Emergency protest at Fairford US base: Sunday 18 Jan (1pm- 2.30pm)

Emergency protest at Fairford US base: Sunday 18 Jan (1pm- 2.30pm)

Chris Cole

Hands off Venezuela, Iran and Greenland – No to War

Demonstration and peace vigil at Fairford US air base

Sunday 18 January, 1.00 – 2.30 pm

Supported by CND, Drone Wars UK, and Oxfordshire Peace Campaign

Join us at the Fairford US air base in Gloucestershire to say no to the US coup in Venezuela and Trump’s threats to attack Greenland, Cuba, Iran, Colombia and Mexico.

Immediately after the New Year US president Donald Trump launched a large scale military attack on Venezuela, leaving dozens dead and resulting in the abduction of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.  Trump has said the US will now run Venezuela, which has the largest proven oil reserves in the world, and take control of its oil resources for an indefinite period.  The US president said that he intends to seize at least 30 million barrels of Venezuelan oil, which “will be sold at market price, and that money will be controlled by me.”

Video filmed on 6 January 2026 at ‘RAF’ Fairford when the US were making preparations to seize the Tanker #Bella1(#Marinera) in the North Atlantic

Last week US military forces captured the Venezuelan oil tanker Bella 1 (re-registered as Russian and renamed Marinera) in a huge naval and special forces operation in the north Atlantic ocean.  Many of the aircraft and troops involved flew from bases in the UK.  Immediately before the operation eleven huge US Air Force C-17 transport aircraft flew into Fairford carrying helicopters and equipment from special forces bases in the US.  Although the helicopters did not appear to be used in the raid on the tanker, they may have been held in reserve for use if necessary, or have been part of a deception operation to distract attention from movements genuinely linked to the tanker seizure.  Fairford also seems to have been involved in the operation in a command and control role.

US troops training at Fairford shortly before US boarded tanker Bella 1/Marinera in North Atlantic. Credit: @Global_Mil_Info

Trump has subsequently boasted that ‘I don’t need international law’ and has threatened to attack a number of other countries to meet his imperial ambitions.

Greenland:  Trump has told reporters of his desire to occupy Greenland, claiming: “It’s so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not gonna be able to do it, I can tell you.

Colombia:  Trump has said Colombia could be next, saying it is “run by a sick man who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States,” regarding President Gustavo Petro. “He’s not going to be doing it for very long,” Trump told reporters. When Trump was asked if he might target Colombia like he did Venezuela, he replied, “It sounds good to me.”

Cuba:  Secretary of State Marco Rubio has told NBC News that Cuba is the “next target” because the government there “is a huge problem.”

Iran: The US president threatened Iran with more U.S. military attacks as the country rocks from protests over worsening economic conditions. “If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the United States,” Trump said. 

Mexico: Trump has also threatened to take military action against Mexico to prevent drug smuggling into the US.  “The cartels are running Mexico, it’s very sad to watch and see what’s happened to that country,” Trump said during an interview on Fox News.  “We’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs coming in by water. And we are going to start now hitting land, with regard to the cartels.”

Despite professing to be a champion of democracy, and whining that he has not been nominated to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, Trump rolled out the red carpet for Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who ordered the invasion of Ukraine, during Putin’s visit to a military base in Alaska in August 2025.

Read more on Sophie Bolt’s CND blog here. 

Emergency demonstration at Fairford US base on Sunday 18 January

1.00 – 2.30 pm: come for as long or short a time as you can manage.

Main gate of Fairford base: Postcode for Sat Nav: GL7 4DL

Speakers:

Sophie Bolt – CND General Secretary

Guest from Venezuela Solidarity Campaign (invited)

Bring banners, placards, and friends!

Wear warm weatherproof clothing.

We suggest parking on the grass verge opposite the main gate at Fairford base – please don’t park in any of the residential closes or areas off Horcott road or Whelford Road.

More details:

Drone Wars UK: info@dronewars.net / 07960 811437 or CND: enquiries@cnduk.org / 020 7700 2393

Trump attacks Venezuela: How drone warfare has opened a crack through which the darkness is flooding in

Trump attacks Venezuela: How drone warfare has opened a crack through which the darkness is flooding in

Chris Cole
Venezuela’s largest military complex, Fuerte Tiuna, on fire following US attack on January 3, 2026. Credit: LUIS JAIMES / AFP

The intrinsic connection between the increasing use of drones and the erosion of international law has been laid bare once again in the Trump administration’s lethal campaign to destabilize Venezuela, culminating  with the shocking attack on the country and the abduction of President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in early January.

