Category: Campaign comment

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.

The Attack Killed Them: Drone Warfare and the Exonerative Voice

Alex Adams

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”.

New York Times, May 26, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/us/minneapolis-police-man-died.html

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 →

Operation Without End: Time to halt UK’s now decade-long air war in Iraq and Syria

Chris Cole

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New briefing (right) calls for end to UK’s ten year air war in Iraq and Syria.

As we reach the tenth anniversary of the deployment of UK armed forces to counter ISIS in Iraq and Syria – known officially as Operation Shader – many may well be surprised at the milestone, thinking that the conflict had long ended.

Indeed both Iraq and Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)  declared military victory over ISIS (or ‘Daesh’ as the group is sometimes called) more than five years ago in March 2019 when the last of the territory held by the group was overrun.  Most nations that engaged in airstrikes against ISIS, including Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands and Canada, have ended their air operations.

However, in the five years since the territorial defeat of ISIS, UK fighter aircraft and drones continue to undertake almost daily military flights over Iraq and Syria alongside the US, with airstrikes continuing albeit on a much more infrequent level. The UK’s most recent drone strike – targeting an individual in Syria – took place in June 2024, nine years and nine months after the UK’s first Operation Shader strike.

TRENDS Research, June 2024

While remnants of ISIS continue to exist and the group remains a serious threat to the people of Iraq including undertaking sporadic terrorist attacks there, they are no longer the military force that they once were.  ISIS in Iraq and Syria (as opposed to those in Europe who have pledged allegiance to the group) currently appears to pose little threat to the UK.

However, as the tenth anniversary of the ongoing deployment approaches there is seemingly little political  appetite, in either the US or the UK,  to bring it to an end. Importantly, with few ‘boots on the ground’ there is the distinct absence of any public campaign ‘to end the war – bring troops home’  as there has been for other major military deployments.

In the US, a recent poll found that less than 30% of public even knew that US troops were still stationed in Syria. Currently, there are around 900 US troops in Syria and 2,500 in Iraq, with an estimated 100 British troops in Iraq alongside an unknown number of British Special Forces troops in Syria and Iraq. US and UK aircraft/drones and their crews, which continue to operate over Iraq and Syria, are based outside of the countries.

Managed Perception: We only kill bad guys

Lack of public and media attention to the ongoing military operation is in no small part due to the lack of UK military casualties and the perception that the UK has undertaken a ‘precision bombing’ campaign with almost no civilian casualties.

Despite more than 4,300 UK air strikes, many of them in heavily populated areas, the UK insists that there has only been one civilian casualty.  While many, including  military officers, journalists and casualty recording organisations, have been scornful of these claims, the management of the perception of the impact of the bombing campaign has clearly worked.

November 2015

On the ground in Iraq and Syria the story is very different, with multiple civilian deaths linked to UK airstrikes.  Overall, Airwars estimates that 8,000 – 14,000 civilians died from Coalition bombing in Iraq and Syria – a huge human toll.  However, while glad to see the back of ISIS, resentment at presence of western forces on the ground – and in the air – grows.

The US drone assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad airport in January 2020 sparked an outpouring of anger and outrage, with the Iraqi parliament passing  a motion demanding the expulsion of US forces from Iraq.  When the Iraqi president pushed for a timetable for a withdrawal of forces, the US flatly refused.  Instead, in December 2021, the US announced that the Coalition had ended combat operation and was now engaged in an ‘advise, assist and enable’ role.  However, the same number of troops remain on the ground and aircraft remain in the skies.

Mission Creep

Here in the UK, the ongoing military operation now gets very little attention either in parliament or the media. In May 2024, the Lib Dem defence spokesperson, Richard Forde MP,  mildly suggested in the House of Commons that as UK forces deployed for Operation Shader had been used instead to counter an Iranian attack on Israel, this deserved at least a debate. The reply from the (then) Defence Minister was: Read more →

FoI challenge shows MoD claim of “thousands of cutting edge” drones in service to be nonsense

Chris Cole

In response to questions raised by the Financial Times regarding the number of drones in service, the MoD insisted in December 2023 that “we have invested heavily in over 30 such programmes over the last several years and have thousands of cutting edge aerial vehicles that are designed to make our armed forces more lethal and effective.”

