Drones are now rapidly proliferating around the globe enabling belligerents to kill at distance with virtual impunity. At the same time, military planners are pushing ahead with incorporating AI into military systems despite grave concerns about the development of autonomous weapons, while behind the scenes, a number of states now see space as a war-fighting domain and are gearing up for space war.
In conjunction with Leicester CND and to remember the wonderful Penny Walker, Drone Wars are a holding a one-day, online conference to inform and build our campaigning to challenge these developments.
Drone Wars, together with Oxfordshire Peace Campaign and CND, will host an online public meeting and in-person demonstration in January 2025 to oppose flights of US Global Hawk and Reaper drones from RAF Fairford military base in Glos.
The US Air Force (USAF) has applied to the UK’s air regulator, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), to change airspace rules to allow RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-9 Reaper drones to fly regularly from RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire.
In August 2024, a US Global Hawk drone flew into Fairford, conducted two sorties over the following days and then departed. It appears these were two ‘demonstration’ flights to trial temporary air corridors. Following a Post-Implementation Review, in which it was revealed that ten flights into Birmingham airport had to be diverted because of the drones flight, the CAA has ordered the USAF/MoD to investigate “mitigation strategies” to resolve the impact on Birmingham Airport.
According to one document submitted to the CAA, the “working assumption” by the USAF is that the corridors would be activated 2-3 times per week but they are “exploring activation periods that exceed these assumption, both in frequency and time periods of utilisation.” The proposal is that the drones would take off and land overnight: “all activations will be between 1 hour after sunset and 1 hour before sunrise unless in extremis.” While the application to fly Global Hawks from Fairford is on-going, the application to fly Reapers has been ‘paused’, likely till after Global Hawk flights have been approved,
Online public Meeting: Wednesday 15th January, 7.00pm – 8.30pm
Join us online to learn more about these dangerous development
and its worrying consequences both locally and globally.
Demonstration at RAF Fairford: Saturday 25th January, 1pm, Main Gate
UPDATE: Protest will go ahead.
Bring banners and placards, food for lunch, and dress appropriately for the weather.
Demonstration will be by the main gate at corner of Horcott Road /Maine Street.
Postcode for Sat Nav: GL7 4DL
There will be parking for some cars at main gate with additional parking nearby (See below)
There are some spaces available on mini-bus from Oxford £10/£5 low-waged.
Pick up point will be the Ashmolean Museum with minibus departing at 11.15 am.
To book a place email: oxonpeace@yahoo.co.uk on first come/first served basis.
If you can make a donation to cover cost of transport we would be grateful. Read more →
Language is one of the most powerful political weapons. The ability to choose how state violence, such as drone warfare, is described is the ability to attempt to determine how it is understood. Consider the difference between the word ‘murder’, for example, and the word ‘neutralisation’. Though they can both be used to mean the same thing – the deliberate killing of a person – the word ‘murder’ is vividly emotive, whereas ‘neutralisation’ is vague, bureaucratic, and sterile. To say that a drone has been used to murder a person sounds much more negative – violent, gruesome, even – than to say that it has been used to neutralise a threat. For ‘neutralisation’ we could substitute, perhaps, equally banal words such as ‘interdiction’ or ‘prosecution’, lofty-sounding technical words with an aura of expertise and formality but which are also difficult to pin down to a precise meaning.
Language, that is to say, often masks the horrors of drone warfare in ways that subtly work to sanitise and legitimise it. One of the key claims about drone warfare, after all, is that it is uniquely positioned to minimize harm, with the metaphors of ‘surgical precision’ and ‘pinpoint accuracy’ being used to suggest that drone strikes are a particularly clean, and therefore proportionate and defensible, form of aerial bombardment. But it is not only such clear uses of metaphor that function to obscure the nature of drone killing. Very often we see the use of what has become known as the ‘exonerative voice’ or the ‘past exonerative tense’, which is a specific way of constructing utterances in order to simultaneously declare that violence has been done and to obscure responsibility for that violence. When exonerative language is used to describe state violence, we are made aware of this violence in a specific way: a way that makes it seem perhaps accidental, or inevitable, or a benign or unimportant by-product of an automatic and legitimate process. Violence appears as anything but violent.
The Politics of Grammar
Perhaps the most direct way to explain the exonerative voice is through examples. Discussing the ubiquitous phrase “mistakes were made,” John Broder writes that this particular piece of innocuous-sounding jargon “sounds like a confession of error or even contrition, but in fact, it is not quite either one. The speaker is not accepting personal responsibility or pointing the finger at anyone else.” It is a linguistic sleight of hand through which people can simultaneously admit that something disagreeable happened and hide the fact that this disagreeable thing was an act (often a deliberate act) of wrongdoing for which people or groups can and should be held accountable.