Build up

Since early September, US forces have been using armed drones and other systems to strike boats allegedly carrying drugs across the Caribbean sea and the eastern pacific to the US.  As we reported at the time of the first strike, multiple legal scholars described the attack as ‘manifestly unlawful’. It later emerged that US special forces had also deliberately killed survivors of that first strike clinging to wreckage. Since then, around 35 individual boats have been bombed with over 100 people killed.  According to unnamed US sources most of the strikes have been carried out by US Reaper drones.  It should be stressed that despite US officials claiming they are in ‘an armed conflict’ with drug cartels and that therefore such strikes are lawful, no such armed conflict exists.  Senior US and international legal experts insist that “the strikes constitute murder under US. domestic law and extrajudicial killings under international human rights law.”

US strikes on small boats, at mid-Dec 2025. Credit: Reuters.

In mid-November 2025, US Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth formally announced Joint Task Force Operation Southern Spear as the name of US military operations ‘to synchronize counter-narcotics efforts across the Western Hemisphere’. The Task Force was given the name previously used by US Navy to emphasis its use of drones and related technology to combat narcotics trafficking.  According to a US Navy press release:

“Southern Spear will operationalize a heterogeneous mix of Robotic and Autonomous Systems (RAS) to support the detection and monitoring of illicit trafficking while learning lessons for other theaters ”

As part of the build up of forces in the region, the US opened a previously mothballed base in Puerto Rico and deployed a wide range of aircraft there, including F-35s and Reaper drones.  According to specialised press, at least nine Reaper drones were spotted at the base, with some carrying heavy loads of weaponry before personnel restricted plane spotters’ views

In a further significant escalation, in late December Trump revealed that the US had ‘knocked out’ a big facility in the first direct US attack on Venezuelan soil.  A short while later, US officials confirmed that a CIA-operated drone had attacked a port facility in the country. While the exact location of the strike has not been released, locals in the north east of the country reported loud explosions and recovered fragments of what appear to be a Hellfire missile

Shocking Attack

On 2 January, US forces invaded Venezuela, bombing a number of facilities in and around the capital, Caracas, and taking Maduro and his wife captive. US officials said that as part of the operation – named Absolute Resolve – at least 150 aircraft including bombers, fighter jets, drones and surveillance aircraft were deployed.

While unconfirmed at the time of writing, The War Zone also suggests that there is strong evidence that the US also used one-way attack drones (often dubbed ‘suicide drones’) during the operation. If so, these are likely to have been the first operational use of the US’ new LUCAS (Low-cost Unmanned Combat Attack System) drones, said to be modelled on Iran’s Shahed-136 drones.   

Following the attack on Caracas, there was also a rare sighting of one of the secret US RQ-170 Sentinel drone apparently returning to the Puerto Rico base from over Venezuela.

This type of drone has reportedly been deployed in numerous covert operations from Pakistan to Iran to North Korea and is unofficially known as the Beast of Kandahar after where it was first publicly sighted. Whilst it is a surveillance rather than attack drone, its presence underscores the crucial role that drones play in such operations.     

Drones have made the world more dangerous

Many continue to insist that the advent and increasing use of armed drones is in no way responsible for the unlawful and destabilizing warfare that we have witnessed over the past twenty years. While officials and commentators acknowledge that the world is now a much more dangerous place (often as part of a call for more spending on military drones and related equipment)  it is argued that to blame weapons technology itself is simply naïve. Drones, it is insisted, are merely a tool of the policymaker. But this is to fundamentally misunderstand how weapons technology opens up new options for the policymaker.     

The reality is that drones have opened a crack through which the darkness has flooded in.  Armed Predator drones enabled the US to conduct large-scale so-called ‘targeted killing’ operations in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere from the early 2000s setting a dangerous and terrible precedent. Drones have lowered the threshold for the use of force and enabled policymakers to ignore state sovereignty with impunity.  The lesson was quickly learned and copied by others, not least by Russia in its invasion of Ukraine. Donald Trumps war against Venezuela is prising that crack further open still.

