Unmanned combat aerial vehicle

[5] As the operator runs the vehicle from a remote terminal, equipment necessary for a human pilot is not needed, resulting in a lower weight and a smaller size than a manned aircraft.

[7] The modern military drone as known today was the brainchild of John Stuart Foster Jr., a nuclear physicist of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory.

[8] He drew up plans and by 1973 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) built two prototypes called "Prairie" and "Calera".

[8] In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel used unarmed U.S. Ryan Firebee target drones to spur Egypt into firing its entire arsenal of anti-aircraft missiles.

[10][11][12] The images and radar decoying provided by these UAVs helped Israel to completely neutralize the Syrian air defenses in Operation Mole Cricket 19 at the start of the 1982 Lebanon War, resulting in no pilots downed.

[14] Impressed by Israel's success, the US quickly acquired a number of UAVs, and its Hunter and Pioneer systems are direct derivatives of Israeli models.

After the Persian Gulf War successfully demonstrated its utility, global militaries invested widely in the domestic development of combat UAVs.

Some commercial drones such as DJI Mavic and Phantom have been modified to carry light explosives for combat missions in recent wars.

BAE describes Taranis's role in this context as following: "This £124m, four -year programme is part of the UK Government's Strategic Unmanned Air Vehicle Experiment (SUAVE) and will result in a UCAV demonstrator with fully integrated autonomous systems and low observable features."

The Taranis demonstrator will have an MTOW (Maximum Takeoff Weight) of about 8000 kilograms and be of comparable size to the BAE Hawk – making it one of the world's largest UAVs.

A bigger one would be to reduce the Navy's reliance on short-range manned strike aircraft like the F-18 and the F-35, in favor of the carrier-launched N-UCAS ...."[40] On 6 January 2011, the DOD announced that this would be one area of additional investment in the 2012 budget request.

[41] The United States Air Force has shifted its UCAV program from medium-range tactical strike aircraft to long-range strategic bombers.

In the mid-2010s, the Islamic State terrorist group began attaching explosives to commercially-available quadcopters such as the Chinese-made DJI Phantom to bomb military targets in Iraq and Syria.

[42] During the 2016–17 battle of Mosul, the Islamic State reportedly used drones as surveillance and weapons delivery platforms, using improvised cradles to drop grenades and other explosives.

[45][46] Starting in the 2020s, Mexican drug cartels began dropping reportedly hundreds of drone-carried bombs targeting both security forces and enemy gangs during turf wars.

A senior official, Kang Shin-chul, said: "Our military's lack of preparedness has caused a lot of concern to the people…actively employ detection devices to spot the enemy's drone from an early stage and aggressively deploy strike assets".

One fatal "error" happened in December 2023, when the Nigerian army accidentally hit a village in northwestern Nigeria killing 85 civilians celebrating a Muslim festival.

[56] In March 2009, The Guardian reported allegations that Israeli UAVs armed with missiles killed 48 Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip, including two small children in a field and a group of women and girls in an otherwise empty street.

A force of Bell OH-58 Kiowa helicopters, who were attempting to protect ground troops fighting several kilometers away, fired AGM-114 Hellfire missiles at the vehicles.

[71] In July 2013, former Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson said, on a panel at the Aspen Institute's Security Forum, that he felt an emotional reaction upon reading Nasser al-Awlaki's account of how his 16-year-old grandson was killed by a U.S.

Senators Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), Chris Murphy (D-CT), Chris Coons (D-DE), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT) introduced a bill to ban sales, transfers, and exports of large armed drones to countries outside of NATO amid concerns that civilians were killed with American-made weapons used by Saudi Arabia and the UAE during the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen.

Unlike bomber pilots, moreover, drone operators linger long after the explosives strike and see its effects on human bodies in stark detail.

According to Professor French, the author of the 2003 book The Code of the Warrior:[80] If [I'm] in the field risking and taking a life, there's a sense that I'm putting skin in the game ...

On 28 October 2009, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Philip Alston, presented a report to the Third Committee (social, humanitarian and cultural) of the General Assembly arguing that the use of unmanned combat air vehicles for targeted killings should be regarded as a breach of international law unless the United States can demonstrate appropriate precautions and accountability mechanisms are in place.

[81] In June 2015 forty-five former US military personnel issued a joint appeal to pilots of aerial drones operating in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere urging them to refuse to fly and indicated that their missions "profoundly violate domestic and international laws."

[79] Writer Mark Bowden has disputed this viewpoint saying in his The Atlantic article, "But flying a drone, [the pilot] sees the carnage close-up, in real time—the blood and severed body parts, the arrival of emergency responders, the anguish of friends and family.

I just watched him.Back in the United States, a combination of "lower-class" status in the military, overwork, and psychological trauma may be taking a mental toll on drone pilots.

These psychological, cultural and career issues appear to have led to a shortfall in USAF drone operators, which is seen as a "dead end job".

[89] Heather Roff[clarification needed] replies that lethal autonomous robots (LARs) may not be appropriate for complex conflicts and targeted populations would likely react angrily against them.

[92] In 2013, a Fairleigh Dickinson University poll asked registered voters whether they "approve or disapprove of the U.S. military using drones to carry out attacks abroad on people and other targets deemed a threat to the U.S.?"