In the trenchesU.K. military’s drone spending keep rising

In an effort to boost its military, the United Kingdom, over the past five years, has spent more than €2 billion  buying and developing unmanned drones. The U.K. government has no intention of slowing down, as it is committed to spending another €2 billion on new unmanned aircraft.

The Ministry of Defense has invested a significant amount of money in UAVs because the military sees the potential of drones in modern warfare.

The Guardian notes that not everyone is happy about UAV spending. The anti-drone campaign group Drone Wars UK has said that the extensive use of UAVs by the military raise moral and ethical questions that should be properly scrutinized and debated.

Chris Cole, the founder of Drone Wars, says drones promote war because there is little threat to humans if a UAV is shot down. “A major concern with the use of this is kind of unmanned armed technology is that it might actually make war more likely,” Cole told a reporter in a YouTube video. “One of the restraining factors in war traditionally has been the risk to one’s own forces.

“Since the Vietnam War there’s been a lot of political problems with body bags coming back from wars, so this push to use unmanned systems where at the moment for instance the Reaper drones are controlled from 7,000 miles away and there is no risk to the forces being used. So there is a great temptation to launch attacks because there is no risk to one’s own forces.”

Cole is asking for the Commons Defense Committee to hold an inquiry into the use of UAVs by the U.K. military. According to the report done by Cole’s group, the U.K. military has been flying armed drones in Afghanistan for four years. The groups says that seventy-six countries currently own UAVs, but only the United States, Israel, and the United Kingdom are using armed drones in current military operations.

Using military statements and parliamentary answers, the report states that €500 million have been spent on Reaper drones and €847 million were committed to the Watchkeeper system, an advanced surveillance and targeting UAV which is currently being tested.

Cole said the €2 billion figure could be an underestimate because of the “difficulty of obtaining up-to-date figures for government spending on developing new drone technology.”

Cole also has some serious questions when it comes to what the drones are being used for and what kind of drawbacks they present. “There are a number of serious questions about the growing use of unmanned drones for military and civil use. Is the military use of unmanned drones lowering the political costs of military intervention? While manufacturers argue that drones can deliver their weapons with ‘pinpoint precision’, how accurate are these systems in reality? What are the privacy and civil liberties implications of using drones in civil airspace? How far should we allow the development of autonomous unmanned