Many writers have pointed out that this specific linguistic trick is often used to describe police killings. In a satirical piece structured as a style guide for using the past exonerative, Devorah Blachor shows how multiple accounts of the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 (the killing that sparked global waves of Black Lives Matter protests) failed explicitly to acknowledge that Floyd was murdered by police. Instead, they coyly referred to police misconduct, a death in custody, or to an incident in which an officer was disciplined for kneeling. The New York Times, for instance, wrote: “4 Minneapolis Officers Fired After Black Man Dies in Custody.” The past exonerative tense, Blachor archly writes, “transforms acts of police brutality against Black people into neutral events in which Black people have been accidentally harmed or killed as part of a vague incident where police were present-ish”.
Writing about the curious phrase “officer-involved shooting,” a deliberately ambiguous formulation which is often used to refer to police brutality, scholar Michael Conklin likewise argues that the awkward and indirect nature of the phrase fails to identify anybody as having actually done anything.
The phrase “officer-involved shooting” is not just grammatically ambiguous; it also deceptively implies that the officer did not do the shooting. This is because referring to someone as being “involved” in an act insinuates that he was only involved in some tangential way.
To the degree that state violence is intelligible at all when spoken about in this opaque register, it appears accidental or incidental, rather than as the central content of the reported event. This is no accident: the exonerative voice is a fantastically effective tool for the misrepresentation of violence.
Drone discourse, too, has its equivalent version of this rhetorical trick. Rather than saying that mistakes were made or that individuals died, however, responsibility for harm is displaced away from the drone or the drone crews and onto the strike itself. Read more →
On Wednesday 20 November, the Defence Secretary John Healey announced in the House of Commons that the UK was scrapping its entire fleet of Watchkeeper drones bringing to an end to the sorry saga of this drone programme.
Anyone who has been following the Drone Wars blog over the last 14 years will be well aware of the failings of Watchkeeper. Based on the Israeli Hermes 450 drone, Watchkeeper was built by a joint venture company (U-TacS) owned 50-50 by the Israeli company Elbit Systems and Thales UK.
While the UK’s armed Reaper drones are operated by the Royal Air Force, the unarmed watchkeepers were bought for the British Army with the intention of undertaking short-medium range surveillance in order to conduct artillery strikes.
Fifty-four of the drones were built under a 2004, £1bn contract which was supposed to see “world-class” drones, operated by the army in Afghanistan by mid-2010. Long delays saw only four of the drones deployed to Afghanistan for four weeks in 2014, conducting around 140 hours of surveillance as British forces withdrew from Camp Bastion.
Since then, apart from one short deployment in the UK, the 50 plus Watchkeeper drones have either flown on training flight, mostly in the UK or Cyprus (despite being marketed as an all-weather system, it performs poorly in ‘adverse’ weather) or simply kept in storage. The UK deployment was to support Border Force operations to curb refugees crossings the channel. According to responses to our FoI requests at the time, a total of 21 flights were conducted in September and October 2022.
Watchkeeper crashes: Aberporth 2014; off Cyprus coast 2022
Military Technophilia
While it would be fair to say that there have been particular problems with the Watchkeeper programme, the dominant narrative that sophisticated military technology is the answer to a wide array of political and security issues is also an important element here. Read more →
With US Global Hawk drones to fly from Gloucestershire, US-UK collaborations are set to increase
USAF RQ-4 Global Hawk drone
The US military appears to have significantly increased the frequency of its reconnaissance drone missions over Occupied Palestine and neighbouring countries, according to flight tracking information identified by Drone Wars. The flights point to intensified US intelligence interests in the region, though the question of their precise purpose – whether general military intelligence, or more targeted surveillance – remains unclear.
The United States maintains an air base at Sigonella Airport in Southern Italy, from which it flies Global Hawk, MQ-4C Triton, and Reaper drones over Europe and the Middle East. While Reaper drones appear only sporadically in publicly-available flight radar registers, data shows that Global Hawks stationed at Sigonella flew missions across the Mediterranean at least twenty times through September, October and early November 2024, regularly crossing into the airspace over Gaza, the West Bank, and Jordan. On other occasions, flights spent hours circling off the coast of Israel, or, in the case of a Triton naval surveillance drone, flew northwards over Lebanon and Libya. Available data suggests that this marks a significant increase, with only one such deployment of a Global Hawk from Sigonella identifiable across June and July. As war and genocide in the region has escalated, expanding to devastating consequence into Lebanon and Syria, this uptick demonstrates an increased dependence on drone capabilities for US military intelligence.
