TrendMilitary reliance on UAVs grows; safety, shortness of pilots an issue
The U.S. military has 167 UAVs in its arsenal in 2001; it now has 5,500; the growing demand for UAVs for both surveillance and operational missions creates safety problems and exposes shortness of trained controllers
Unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have been assigned more and more surveillance and operational missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The growing demand for UAVs has created two problems: UAV safety and maintenance and shortness of pilots to operate them remotely.
The New York Times’s Christopher Drew writes that the urgent need for more drones has meant bypassing usual procedures. Some of the seventy Predator crashes, for example, stemmed from decisions to deploy the planes before they had completed testing and to hold off replacing control stations to avoid interrupting the supply of intelligence. U.S. Air Force officials say that the lost drones, representing more than a third of the Air Force’s unmanned Predator spy planes — which are 27 feet long, powered by a high-performance snowmobile engine, and cost $4.5 million apiece — have crashed, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Pilots, who fly them from trailers halfway around the world using joysticks and computer screens, say some of the controls are clunky. For example, the missile-firing button sits dangerously close to the switch that shuts off the plane’s engines. Pilots are also in such short supply that the service recently put out a call for retirees to help.
UAV were considered a novelty a few years ago, but now the Air Force’s fleet has grown to 195 Predators and 28 Reapers, a new and more heavily armed cousin of the Predator. Both models are made by San Diego-based General Atomics. Including drones that the Army has used to counter roadside bombs and tiny hand-launched models that can help soldiers to peer past the next hill or building, the total number of drones in the U.S. arsenal has soared to 5,500, from 167 in 2001.
The Predators and Reapers are now flying 34 surveillance patrols each day in Iraq and Afghanistan, up from 12 in 2006. They are also transmitting 16,000 hours of video each month, some of it directly to troops on the ground.
P. W. Singer, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution and author of the recently published Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, said the Predators have already had “an incredible effect,” though the remote control raised obvious questions about whether the military could become “more cavalier” about using force. Still, he said, “these systems today are very much Model T Fords. These things will only get more advanced.”
