Unmanned warfighting: The legacy of the Industrial Revolution

The success of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) has made the drone business one of the fastest growing sectors in the aviation industry. It is thought that the US military has over 7,000 of them, from only 50 a decade ago.

Drones have proved their usefulness in conventional military applications (surveillance, overwatch of combat troops and close air support for example) as well as intelligence operations (the CIA operates a significant number of drones independently from the military). Their success has also opened up a huge new market in commercial and civilian uses for unmanned vehicles in the air, on land and on sea. 

What excites most journalists – and understandably so – are the ethical and legal issues raised by the use of drones in military and law enforcement roles. Notably habeas corpus, collateral damage and right to privacy. At a deeper level, so the argument goes, drones are challenging the moral calculus of warfare - built as it used to be on the value of human lives risked or saved and age-old martial values of honour and sacrifice. 

Viewed through the lens of history however, there is nothing intrinsically revolutionary about drones in terms of either the underpinning technologies or the calculations driving their development.  

Put simply, a drone is an armed plane that can fly itself (or be flown remotely) and target with precision. The novelty lies not the component parts but in the bundling. After all, we’ve been building war planes for almost 100 years, autopilot features have been around on aircraft for over 40 years. The success of drones is in combining old concepts (such as a planes carrying bombs) with new technology like GPS and satellite communications. Drones simply enhance a portfolio of already existing capabilities.

More fundamentally, drone warfare is arguably just a natural step in a 200 year old evolutionary continuum. 

The industrial revolution kickstarted the mechanisation of labour and it wasn't long before the military of industrialised states began seeing the potential of these technological breakthroughs in military applications. More and more machines were introduced into military arsenals - trains, aircraft, armoured vehicles, trucks etc. Machines increasingly complemented and sometimes replaced the role of man and animal both on and off the battlefield. Take the Gatling gun, which made its battlefield debut in 1862. Dr Gatling developed the weapon in order to reduce the number of overall lives lost in the American Civil War. The idea was that a Gatling Gun crew could do the same job as a company of riflemen - thus reducing the need for more soldiers on the battlefield and reducing the overall number of people put in harm’s way.  

As armies modernise, hardware becomes more complex and thus more and more expensive to build, maintain and train on. Governments expect their money's worth, hence the increasing emphasis on the survivability of military hardware. From an infantryman's Personal Protective Equipment to modern electronic counter-measures, an increasing amount of research and development is being directed towards safeguarding a government's "investments". Reducing/eliminating human risk is simply part of the same calculation.  

And what if we look forward along the same continuum, say 50 years into the future? My prediction is that the future will re-frame our view of the ethics of drones, just as the past helps frame our understanding of the technology.