The United States military operates a large number of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, also known as Unmanned Aircraft Systems [UAS]). As of 2014 these were known to include 7,362 RQ-11 Ravens; 990 AeroVironment Wasp IIIs; 1,137 AeroVironment RQ-20 Pumas; 306 RQ-16 T-Hawk small UAS systems; 246 MQ-1 Predators; MQ-1C Gray Eagles; 126 MQ-9 Reapers; 491 RQ-7 Shadows; and 33 RQ-4 Global Hawk large systems.
The military role of unmanned aircraft systems is growing at unprecedented rates. In 2005, tactical- and theater-level unmanned aircraft alone had flown over 100,000 flight hours in support of Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, organized under Task Force Liberty in Afghanistan and Task Force ODIN in Iraq. Throughout the US missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran rapid improvements in technology enabled steadily increasing capabilities to be placed on smaller airframes. Throughout those campaigns, further advances continued to contribute to a large increase in the number of unmanned systems being deployed on the battlefield. This trend continues following American withdrawals from the Middle East and Central Asia.
The first use of armed UAVs was in 2001, in which an MQ-1 Predator was used to carry anti-tank missiles into Afghanistan, controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency. Until 2006, flight hours by UAVs were not logged, though the DoD now states that millions of UAV flight hours have been logged. As the capabilities grow for all types of unmanned systems, states continue to subsidize their research and development, leading to further advances enabling them to perform a multitude of missions.
UAVs no longer perform solely intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions, although these still remain their predominant tasks. Their roles have expanded to include electronic attack, drone strikes, suppression or destruction of enemy air defense, network node or communications relay, combat search and rescue, and derivations of these themes. These unmanned systems range in cost from a few thousand dollars to tens of millions of dollars, with aircraft weighing from less than to over .
Classifications by the United States military
The modern concept of U.S. military UAVs is to have the various aircraft systems work together in support of personnel on the ground. The integration scheme is described in terms of a "Tier" system and is used by military planners to designate the various individual aircraft elements in an overall usage plan for integrated operations. The Tiers do not refer to specific models of aircraft but rather roles for which various models and their manufacturers competed. The U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Marine Corps each has its own tier system, and the two systems are themselves not integrated.
List of U.S. military UAVs Former Interstate TDR MQ-1 Predator RQ-2 Pioneer MQ-5 Hunter RQ-14 Dragon Eye RQ-16 T-Hawk FQM-151 Pointer CQ-24A K-MAX Desert Hawk Maveric MQ-8B Fire Scout Current MQ-1C Gray Eagle RQ-4 Global Hawk MQ-4C Triton RQ-7 Shadow MQ-8C Fire Scout MQ-9 Reaper CQ-10 Snowgoose RQ-11 Raven RQ-12 Wasp MQ-19 Aerosonde RQ-20 Puma RQ-21 Blackjack RQ-170 Sentinel RQ-180 Altius-600 Black Hornet Nano Coyote Jump 20 VTOL Northrop Grumman Bat Phoenix Ghost Snipe NAV Switchblade Stalker Low-cost Uncrewed Combat Attack System (LUCAS) ScanEagle TRV-150C Tactical Resupply Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Survice Engineering and Malloy) In development MQ-25 Stingray Horus A XQ-58 Valkyrie
Use in the War on Terror
The Obama administration announced the deployment of 30,000 new troops in Afghanistan in December 2009, but there was already an increase of attacks by unmanned Predator UAVs against Taliban and al-Qaeda militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas, one of which probably killed a key member of al-Qaeda. However, neither Osama bin Laden nor Ayman al-Zawahiri was the likely target, according to reports. According to a report of the New America Foundation, armed UAV strikes had dramatically increased under President Obama, even before his deployment decision.
There were 43 such attacks between January and October 2009. The report draws on what it deems to be "credible" local and national media stories about the attacks. This can be compared to a total of 34 in all of 2008, which was President Bush's last full year in office. Between 2006 and 2009, UAV-launched missiles allegedly had killed between 750 and 1,000 people in Pakistan, according to the report.
Of these, about 20 people were said to be leaders of al-Qaeda, Taliban, and associated groups. Overall, 66 to 68 percent of the people killed were militants, and 31 to 33 percent were civilians. U.S. officials disputed the percentage for civilians. The U.S. Air Force has recently begun referring to larger UAS as Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA), such as Predator, Reaper, and Global Hawk, to highlight the fact that these systems are always controlled by a human operator at some location.
CIA-ordered drone strikes were ended by President Obama, who transferred control entirely to the military under a separate legal authority. President Trump reversed this decision in 2017.
UAVs and Morality
Dr. Peter Lee is a Portsmouth University Lecturer in military and leadership ethics specializing in the ethics and ethos of remotely piloted aircraft. In his paper, Rights, Wrongs and Drones: Remote Warfare, Ethics and the Challenge of Just War, he claims that no weapon system has prompted more debate, speculation and opposition since the nuclear controversies of the 1980s (pg 21). As the issues of individual rights, legality and morality have advanced over a decade, the moral arguments surrounding war have shifted from state-centric to focused on the individuals involved in war and the ethics of their actions. This may have significant consequences for the moral component of fighting power as understood by western powers.