This is not, of course, to lay all the ills of the world at the feet of drones.  Fundamental political and economic inequalities underlie the world’s geopolitical problems and many of its armed conflicts. Yet drones have encouraged and enabled some political leaders to gravely undermine fundamental legal structures governing international conduct and that puts us all in danger.  

Lucky Dip: Drone companies await spending bonanza as Defence Investment Plan (DIP) to be revealed.   

Lucky Dip: Drone companies await spending bonanza as Defence Investment Plan (DIP) to be revealed.   

Chris Cole

Following the government’s commitment to increase military spending and the publication of the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) in early June, the military industry has been keenly awaiting the release of the government’s Defence Investment Plan (DIP) which will layout military spending plans and other details for the rest of this parliament. Numerous reports have indicated that many planned projects are ‘on hold’ until the plan is finalised and published.

UK Military Spending 2010/11 – 2024/25 – Statista

Defence minister Luke Pollard told MPs in June that the DIP will “cover the full scope of the defence programme, from people and operations to equipment and infrastructure”. Time and again ministers have promised that the plan will be unveiled in the autumn and so this now seems likely to be soon after the Budget of 26 November (although such promises are of course routinely broken).

How much?!

UK military spending was £60.2bn in 24/25 (around 2.4% of GDP), up from £42.4bn in 2020/21. In February 2025, the Starmer government committed to further increase military spending raising the budget to 2.5% of GDP by 2027 (estimated at around an extra £6bn per year – roughly the amount cut from the UK’s Aid budget) with ‘an ambition’ to reach 3% by the next parliament.  At the NATO summit in June 2025, however, Starmer upped the ante, with a pledge to reach a ‘goal’ of 5% (3.5% on ‘core defence’ (estimated to be an extra £30bn per year) with 1.5% (around £40bn per year) on ‘defence-related areas such as resilience and security’) by 2029. Subsequently the government said it “expected to reach at least 4.1% of GDP in 2027”.

‘Whole of Society’

Importantly, alongside the increase in military spending, the Strategic Defence Review argued that ‘defence’ is now to be seen as a ‘whole of society’ effort and this may well be re-emphasised when DIP is published.

The plan is being billed as enabling the UK to be at ‘warfighting readiness’ and alongside equipment and weapons programmes, the public is being urged to be ”prepared for conflict and ready to volunteer, support the military, and endure challenges”.

Plans already announced to ‘reconnect society with the military’ include the expansion of youth cadet forces, education work in schools to develop understanding among young people of the armed forces, and broader public outreach events to outline the threats and the need for greater military spending despite increased social challenges.

Government keen to ‘reconnect’ young people with the armed forces

And to top this off, the government is deploying the hoary old chestnut that military spending is good for the economy (despite such claims being persistently and thoroughly debunked).

Trailed Plans

While specific spending details remain under wraps, government announcements since the publication of the SDR have indicated some of the broad areas which will receive more funding:

Drones, Drones, Drones. In the Spring Statement, Chancellor Rachel Reeves stated that “a minimum of 10% of the MoD’s equipment budget is to be spent on novel technologies including drones and AI enabled technology.”  Defence Minister Alistair Cairns indicated in July that there would be around £4bn spending on uncrewed systems – ‘Drones, drones and drones‘ as he put it on twitter. 

To the ever-expanding list of UK drone development programmes, many of which are seeking funding decisions as part of the DIP, we can add Project Nyx which seeks to pair a new drone with the British Army’s Apache Helicopter. 

Perhaps most significantly in this area, publication of the Defence Investment Plan may illuminate UK plans for a ‘loyal wingman’ type drone  – now described by the MoD as an Autonomous Collaborative Platform (ACP) – to accompany the UK’s planned new fighter aircraft, Tempest. While some funding has already been allocated to develop smaller Tier 1 and 2 ACP’s, plans for the more strategic and no doubt costlier level Tier 3 drone have been placed on the back burner pending funding decisions.  Will the UK go it alone and build a new armed drone (as no doubt BAE Systems hopes) or will it buy Australia’s Ghost Bat or one of the two drones currently competing for the US contract?

Integrated targeting web. Alongside new drones, the UK is developing a ‘digital targeting web’ to link, as MoD-speak puts it,  ‘sensors’, ‘deciders’ and ‘effectors’.  In other words commanders supported by AI will be networked with ‘next generation’ drones, satellites and other systems to identify targets to be destroyed by a variety of novel and traditional military systems. The aim is to rapidly speed up the time between target identification and attack.  As Drone Wars has reported, several tests of various elements of this system (such as ASGARD) have been tested and it is likely that further funding for this programme will be part of the DIP.

