6 June 2020 — Drone Warfare
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A new report published today by Drone Wars UK investigates the co-operation between the UK and the US in relation to armed drone operations. While the UK insist its armed drone programme is separate and independent to that of the US, our report, ‘Joint Enterprise: An overview of US-UK co-operation on armed drone operations’, argues that close historic ties, shared use of infrastructure and tightly integrated operations show that that the two programmes amount to a joint enterprise, with arguably joint liability.
In this final post to mark our 10th birthday, I want to peer a little into the future, looking at what we are facing in relation to drone warfare in the coming years. Of course predicting the future is always a little foolish – perhaps especially so in the middle of a global pandemic – but four areas of work are already fairly clear: public accountability over the deployment of armed drones; the push to open UK skies to military drones; monitoring the horizontal and vertical proliferation of military drones and opposing the development of lethal autonomous weapons, aka ‘killer robots’.
We were excluded from our 2017 Information Tribunal when it went into closed session
Behind the scenes, the UK is developing a range of military autonomous systems. Image: Crown Copyright
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has 
Arthur Holland Michel, author of ‘Eyes In The Sky’, is one of the co-founders of the 
November 2019 saw seven civilian casualties incidents from drone strikes in four different war-zones illustrating the growing spread of drone warfare. The seven strikes between them are thought to have killed 41 civilians including 11 children.
The Zephyr ‘High Altitude Pseudo Satellite’ drone
On Saturday (23 March) the Syrian Defence Force announced that ISIS’ last stronghold, the small town of 
The New Dark Age 