In an article published by NPR titled "The Legal and Moral Issues of Drone Use", Amitai Etzioni, professor of International Affairs and Sociology at George Washington University, states that while drones have been successful in fighting Al-Qaida, and Taliban members, 24% of kills have been civilian casualties. Etzioni postulates that civilian casualties have given rise to increased violence around the Afghan-Pakistan border resulting in an uptick of suicide attacks. Yet, she considers drone strikes to be “cleaner instruments of war” than special ops, or bombings, justifying the use of them in a utilitarian sense.
For example, when the leader of the Pakistani Taliban was killed by a drone strike, his father-in-law and wife were also killed. During the Obama administration, the state department's top lawyer, Harold Koh, argued that the U.S. has the authority under international law to defend its citizens from terrorist organizations by using lethal force and targeting leaders of Al-Qaida and the Taliban.
The first Committee of the UN General Assembly saw its very first side event on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, on Friday, 23 October 2015. According to the UN, an increasing number of countries and non-state actors have shown interest in the use of both commercial and military use of drones. One of the panel experts, Mr. Zwijnenburg concluded the meeting by stating that clarity surrounding drone strikes is required, to provide the international community with a legal interpretation of international humanitarian laws and frameworks related to targeted drone attacks and the civilian killings that may result.1. Study on Armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Advisory board of Disarmament Matters, United Nations. Published 2015. https://unoda-web.s3-accelerate.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/assets/publications/more/drones-study/drones-study.pdf 2. The Legal and Moral Issues of Drone Use. NPR, Amitai Etzioni. Published 2010. https://www.npr.org/2010/03/30/125355144/the-legal-and-moral-issues-of-drone-use 3. Rights and Wrongs: Remote Warfare, Ethics and the Challenge of Just War reasoning. Dr. Peter Lee. Published in 2015. https://researchportal.port.ac.uk/portal/files/2814547/LEEp_2013_cright_RAF_APR_Rights_wrongs_and_drones.pdf 4. Discussing Drones at the UN Headquarters. Maaike Verbruggen, United Nations. Published 2015. https://www.un.org/disarmament/update/discussing-drones-at-the-un-headquarters-2/
Armed attacks by U.S. UAVs MQ-1 Predator UAVs armed with Hellfire missiles have been used by the U.S. as platforms for hitting ground targets. Armed Predators were first used in late 2001 from bases in Pakistan and Uzbekistan, mostly aimed at assassinating high-profile individuals (terrorist leaders, etc.) inside Afghanistan. Since then, there have been many reported cases of such attacks taking place in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia.Sauer, Frank/Schörnig Niklas, 2012: Killer drones: The ‘silver bullet’ of democratic warfare? , in: Security Dialogue 43 (4): 363–380. Retrieved 1 September 2012. The advantage of using an unmanned vehicle rather than a manned aircraft in such cases is to avoid a diplomatic embarrassment should the aircraft be shot down and the pilots captured, since the bombings take place in countries deemed friendly and without the official permission of those countries.
A Predator based in a neighboring Arab country was used to kill suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in Yemen on 3 November 2002. This marked the first use of an armed Predator as an attack aircraft outside of a theater of war such as Afghanistan.
The U.S. has claimed that the Predator strikes killed at least nine senior al-Qaeda leaders and dozens of lower-ranking operatives, depleting its operational tier in what U.S. officials described as the most serious disruption of al-Qaeda since 2001. It was claimed that the Predator strikes took such a toll on al-Qaeda that militants began turning violently on one another out of confusion and distrust. A senior U.S. counter-terrorism official said: "They have started hunting down people who they think are responsible [for security breaches]. People are showing up dead, or disappearing."
By October 2009, the CIA claimed to have killed more than half of the 20 most wanted al-Qaeda terrorist suspects in targeted killings using UAVs. By May 2010, counter-terrorism officials said that UAV strikes in the Pakistani tribal areas had killed more than 500 militants since 2008 and no more than 30 (5%) nearby civilians – mainly family members who lived and traveled with the targets. UAVs linger overhead after a strike, in some cases for hours, to enable the CIA to count the bodies and attempt to determine which, if any, are civilians. A Pakistani intelligence officer gave a higher estimate of civilian casualties, saying 20% of total deaths were civilians or non-combatants.
In February 2013, U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham stated that 4,756 people have been killed by U.S. UAVs.
CIA officials became concerned in 2008, that targets in Pakistan were being tipped off to pending U.S. UAV strikes by Pakistani intelligence, when the U.S. requested Pakistani permission prior to launching UAV-based attacks. The Bush administration therefore decided in August 2008 to abandon the practice of obtaining Pakistani government permission before launching missiles from UAVs, and in the next six months the CIA carried out at least 38 Predator strikes in northwest Pakistan, compared with 10 in 2006 and 2007 combined.