Eyes in the sky

1944 Japanese Balloon bomb

The United States should continue the use of drones. Not only should it continue it the U.S. should invest into making the technology safer and more effective. The U.S. is not the first country to use drones. That distinction goes to the Habsburg Austrian Empire which launched 200 pilot less balloons armed with bombs that where used against the rebellion of Venice in 1849. In 1944 Japan did something similar by releasing 9,000 balloons which contained bombs. The Japanese were hoping that the balloons would travel across the Pacific Ocean and cause panic and forest fires on the western shores of the U.S. Those where crude drones which had no navigation system but whose purpose was to harm a selected target. Today's drones are much more advance and can be navigated remotely with deadly precision. Drones comes in all different shapes and sizes. Currently, the largest of all drones is the Global Hawk, at a cost of around 140 million it can stay in the air for around 35 hours at 65,000 feet well above traditional airspace. The Global Hawk drone is used for spying and carries no weapons. The drone that most people have heard about is the predator drone at a cost of around 4 million. This drone unlike the Global Hawk is used to eliminate targets. It's armed with 2 hell fire missiles and laser tagging directs the missiles to a 9 foot accuracy. The drones are operated by military personnel thousands of miles away and the personnel go through a specialized one year program before they are giving live missions. These drones allow the U.S. to eliminate terrorist around the world. The U.S. states has targeted killing list and they routinely use drones to eliminate individuals on that list. The use of drones allows the U.S. to go to places where traditional forces can't easily go or are just to expensive or dangerous to go to. One of these places are the tribal areas deep in the mountains of the Pakistan. Those areas are known to harbor terrorist and their training camps. The first CIA use of a predator drone was in 2002 in Afghanistan after a target which some believe was Osama Bin Laden. Since then the use of drones has increased dramatically. What started under the Bush administration was followed by the Obama administration and outdone in just his first year. There have been a total of 370 drone strikes in Pakistan alone and while there have been civilian casualties they have steadily decline to less than 7%. Currently around 41% of all aircraft in the U.S. military are drones. Drones are also used domestically. The U.S. uses drones to monitor the border and various police departments utilize drones for surveillance, schools utilize drones for training. A total of 1,428 permits have been issued by the FAA for drones on U.S. soil. Drones are the future of our military and safety/security of our country.

Click to enlarge

Predator Drone

Global Hawk drone

Not everybody is in favor of using drones without putting privacy rules in place first, specifically the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) states on their website that "Routine aerial surveillance would profoundly change the character of public life in America. Rules must be put in place to ensure that we can enjoy the benefits of this new technology without bringing us closer to a “surveillance society” in which our every move is monitored, tracked, recorded, and scrutinized by the government."

In New York Times post published on 11/23/2013 makes note that "Pakistani politicians denounce the attacks as a violation of the country’s sovereignty. Pakistani officials have regularly condemned the strikes in public while, in the past, endorsing them in private. But increasingly the drone campaign has strained relations between Pakistan and the United States."

On the war front "Amnesty International investigators conducted on-the-ground research into nine of the 45 drone strikes they reviewed. They found that in some cases, innocent civilians were killed in the strikes. In one circumstance, 18 workers were killed by multiple missiles in North Waziristan as they were settling into an evening meal. In another, a 68-year-old grandmother was killed by a Hellfire missile as she harvested vegetables from her family's farm." Civilian casualties are this sort are a sad fact of war nonetheless they are heart breaking and should not occur.

The genie is out of the bottle and we can't put the technology back in a safe place. The truth is that the usage of drones will expand because it does provide a financial benefit in reducing the cost of wars. It provides necessary surveillance to keep citizens safe and assist in solving crimes.

Wars are inevitable, messy in all sorts of ways, from the enormous loss of life to equipment and capital. However, with the use of drones we can for the first time in history conduct wars that minimize the loss of life. Avery Plaw a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts reported that in "conventional military conflicts over the last two decades, he found that estimates of civilian deaths ranged from about 33 percent to more than 80 percent of all deaths." that is far greater than the 3% found in drone strikes. According to Bradley J. Strawser "using them to go after terrorists not only was ethically permissible but also might be ethically obligatory, because of their advantages in identifying targets and striking with precision"

In future wars we will not lose as many civilians as the 100,000+ of people we've lost in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Wars will be targeted with minimal amount of troops on the ground. We'll have a fleet of automated drones that can search out and eliminate our enemies without providing them targets to harm as we won't have massive bases in their vicinity. Yes other countries will also have drones and there is an arms race but the price of saving lives and minimizing unnecessary deaths is worth it.

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BONUS: Documentary of drones by Nova.