List of UAV programmes MoD says it has funded “over last several years”.

Following a long-running Freedom of Information (FoI) wrangle with the MoD, in which the Information Commissioner threated legal proceeding against the Department,  Drone Wars UK finally received a list of the 32 UAV programmes which the MoD said it has funded.

However, of the 32 programmes listed only seven have resulted in drones which are currently in service (one of which is a naval target/training drone), while another four relate to drones which are planned to be in service in the future.

Of the remaining programmes, seven relate to drones that have been retired or are due to be retired this year, five are for trials (two of which have ended), two are funding broad research and two are funding for programmes not related to the development of military UAVs. The names of five other programmes have been redacted.

In total these programmes add up to around 250 military drones currently in service, with another 250 due to be in service in the next year or two – far from the ‘thousands’ claimed by the MoD in December.

While it is unfortunately no longer surprising that MoD reporting on its programmes is questionable, the extent of smoke and mirrors around UK’s drone programme in particular is disturbing.  Cost overruns seem endemic, an RAF Squadron specifically set up four years ago to trial new drones has yet to undertake any such tests and now we find that we are being misled about basic inventory figures.

Analysis of drone programmes listed by MoD in its FoI response

We believe that there is a real debate to be had about the efficacy, legality and ethics of drone warfare – even more so given the increasing autonomy of these systems.  While some insist that that the UK must invest even more heavily in drones and autonomous weapons arguing they are transforming warfare, serious questions remain.  However neither Parliament nor the public cannot properly debate and discuss these issues without appropriately factual information. While we have seen increased secrecy from the UK government around the deployment and use of drones – ostensibly due to what is described as the ‘geopolitical situation’ – we now have misleading information about UK drone numbers and development programmes given to the UK media.

Around the world we are increasingly seeing new and emerging technology being adopted by militaries in order to  ‘increase lethality’.  The UK has argued that it should be at the forefront of this new way of warfare – “all the warfare of the future” as Boris Johnson described it when discussing the Integrated Review.  However it is crucial that there is proper accountability and oversight of these developments, something that is simply not possible without proper transparency.  Misinformation here, whatever some may say, is simply wrong and unhelpful.

Read more →

Proceed in Harmony: The Government replies to the Lords on AI in Weapon Systems

Peter Burt

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Last December a select committee of the House of Lords published ‘Proceed with Caution’: a report setting out the findings of a year-long investigation into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in weapon systems.

Members of the Lords committee were drawn entirely from the core of the UK’s political and security establishment, and their report was hardly radical in its conclusions.  Nevertheless, their report made a number of useful recommendations and concluded that the risks from autonomous weapons are such that the government “must ensure that human control is consistently embedded at all stages of a system’s lifecycle, from design to deployment”.  The Lords found that Ministry of Defence (MoD) claims to be “ambitious, safe, responsible” in its use of AI had “not lived up to reality”.

The government subsequently pledged to reply to the Lords report, and on 21 February published its formal response.  Perhaps the best way of summarising the tone of the response is to quote from its concluding paragraph:  ““Proceed with caution”, the overall message of this [Lords] report, mirrors the MoD’s approach to AI adoption.”   There is little new in the government response and nothing in it will be of any surprise to observers and analysts of UK government policy on AI and autonomous technologies.  The response merely outlines how the government intends to follow the course of action it had already planned to take, reiterating the substance of past policy statements such as the Defence Artificial Intelligence Strategy and puffing up recent MoD activity and achievements in the military AI field.

As might be imagined, the response takes a supportive approach to recommendations from the Lords which are aligned to its own agenda, such as developing high-quality data sets, improving MoD’s AI procurement arrangements, and undertaking research into potential future AI capabilities.  On the positive side, it is encouraging to see that in some areas concerns over the risks and limitations of AI technologies are highlighted, for example in the need for review and rigorous testing of new systems.  MoD acknowledges that rigorous testing would be required before an operator could be confident in an AI system’s use and effect, that current procedures, including the Article 36 weapons review process, will need to be adapted and updated, and that changes in operational environment may require weapon systems to be retested.

