Unmanned aerial vehicles in the United States military
Throughout the US missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, rapid improvements in technology enabled steadily increasing capabilities to be placed on smaller airframes.
[3] As the capabilities grow for all types of unmanned systems, states continue to subsidize their research and development, leading to further advances enabling them to perform a multitude of missions.
Their roles have expanded to include electronic attack, drone strikes, suppression or destruction of enemy air defense, network node or communications relay, combat search and rescue, and derivations of these themes.
[citation needed] The modern concept of U.S. military UAVs is to have the various aircraft systems work together in support of personnel on the ground.
[7] The U.S. Air Force has recently begun referring to larger UAS as Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA), such as Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk, to highlight the fact that these systems are always controlled by a human operator at some location.
CIA-ordered drone strikes were ended by President Obama, who transferred control entirely to the military under a separate legal authority.
In his paper, Rights, Wrongs and Drones: Remote Warfare, Ethics and the Challenge of Just War, he claims that no weapon system has prompted more debate, speculation and opposition since the nuclear controversies of the 1980s (pg 21).
Etzioni postulates that civilian casualties have given rise to increased violence around the Afghan-Pakistan border resulting in an uptick of suicide attacks.
During the Obama administration, the state department's top lawyer, Harold Koh, argued that the U.S. has the authority under international law to defend its citizens from terrorist organizations by using lethal force and targeting leaders of Al-Qaida and the Taliban.
[17] By May 2010, counter-terrorism officials said that UAV strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas had killed more than 500 militants since 2008 and no more than 30 (5%) nearby civilians – mainly family members who lived and traveled with the targets.
[18][19] UAVs linger overhead after a strike, in some cases for hours, to enable the CIA to count the bodies and attempt to determine which, if any, are civilians.
[16] The Bush administration therefore decided in August 2008 to abandon the practice of obtaining Pakistani government permission before launching missiles from UAVs, and in the next six months the CIA carried out at least 38 Predator strikes in northwest Pakistan, compared with 10 in 2006 and 2007 combined.
In 2013, a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll found that 48% of American voters believe it is "illegal for the U.S. government to target its own citizens living abroad with drone attacks.
"[24] In the same poll, however, a majority of voters approved of the U.S. military and the CIA using UAVs to carry out attacks abroad “on people and other targets deemed a threat to the U.S.”.
[26] Like any military technology, armed UAVs will kill people, combatants and innocents alike, thus "the main turning point concerns the question of whether we should go to war at all.
[34] A 2011 study by the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine indicated that nearly 50% of spy UAV operators suffer from high stress.
As currently conceived, the MQ-X would be a stealthier and faster fighter-plane sized UAV capable of any number of missions: high-performance surveillance; attack options, including retractable cannons and bomb or missile payloads; and cargo capacity.
[40] The USAF said in 2012 that it will focus on development of UAVs capable of collaborative networking with manned aircraft in "buddy attacks" or flying as standalone systems.
[41] The U.S. Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) planned in 2014 to award grants and contracts up to $5.5 million each, for its Fast Lightweight Autonomy Program (FLAP) program, which specifies UAVs capable of traveling 60 feet per second (18 m/s) to include autonomy algorithms for quickly and autonomously navigating indoor obstacles and learning from past travels.
