Iain Overton

5 days ago | aoav.org.uk | Iain Overton

Keir Starmer’s Govan shipyard speech in advance of his unveiling of the Strategic Defence Review was a full-throttle rallying cry for a Britain rearmed and remobilised. Wrapped in the rhetoric of national unity and renewal, it was also a striking departure from the approach of peace and humanitarian accountability that many of his backbenchers have extolled.

1 week ago | aoav.org.uk | Iain Overton

In November 2024, the UK Ministry of Defence issued JSP 936, Dependable Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Defence, a directive laying out the ethical, operational, and governance framework for integrating AI across military systems. Described as a “Directive” rather than merely a guideline, the publication represents a formal step in embedding artificial intelligence into the very structure of British defence strategy. The ambition is clear.

1 week ago | aoav.org.uk | Iain Overton

This week (May 2025), the UK government announced over £1 billion in new defence spending to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) on the battlefield. It went largely unnoticed by many. But central to all of this was the Ministry of Defence’s newly unveiled Digital Targeting Web. It’s a system that promises to integrate AI, satellite feeds, drones and frontline troops in real time and does so in order to enable faster and more lethal decision-making.

1 week ago | aoav.org.uk | Iain Overton

Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher, is not known for his restraint. His writing gallops and sometimes falters. His metaphors clash and sometimes drown. His references leap from Hegel to Hitchcock, from Stalin to Starbucks and sometimes off a cliff. And yet, for al the noise, beneath the performance lie moments of some of the most potent and unsettling dissections of violence in modern thought. This is not because he condemns violence.

1 week ago | aoav.org.uk | Iain Overton

If there is one thing that is clear about the 21st century battlefield is that algorithmic warfare is no longer the stuff of science fiction. With the British government announcing in May 2025 over £1 billion in new defence spending to accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence on the battlefield, the deployment of autonomous systems is fast becoming the norm in state defence doctrine.