A British Reaper drone taxis across a runway in southern Afghanistan. The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is about the size of a light aircraft. Circling thousands of feet above the ground for hours at a time, armed with deadly hellfire missiles, it feeds live pictures to the soldiers below. But while those on the ground might have just started the evening shift in Kandahar, the drone’s two-man pilot team will be watching dawn rise 7,000 miles to the west, in an air-conditioned room on Creech Air Force base in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Britain bought its first Reaper drones under an “urgent operational requirement” in October 2007, shipping the machines to Afghanistan, while dispatching a 50-strong RAF contingent of pilots and support staff to the US. But Britain’s small UAV fleet is dwarfed by America’s. The US now spends $0.5bn annually on drone development, and its fleet has grown from 300 to nearly 7,000 since 2002. In the last year the US military doubled the number of combat hour flown by its drone army.
In his book,Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution argues that this new generation of warrior—both human and machine—raises troubling legal and ethical questions about the nature of wars. But it is the human dimension that is most challenging.
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