New munition and drone factories.  The government is keen to bolster the UK’s munitions stocks after supplying huge amounts to Ukraine. The MoD accidentally released details of 12 potential sites for new munitions factories to The Ferret in a Freedom of Information mix-up.  The government has plans to open 6 new factories at a cost of £6bn,   

Helsing factory

Alongside this, there is also a desire to persuade some of the newer drone companies to open factories here in the UK. While Tekever has announced it will open a new site in Swindon, Anduril and Helsing seem to be keeping their power dry while awaiting news that they have secured government contracts before committing to setting up premises.  Both companies have, however, set up UK subsidiaries and have launched PR campaigns to persuade ministers and officials of the efficacy of their products.

While drones are key for these companies, a huge increase in UK spending on military AI systems is also in their sights.

An AI ‘Manhattan Project’ endeavour.  Despite continued and significant concerns about the military use of AI, particularly in ‘the kill chain’, ministers, officials and commanders seem convinced that a rapid integration of AI into all areas of the armed forces is urgent and vital.  Just before stepping down as Chief of the Defence Staff in September, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin put his weight behind calls from Helsing co-founder Gundbert Scherf for a “Manhattan-Project for AI defence”.  Arguing such a plan “would not cost the earth” (but putting it at around $90bn!) Scherf suggested four areas to concentrate on: a) masses of AI-enabled defensive drones deployed on NATO’s eastern flank;  b) deploying AI-enabled combat drones to dominate airspace; c) large scale deployment of ai-enabled underwater drones/sensors; and finally, d) replacing Europe’s ageing satellites with (you guessed it) ai-enabled surveillance and targeting satellites.

Anduril is also not shy of lobbying in its own interests. Anduril UK CEO Richard Drake told The House, Parliament’s in-house magazine, that Anduril US was “very much happy with the direction [the SDR is] taking” but went on to publicly push to reduce regulation on the use of drones in UK airspace:

“For UK PLC to get better and better and better in drones and autonomous systems, they have to always look at their regulatory rules as well. Companies like ours and other UK companies can design and build these really cool things, but if we can’t test them well enough in the UK, that’s going to be a problem.”

Winners and Losers

While wholesale adoption of Helsing’s plan seems unlikely, there seems little doubt that the new AI-focused military companies will be among the various military companies who will be the lucky beneficiaries of the UK’s DIP.  Meanwhile, the rest of us seem assured of spending cuts and tax rises.  

Their drones bad! Our drones good! Defence Secretary announces drones to be shot down

Chris Cole

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. 

UK troops engaged in counter-drone exercise. Credit: MoD

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.

Drone footage shows ‘manifestly unlawful’ US strike on civilians; Trump vows to rip-up drone treaty

Chris Cole

The US killed 11 people in a reported drone strike on a small boat in the Caribbean Sea on 3 September. Although it has not been confirmed that the strike was carried out by a drone, President Trump shared drone footage of the strike on his social media. In August it was revealed that Trump had secretly signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to begin military  operations against drug cartels.

Screen grab from drone video shared by President Trump.

While US officials alleged that the boat targeted was carrying drugs being transported by members of the Tren de Aragua cartel, multiple legal scholars and experts have argued that the strike was “manifestly unlawful.”

Professor Luke Moffett of Queens University Belfast told the BBC that while “force can be used to stop a boat, generally this should be non-lethal measures.” Any use of force must be “reasonable and necessary in self-defence where there is immediate threat of serious injury or loss of life to enforcement officials.”  The US and other states regularly stop boats in international waters as part of law enforcement activity without resorting to the use of lethal force.   

Much more significantly, however, is the grave violation of international law that is deliberate, premeditated targeting of civilians. Claire Finkelstein, professor of national security law at the University of Pennsylvania, said “There’s no authority for this whatsoever under international law. It was not an act of self-defense. It was not in the middle of a war. There was no imminent threat to the United States.”  Finklestein went on to make the clear and obvious connection between the strike and the on-going, two-decades long US drone targeted killing programme which has significantly blurred the lines between law enforcement and armed conflict.

