Britain loses 100 unmanned aircraft in Iraq and Afghanistan

Britain has lost almost 100 unmanned surveillance aircraft - including a £10m Reaper which had been in service for less than six months - over Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003, The Herald can reveal.

The equipment the robot spy planes carry is so sophisticated and so vital for intelligence-gathering that commanders have ruled it an acceptable risk to launch rescue missions to retrieve it to prevent it falling into enemy hands.

At least one British soldier, Captain James Philippson, of 7 Parachute Regiment, Royal Horse Artillery, was killed by Taliban gunfire when his patrol arrived to rescue another group ambushed while trying to recover top-secret sensors from a crashed drone near Sangin in 2006.

The unmanned aerial vehicle losses include about 50 which were shot down or suffered catastrophic mechanical failure in mid-air and another 40 damaged beyond repair by crash-landing on rough terrain.

The Ministry of Defence admits that 33 have been lost over Iraq, although it has not released details of the types of robot spy planes brought down by enemy fire, severe weather or internal faults.

At least 23 of the older and notoriously unreliable Phoenix drones used to locate enemy positions and movement for artillery bombardment were downed during the combat phase of the Iraq invasion in 2003.