The Global Hawk drone was developed by Northrop Grumman in the 1990s to maximise aerial surveillance capacity for the US military. With its advanced sensors and extensive operational range, the drone can remain airborne for over 30 hours, covering vast areas without the risk posed to crewed aircraft in territories deemed hostile. The drone’s high-resolution imaging systems and radar communications enable it to provide real-time data that informs military strategy, but which leaves communities subject to its missions under relentless aerial surveillance.
Global Hawk 11-2046 mission from Sigonella Air Base, 13th November 2024
In Palestine, surveillance is already inescapable. Long prior to the onset of the current war, Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have been consistently subjected to round-the-clock observation, tracking and monitoring through extensive infrastructures of surveillance, including ubiquitous facial recognition technology. Israeli quadcopter drones, many of which are also fitted with deadly attack capabilities, hover constantly. Palestinians report the psychological harm wrought by this permanent monitoring, which threatens to enact more death at any moment. Read more →
Drone Wars appeared before a two-day information tribunal this week seeking to overturn the decision of the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to end the release of statistical information on the use of Reaper drones and other armed aircraft on military operations. This information has been a crucial way for the public and parliament to have oversight of UK military action and without the data, it will be much hard to hold the UK to account.
The MoD has been responding to our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for statistical information since 2010. In January 2023, the MoD abruptly ended the practice arguing that the information could not be provided due to exemptions provided under Section 23 (Security bodies) or Section 24 (National Security), and Section 26 (Defence) of the Act.
Section 23 and Section 24 are used as ‘alternatives’ to disguise which exemption is being relied upon, that is whether the information comes from or relates to Special Forces, the intelligence service or similar bodies, or whether it is needed to protect ‘national security’.
The hearing took place partly in open session with Drone Wars present, but it also went into closed session when we were excluded, in order to hear evidence in secret.
The MoD provided a witness statement from Group Captain Redican, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Joint Air Force Component and someone with direct experience of Operation Shader in response to our appeal. Although the full witness statement contains 50 numbered paragraphs, only 15 were visible to us, the rest was redacted.
Documents also disclosed to us in the run up to the Tribunal revealed that at an earlier stage of our appeal, the Information Commissioner had asked the MoD to provide it with evidence that disclosure of the statistics to Drone Wars had caused harm or prejudice to the UK. The MoD wrote to the Information Commissioner:
“The information previously released cannot be directly linked to harm to UK forces in its current operating environment (predominantly Operation Shader) however it has revealed capability details for a system that is capable of use on global operations where the threat environment may be significantly different against a more sophisticated adversary.”
In his witness statement, Gp. Capt Redican stated:
“I am aware that the MoD has previously provided responses to similar requests issued by Mr Cole. The MoD now seeks to withhold information which it was previously content to disclose. This is due to the changing national and security context, detailed further below.” [note the following four paragraphs were redacted]
Asked to explain what he meant by the ‘changing national and security context’, Redican explained that following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the UK was now preparing for ‘State on State’ warfare rather than use of armed force against non-state groups. At the same time, he went on, the situation in the Middle East had changed since the beginning of Operation Shader, with Iran – which had previously engaged in the same task of opposing ISIS – but now, “was a major actor in that theatre, and their actions are contrary to British interests.”
Drone Wars strongly argued that the statistical data that we sought was simply not capable of providing insight into ‘techniques, tactics and procedures’ at the level of detail which could cause prejudice to the UK as claimed, but instead gave a broad overview which enabled public oversight.
MoD ‘drawing a line in the sand’
Redican argued that it was not about “the specifics of information” but that “a line in the sand had to be drawn somewhere”. He went on “at some point we have to set a new precedent. We are going to have to begin to protect our capabilities more and more.” Read more →
Drone Wars, together with Oxfordshire Peace Campaign and 
Language is one of the most powerful political weapons. The ability to choose how state violence, such as drone warfare, is described is the ability to attempt to determine how it is understood. Consider the difference between the word ‘murder’, for example, and the word ‘neutralisation’. Though they can both be used to mean the same thing – the deliberate killing of a person – the word ‘murder’ is vividly emotive, whereas ‘neutralisation’ is vague, bureaucratic, and sterile. To say that a drone has been used to murder a person sounds much more negative – violent, gruesome, even – than to say that it has been used to neutralise a threat. For ‘neutralisation’ we could substitute, perhaps, equally banal words such as ‘interdiction’ or ‘prosecution’, lofty-sounding technical words with an aura of expertise and formality but which are also difficult to pin down to a precise meaning.
On Wednesday 20 November, the Defence Secretary John Healey 