While the US alleges that the occupants of the boat were members of an organised criminal gang and President Trump and other administration officials have began to publicly talk about the threat of ‘Narco terrorists’, that in no way makes the targets of this strike combatants under the laws of war.  While civilians are regularly and persistently victims of  drone and air strikes, the deliberate targeting of non-combatants is still shocking.

New York University law professor Ryan Goodman, who previously worked as a lawyer in Pentagon, told the New York Times that “It’s difficult to imagine how any lawyers inside the Pentagon could have arrived at a conclusion that this was legal rather than the very definition of murder under international law rules that the Defense Department has long accepted.”

In the aftermath of the strike and questioning by the media, administration officials struggled to justify the legality of the strike, resorting to arguing that it was a matter of self-defence. Significantly, senior officials said that further such operations were likely. 

Trump and the MTCR

Meanwhile, President Trump is reportedly returning to a plan formulated during his first administration to overturn controls on the export of US armed drones. Trump attempted in 2020, as we reported, to get the other state signatories of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) to accept that Predator/Reaper-type drones should be moved out of the most strongly controlled group (Category I) into the lesser group (Category II). Other states, however, gave this short shrift, much to Trumps annoyance.     

According to the Reuters report, the new move involves “designating drones as aircraft… rather than missile systems”  which will enable the US to then “sidestep” its treaty obligations. The move will aid US plans to sell hundreds of armed drones to Saudi Arabia, UAE and Qatar.  

Whether this will convince other states is highly doubtful, but it is likely that Trump and his administration will not care. Such a move will of course open the flood gates for other states to unilaterally reinterpret arms control treaties in their favour in the same way and will also likely spur the proliferation of armed drones which will only further increase civilian harm.  

Collateral Damage: Economics and ethics are casualties in the militarisation of AI

Matthew Croft

The current government places a central emphasis on technology and innovation in its evolving national security strategy, and wider approach to governance. Labour proposes reviving a struggling British economy through investment in defence with artificial intelligence (AI) featuring as an important component. Starmer’s premiership seems to align several objectives: economic growth, defence industrial development and technological innovation.

Rachel Reeves and John Healey hold roundtable with military company bosses, in front of Reaper drone at RAF Waddington, Feb 2025. Image: MoD

Taken together, these suggest that the government is positioning AI primarily in the context of war and defence innovation. This not only risks undermining the government’s stated ambitions of stability and economic growth but a strategy that prioritises speed over scrutiny, to the neglect of important ethical concerns.

The private defence industry has been positioned as an important pillar of this strategy. Before the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) was published, Chancellor Rachel Reeves and Defence Secretary John Healey initiated a Defence and Economic Growth Task Force to drive UK growth through defence capabilities and production. Arms companies are no longer vital for the purposes of national security but now presented as engines of future prosperity. AI is central to this, consistently highlighted in government communications John Healy has explicitly acknowledged that AI will increasingly power the British military whilst Kier Starmer stated that AI ‘will drive incredible change’.

UK focusing AI on military applications

The AI Action Plan, released in January 2025, explicitly links AI to economic growth. Although this included references to ‘responsible use and leadership’, the government has now shifted emphasis on military applications at the expense of crucial policy areas. On the 4th of July, the Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle wrote to the Alan Turing Institute – Britain’s premier AI research organization – to refocus research on military applications of AI. The Institutes prior research agenda spanned environmental sustainability, health and national security; under this new directive priorities are fundamentally being narrowed.

BAE Systems Project Odyssey uses AI and VR to make training ‘more realistic’. Image: BAE Systems

Relatedly, the Industrial Strategy released by the government aims to ‘embolden’ the UK’s digital and technologies economy, with £500 million to be delivered through a sovereign AI unit – this however will be focused on ‘building capacity in the most strategically important areas’. Given Peter Kyles re-direction and the overwhelming emphasis the government has placed on AI’s productive capacity in war, it becomes clear that AI research in defence will be at the cost of socially beneficial research in the case of the Alan Turing Institute.

Take Britain’s bleak economic outlook: sluggish productivity; post-Brexit stagnation; strained public finances; mounting government debt repayments; surging costs of living and inflating house prices. There is little evidence to suggest that defence-led growth will yield impactful returns on this catalogue of challenges. No credible economist is going to advise, in the face of these challenges, that investing in defence and redirecting research on AI in the name of national security, is going to give a better return on investment.

