Officer wins Churchill Fellowship for drone defence work

A police officer who specialises in countering drones has been awarded a Churchill Fellowship that will take him to Canada, Australia and further afield to study how other countries protect critical national infrastructure from the threat, the Churchill Fellowship announced.

Jack Venables, currently seconded to the North West Regional Organised Crime Unit, is one of 109 people named as 2026 Churchill Fellows. He already works in the field as a tactical adviser and Bronze Commander for countering drones, roles that place him in the command structure police use to manage firearms and other high-risk operations, and the fellowship will let him build on that experience by drawing on the methods used by police forces, security agencies and industry overseas.

The subject he has chosen sits where policing and national defence increasingly overlap. Cheap, commercially available drones have become a persistent worry for the sites that keep a country running, among them airports, power stations, prisons and military bases.

The level of concern was clear in November 2024, when the United States Air Force reported small drones over its bases at RAF Lakenheath, RAF Mildenhall and RAF Feltwell in East Anglia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire on a number of nights. What was actually in the sky has remained disputed, with no craft recovered and no full public account of the sightings, but the reports were enough to prompt a criminal investigation and the deployment of around sixty RAF personnel to help the Americans respond, and later press reporting suggested a possible link to Russia, though that was never confirmed.

Prisons, meanwhile, have spent years trying to stop drones carrying contraband over their walls. On a far larger scale, the war in Ukraine has turned cheap drones into a weapon of mass effect, with both sides using them in huge numbers to reach targets that older air defences were never built to stop, a shift that has pushed counter-drone work up the agenda for militaries and police forces alike.

Countering the craft is a harder problem than it can appear. They are small, fly low and slow and are difficult to detect and track, and the responses range from jamming their radio and satellite links to physically bringing them down with nets, other drones or, increasingly, directed energy. Doing any of that over British soil raises legal questions about who is allowed to act and how, and the response to the 2024 airbase reports drew in the Ministry of Defence Police and police air support alongside emergency airspace restrictions, an illustration of how closely the civil and military sides of the problem are tied together.

The government has been putting substantial money into the same problem, its recently published Defence Investment Plan set aside more than £750 million for short-range drone protection for the homeland and deployed forces over the next four years, alongside further investment in counter-drone systems for the field army and in low-cost ground-based effectors, and it committed separately to double the number of the Army’s Sky Sabre air defence systems. Venables’s work sits on the civil and homeland side of that effort, where the sites at risk are rarely defended by the military.

Venables is asking individuals and teams with effective or unusual methods of countering drones to contact him directly, with a view to including their work in his research tour. His choice of Canada and Australia takes him to two of Britain’s closest intelligence and security partners, both of which have grappled with drone security around their own sites and borders. The Churchill Fellowship funds each recipient to spend between four and eight weeks meeting experts in their field, in person or online, before turning what they learn into recommendations for policy and operations back in the UK.

Speaking about the award, Venables said he was “incredibly proud to step into this role as a global ambassador” for UK security services, and that by exchanging knowledge with counterparts from Canada to Australia he hoped to return with fresh approaches “that keep us ahead of emerging threats.”

The scheme’s chief executive, Julia Weston, said there was “something genuinely hopeful about people choosing to seek out new ideas” and to build connections across borders. The Churchill Fellowship was set up in 1965 as a national memorial to Sir Winston Churchill and has since funded more than 4,000 people to research practical problems abroad and bring their findings home. This year’s group is working on subjects that range from dementia care in rural communities to the harms of social media and greener school meals, drawing on contacts in countries from Greenland to Taiwan. Applications for the next round open on 1 September.