An unmanned combat air vehicle or combat drone or simply "drone" is an unmanned aerial vehicle that is armed and has no onboard pilot. Currently operational drones are under real-time human control of unknown precision.
Drones change the nature of modern aerial combat. Obviously, controllers of drones are in no immediate danger, unlike jet pilots. As a highly advanced use of robots in war, drones also prompt fundamental questions about the relationship of warriors to war, and soldiers to their weapons.
In terms of military logistics, much of the equipment necessary for a human pilot (such as the cockpit, ejection seat, flight controls, and environmental controls for pressure & oxygen) can be omitted from an unmanned vehicle, resulting in a decrease in weight. This may allow greater payloads, range and maneuverability. However the distance between the pilot and the aircraft will naturally result in slower response time or latency.
The use of drones in war has far-reaching consequences for wars in the 21st Century, including for AI development, the ethics of war (see below), and for military software design. The degree of a drone's autonomy in the field of battle also has severe legal ramifications, i.e., a "the drone did it, not me" argument.
Read more about Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle: History, Proliferation, Laws of War & Ethics, Political Effects, Current Models
Famous quotes containing the words combat, air and/or vehicle:
“The combat ended for want of combatants.”
—Pierre Corneille (1606–1684)
“Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The woman may serve as a vehicle for the rapist expressing his rage against a world that gives him pain—because he is poor, or oppressed, or mad, or simply human. Then what of her? We have waded in the swamp of compassion for him long enough.”
—Robin Morgan (b. 1941)