What The Filton Six Destroyed

Over the course of two years – following an unusual arrest under counter-terror powers, eighteen months on remand, a first trial, a second trial, and two separate proceedings against Charlotte Head’s barrister – it has become increasingly difficult to believe that the government is prosecuting the Filton 25 for property damage. It is prosecuting the concept of direct action.

But the Filton 25’s alleged action has also exposed something larger: the convergence of drone warfare, artificial intelligence, and industrialised killing that is reshaping warfare in the 21st century.

Israel’s unmanned military

Israel has been a pioneer in unmanned military systems since the 1970s, but Gaza has become a testing ground for a far more integrated doctrine. Drones no longer serve only as surveillance platforms; they operate within a layered ecosystem of targeting, intelligence gathering, and strike coordination.

Some fly to collect surveillance for 17 hours without landing. Others operate in swarms. Others still are piloted remotely by soldiers. Drones that follow individuals into their homes and announce their names have been reported in both Gaza and Lebanon. Others emit the sound of crying babies to draw people out of shelters before striking them.

Hermes 900 drones circle at high altitude, relaying information to strike-capable Hermes 450s. Backpack-sized Skylark drones guide artillery fire. Smaller systems, including Elbit’s Magni-X, are marketed as reconnaissance tools for “dense urban environments” – a sanitised phrase for navigating the ruins of bombed neighbourhoods and identifying those who remain alive beneath the rubble.

These tactics are not outliers. They are features of a doctrine that functions to psychologically break an entire population and kill them quickly.

Drone squadrons

The Israeli Air Force (IAF) has approximately eight squadrons dedicated to unmanned vehicles, of which five are confirmed UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) units. Their origins lie with Squadron 200. Established in 1971, it was one of the earliest operational UAV units in the world.

Current UAV squadrons include Squadron 161, known as “The Black Snake”, which flies the Elbit Hermes-450 primarily over the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon.

Squadron 210, launched in 2010, became the first UAV unit to operate outside the traditional UAV hub at Palmachim airbase, expanding the IAF’s infrastructure.

A further squadron built around the Heron MK 2 is now being established. Major General (ret.) Hagi Topolanski, former second-in-command of the Israeli Air Force, claims that roughly 80–90% of all IAF flight hours are now performed by unmanned systems.

Press ban lifted

Despite a global reputation as one of the world’s biggest exporters of unmanned military systems, Israel maintained a legal ban on domestic press reporting about its use of armed drones for roughly 20 years.

That censorship was lifted on 20 July 2026. The decision came down to commercial pressure. Arms manufacturers wanted to speak more openly about what their products could do, in order to sell more of them. It was confirmation that the outcomes of settler colonialism had served a commercial purpose; the subjugation of Palestinians is lucrative.

Israel insists that these systems are justified, and consent is constantly manufactured under the language of defence or counterterrorism. On 8 April 2026, now called ‘Black Wednesday‘, we saw what happen when 100 air strikes are made on densely populated cities in 10 minutes, all through our phone screens. Israeli military claims that these are targeted operations against Hezbollah have started to fall on deaf ears. Referring to Israel’s bombing campaign on Lebanon, breaking the Iran-US ceasefire, even Trump recently said:

You don’t have to knock down an apartment house every time you’re looking for somebody.

“Where’s Daddy?”

Alongside these systems sits another layer: artificial intelligence.

The Israeli military’s Lavender programme, revealed by +972 Magazine through interviews with intelligence personnel, reportedly generated vast numbers of targets using algorithmic analysis. A companion system, known as “Where’s Daddy?“, allegedly tracked individuals to their homes before strikes were authorised. Together, these systems raised profound questions about what happens when machine learning models increasingly mediate life-and-death decisions.

The horror is not simply technological; it is moral. The more responsibility is delegated to databases, machine-learning models, and predictive systems, the easier it becomes for human beings to describe civilian deaths as errors generated somewhere further down the chain. This violence is deployed through drones. The killing itself are handed over to unmanned systems.

No Accountability

Watching executives discuss these developments often leaves me unsettled. Civilian deaths become “mistakes“. Algorithms become “tools“. Entire systems of violence are described in the language of optimisation and efficiency. However, mass killings never seem to be the ‘red line’ to stop the use of AI for these Silicon Valley CEOs.

Once again, this infrastructure extends far beyond Gaza. Companies such as Palantir increasingly occupy positions at the intersection of state administration, healthcare systems, intelligence agencies, and military operations. AI companies once associated with consumer products now find themselves drawn into defence contracts and battlefield applications. The boundaries between civilian technology and military technology continue to erode.

Through mass data collection, geolocation tracking, biometric identification, and behavioural profiling, populations can be rendered visible at all moments and pre-targeted before any violence even occurs. Yet behind every abstraction are human beings. Children become data points. Families become coordinates. Entire neighbourhoods become target environments. And still, normal life continues around us.

Business as usual?

Supermarkets remain stocked. Offices remain open. We answer emails, attend meetings, and scroll through our phones, all while wars unfold around us in real time. Every day, life carries on unscathed, even as governments provide military support, intelligence cooperation, and diplomatic cover to campaigns that many regard as catastrophic violations of international law.

Since Gaza’s ongoing genocide, I have become increasingly disenfranchised with British politics. Those who facilitate military policy rarely face meaningful consequences for its outcomes. Ministers authorise surveillance flights, intelligence sharing, arms exports, and defence contracts without any prospect of entering the prisons that hold the people who protest those decisions. The architects of policy remain insulated from the systems of punishment imposed on those who challenge it. This asymmetry is impossible to ignore.

The state treats direct action as a threat requiring exceptional measures. Yet the violence that provokes that action is often discussed in the language of procedure, procurement, and national interest. That is why the Filton action continues to resonate.

The question was never simply about property damage to forty Israeli weapon components. It was about the infrastructure behind them: the manufacturers, the supply chains, the software, the military doctrines, the political decisions, and the collective willingness to treat all of it as normal.

For me, that normality has become the most difficult thing to understand. Once you recognise the connections – between a factory in Filton, a prison in Surrey, a drone over Gaza, and a politician in Westminster – it becomes impossible to look away.

And once you can no longer look away, neutrality itself begins to feel like a form of participation.

Featured image via the Canary