Drone Wars UK is a small, UK-based, NGO working towards a long-term goal of an international ban on the use of armed drones. While drone warfare is often presented as a precise and risk-free solution to international security threats, there are significant dangers to global peace and security arising from their use.  These include how drones are:

-lowering the threshold for the use of armed force,
-expanding the use of targeted killing
-enabling greater secrecy, and less accountability for military intervention
-rehabilitating the notion that armed force can solve political conflicts

Remote ‘risk free’ intervention through using armed drones is in danger of becoming not the last option, but the first. Besides the direct consequences on the ground, the normalisation of this type of response means that underlying political and social causes of conflicts go unaddressed. This in turn drastically reduces the chances of achieving just and sustainable peace and security.

Recognising a ban on the use of armed drones is some distance away, its primary focus is on  initiating and supporting activity designed to restrict the use of these systems (for example their use for targeted killing outside of conventional battlefields) as steps towards our goal.