The response also reveals that the government is working on a Joint Service Publication covering all the armed forces to give more concrete directions and guidance on implementing MoD’s AI ethical principles.  The document, ‘Dependable AI in Defence’, will set out the governance, accountabilities, processes and reporting mechanisms needed to translate ethical policies into tangible actions and procedures.  Drone Wars UK and other civil society organisations have long called for MoD to formulate such guidance as a priority.

In some areas the MoD has relatively little power to meet the committee’s recommendations, such as in adjusting government pay scales to match market rates and attract qualified staff to work on MoD AI projects.  Here the rejoinder is little more than flannel, mentioning that “a range of steps” are being taken “to make Defence AI an attractive and aspirational choice.”

In other respects the Lords have challenged MoD’s approach more substantially, and in such cases these challenges are rejected in the government response.  This is so in relation to the Lords’ recommendation that the government should adopt a definition for autonomous weapons systems (AWS).  The section of the response dealing with this point lays bare the fact that the government’s priority “is to maximise our military capability in the face of growing threats”.  A rather unconvincing assertion that “the irresponsible and unethical behaviours and outcomes about which the Committee is rightly concerned are already prohibited under existing legal mechanisms” is followed by the real reason for the government’s opposition: “there is a strong tendency in the ongoing debate about autonomous weapons to assert that any official AWS definition should serve as the starting point for a new legal instrument prohibiting certain types of systems”.  Any international treaty which would outlaw autonomous weapon systems “represents a threat to UK Defence interests” the government argues.  The argument ends with a side-swipe at Russia and an attempt to shut down further debate by claiming that the debate is taking place “at the worst possible time, given Russia’s action in Ukraine and a general increase in bellicosity from potential adversaries.”  This basically seems to be saying that in adopting a definition for autonomous weapon systems the UK would be making itself more vulnerable to Russian military action.  Really? Read more →

The UK and the Ukraine War: Drones vs Diplomacy

Chris Cole

Custom-built British ‘suicide-drone’ reportedly bound for Ukraine.     Pic: QinetiQ

The UK is to supply Ukraine with “hundreds of new long-range attack drones” a government spokesperson told the media on Monday as the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak welcomed President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to Britain for a brief visit.

“Today the prime minister will confirm the further UK provision of hundreds of air defence missiles and further unmanned aerial systems including hundreds of new long-range attack drones with a range of over 200km. These will all be delivered over the coming months as Ukraine prepares to intensify its resistance to the ongoing Russian invasion.”

It is not at all clear what theses ‘long range attack drones’ are, although there has been some reports of the UK funding the development of a ‘suicide-drone’ to supply to Ukraine.

This latest news comes on top of the announcement in the last few weeks that the UK is supplying Storm Shadow cruise missiles to Ukraine following the export of UK Challenger 2 tanks.

Some will no doubt welcome the supply of attack drones and cruise missiles to Ukraine as a counter to Russia’s military aggression. It goes without saying that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and continuing use of lethal force is unlawful and must be resisted.   However, there are real questions to be asked now about how such a strategy of supplying evermore lethal military hardware risks expanding rather than ending this war. It is becoming increasingly easier to see the UK and other NATO countries being drawn more directly into an armed conflict with Russia.  Any such escalation would be disastrous for the people of Ukraine and the wider region as well as seriously risking a catastrophic nuclear event.

Rather than escalating the conflict by supplying ever more lethal arms, the UK should be urging negotiations to end the war as it is inevitable that this will have to happen at some point.  While some western military analysts urge that the war should be prolonged in order to weaken Russia in the long term, Ukraine and its people suffer.

Negotiations are of course a matter for the Ukrainian people, but it should be remembered that a settlement  was seemingly very close last March with a Turkish-backed plan for Russian forces to withdraw to their pre-24 February positions without Ukraine giving up its claim to any of its territory.  Unfortunately the moment passed (with suggestions that the then British PM Boris Johnson personally lobbied Zelenskiy to reject the plan (for more on this see  Ukraine One Year On: Time to Negotiate Peace).

While it is easy for the current PM to grab a few headlines and play to the crowd by supplying lethal attack drones to Ukraine, the harder but more rewarding long-term work of diplomacy in order to end this awful war is being neglected.