Amid naval patrols, live military drills, island building, trade wars and diplomatic breakdown, drones are making an increasing impact on the security situation in the South China Sea and the relationship between China and the US. Smaller nations in the region are also acquiring further reaching surveillance UAVs, while a number of states are looking to bring armed drones in to service over the next few years.

The world’s attention has been drawn in recent months to a number of spectacular cases of the use of armed drones in military operations.
the targeted killing by the United States of Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Iranian Qods paramilitary force, at Baghdad airport on 3 January 2020, together with pro-Iranian militia leaders;
strikes on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco oil facilities at Abqaiq on 14 September 2019 by some 25 drones and missiles. The Houthi movement in Yemen claimed to have carried out these strikes, but the United States and Saudi Arabia attributed the attack to Iran, which denied responsibility; and
reports that Turkey had made intensive use of armed drones in Syria to destroy dozens of Syrian battle tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and air defence systems after several of its own drones had been shot down by Syrian or Russian forces in early 2020. Previously, Turkey had publicised its manufacture of a new drone, the Songar, armed with a machine gun or grenade launcher, controlled by artificial intelligence, and capable of being used in swarms.

These events are only the visible part of a global phenomenon that started a few decades ago but is now widespread: the resort to uncrewed air vehicles (UAVs) equipped with weapons as a substitute for air strikes previously carried out by crewed aircraft. As a consequence of the attractiveness of the use of drones – for obvious reasons of cost and pilot safety – the international market in armed drones is booming, creating risks of widespread proliferation, especially to non-state actors or states known for their lack of respect for the laws of warfare.This paper analyses these proliferation risks and formulates recommendations on how to mitigate them.

Date: August 2020
Authors: Cholpon Orozobekova and Marc Finaud

Military and “security” actions with military robotic and armed systems have radically changed the war scenarios, which have evolved from concentrating on military and strategic targets to performing attacks that can seriously affect uninvolved civilian population.

Attacks with armed drones often do not appear in newspapers, but they show a steady growth rate in recent years. They are attacks that end up killing civilians, as well as perpetrating summary and extrajudicial executions of supposedly terrorist people. Lately, in addition, the military drones are evolving to incorporate autonomous systems of decision.

This report presents the main concepts related to the new robotic military systems as well as the different types of military drones and the risk that the automation step towards autonomy and the deployment of autonomous and lethal armed systems can mean. The publication seeks to identify the major actors (producing and buying countries, and companies) in the field of armed and autonomous drones, as well as the main types of drones that may include autonomous capacities. The international efforts that aim at the prohibition of these weapons are also presented, as well as the ethical problems that arise in relation to these new weapons, to armed drones and their possible autonomy, in a geopolitical framework in which the business has neglected people and their rights.

Date: November 2019
Authors: Pere Brunet, Tica Font, Xavi Mojal and Joaquín Rodríguez