Research conducted in America illustrates that investing in health, education, infrastructure and green investment is more likely to give better returns on individual income specifically and broadly, the country’s prospects. Similarly, Lord Blunkett (former minster under Blair) pointed out that without GDP growth, raising defence spending as a share of GDP may not increase the actual funding.

Concerning applications to health outcomes, in August the World Economic Forum reported AI’s striking potential in doubling accuracy in the examination of brains in stroke patients, detecting fractures often missed in overstretched departments and predicting diseases with high confidence. This is critical given the NHS’s persistent challenges: long waiting times, underfunding, regional inequality, staff shortages and bureaucratic inertia.

Health and economic growth are closely related: healthier individuals are more productive, children attend school more consistently, preventative care lowers long-term costs – fundamentally strong health systems add value to the economy and our lives . Yet health is just one example. We are in the embryonic stages of AI development, and by prioritising research on military applications over civilian ones with public value, the government risks undermining, not fuelling long-term economic growth.

Crucially, framing arms companies as a major engine of economic growth is wildly misleading and economically unfounded. Arms sales account for 0.004% of the treasury’s total revenue and the defence industrial base accounts for only 1% of UK economic output. This sector is highly monopolized and so the benefits of ‘growth’ are concentrated among a handful of dominant corporations. Even then, the profit generated will not be reinvested into the UK. The biggest arms company in the UK – BAE Systems – is essentially a joint US-UK company with most of its capital invested in the US with majority shareholders emanating from US investment companies like BlackRock.

Prioritising speed over scrutiny

Beyond the economics, this is part of a wider strategy that signals a growing dismissal of ethical concerns, prioritising speed over scrutiny. The SDR acknowledged that technology is outpacing regulatory frameworks, noting that ‘the UK’s competitors are unlikely to adhere to common ethical standards’. In April 2025, Matthew Clifford – AI advisor to the PM – has been quoted saying ‘speed is everything’. While the Ministry of Defence (in 2022) promised to take an ‘ambitious, safe and responsible’ approach to the development of military AI, the current emphasis on speed sidelines important ethical concerns in the rush for military-technological superiority.

Militarily, the SDR makes plans to invest in drones, autonomous systems and £1 billion for a ‘digital targeting web’. A key foundational principle of International Humanitarian Law is the protection of civilians and their distinction with military targets. An AI-enabled ‘digital targeting web’ – like the one proposed in the SDR – connects sensors and weapons enabling faster detection and killing of human life. These networks would be able to identify and suggest targets faster than humans ever could, leaving soldiers in the best case, minutes, and the worst case, seconds to decide whether the drone should kill.

Digital Warfare: US and UK forces at the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC), Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar,

One notable example is the Maven Smart System, recently procured by NATO. According to the US Think Tank, the Centre of Security and Emerging Technology, the system makes possible small armies to make ‘1000 tactical decisions per hour’. Some legal scholars have pointed out that the prioritisation of speed, within AI-powered battleground technology, raises questions surrounding the preservation of meaningful human control and restraint in warfare. Israeli use of AI-powered automated targeting systems such as ‘Lavender’ during its assault and occupation of Gaza is illustrative of this point. Systems such as these have been highlighted as one of the factors behind the shockingly high civilian death toll there.

This problem is compounded by the recent research that has shown that new large language models are known to ‘hallucinate’ – producing outputs in error or made up. As these systems become embedded within military decision-making chains, the risk of escalation due to technical failure increase dramatically. A false signal, misread sensor or a corrupted database could lead to erroneous targeting, or unintended conflict escalation.

In sum, the UK’s current approach – predominantly framing AI’s utility though the lens of defence – risks squandering its broader social and economic potential. The redirection of public research institutes, the privileging of AI investment in military applications (or so-called ‘strategic areas’) and the emphasis on speed over scrutiny raises serious concerns. Ethically, the erosion of meaningful human control in battlefield decision-making, the risk of AI-driven conflict escalation and the disregard of international humanitarian principles points to a troubling trajectory. The UK risks drifting towards the ethical standards of Russia and Israel in its use of military AI. A government approach to AI grounded in human security (freedom from fear and want), not war is not only more ethical but far more likely to generate sustainable economic growth for the United Kingdom.

  • Matthew Croft is a postgraduate student at Kings College London studying Conflict, Security and Development with a particular interest on the ethics of national security and the politics of technology.