One example of a benefit offered by the use of UAV drones is that they do not place an American pilot in harm’s way. It is an easier political sell that many of our best drones may be shot down than to talk about pilots either dying of being captured and tortured by terrorists. UAVs also seem to be the wave of the future, particularly looking at the current conflict between Ukraine and Russia and thinking about how we can learn from that, and it seems like swarms of cheap drones are going to be what the wars of the future are fought with. We need to be learning how to manufacture and deploy lots and lots of cheap autonomous drones that will be able to fight the battles of the future without endangering the lives of our servicemen and servicewomen. The downside to such drones is that they are liable to cause civilian casualties because they are farther from a responsible human to tell them not to pull the trigger.
