine fear.
While ordinary people living under drones around the world constantly feel threated and suffer real physical and psychological harm from military drones flying overhead, British politicians have regularly dismissed such fears, arguing that the drones are there in fact to create peace for the people on the ground.
It is ironic then, not to say hypocritical, that fear and apprehension about possible drone incursions within the UK is met with strong government response including ordering the military to shoot such drones down.
Next month, the UK will release its Defence Investment Plan which is likely to see further spending on drones and counter-drone technology. Rather than spending vast sums on new military technology which will simply proliferate and make the world – and ourselves – much less safe, we need to be investing in building global co-operation and common security, accepting that no nation can be truly secure unless all feel secure.
Rather than squandering billions developing drones and then have to spend more on counter-drone technology, we should be investing much more in diplomacy and conflict prevention structures; we should be investing in our health and social care; investing in greening the economy and focusing our extremely talented engineers and scientists on help to tackle climate changes rather than developing new war technology.