Drones: disembodied aerial warfare

and the unarticulated threat

DAVID HASTINGS DUNN*

International Affairs 89: 5 (2013) 1237–1246© 2013 The Author(s). International Affairs © 2013 The Royal Institute of International Affairs. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford ox4 2dq, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

At the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 an English and Welsh army defeated a French force at least six times its size, inflicting casualties of a ratio of 9:1.1 The decisive advantage was gained by the use of the longbow and armour-piercing arrows. The French preponderance in cavalry and heavy armour was turned against them and exploited by the archers. As well as piercing French armour, the arrows destroyed the idea that a knight on horseback was invincible. This example of a ‘disrup-tive technology’ in action provides a useful background to the debate about the impact of ‘drones’ in modern warfare, as a lot of the discussion on this subject comes down to how significantly different drones are from other aerial systems—whether or not they are a ‘disruptive technology’. Partly for this reason, the term ‘drone’ is disliked as pejorative by the air forces that use them, which prefer the terms ‘remotely piloted vehicle’, ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’ (UAV) or ‘unmanned aerial system’ (UAS).2 In refusing to accept the nomenclature of ‘drones’, air power traditionalists reject the proposition that their use constitutes a step change in the application of flying machines. But in so doing, they are also implicitly failing to acknowledge that drones actually have two separate parents: conventional aircraft without a pilot, but also smarter and more capable ‘model’ aircraft. Much of the debate on drones to date has focused on the larger systems, and this focus partly explains the rejection of the idea that they represent a strategic novelty.3 For air power traditionalists, the legal and ethical debate that has arisen around drone use has more to do with how they have been employed than with any intrinsic characteristics of the technology. After all, they argue, their ability to fly long patrols with no risk to the pilots who operate them represents an incremental improvement along a trend line which has characterized US and UK uses of air

* I am grateful to Stefan Wolff, Nicholas J. Wheeler and Richard Lock-Pullan and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this article and to Lindsey Murch for invaluable research assistance. Dunn, Wolff and Wheeler are also grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for their support for this research on drone warfare.

1 See http://www.britishbattles.com/100-years-war/agincourt.htm, accessed 24 July 2013.2 ‘Unmanned’ as a term is similarly disliked as this fails to take account of both how labour-intensive their

operation is and also how much control is exercised over their use. ‘Unmanned’ is also gender-specific. A better term might be ‘disembodied aerial systems’ or DAS—but ‘drones’ has now stuck and is unlikely to be dislodged.

3 A good example of this debate to date is Michael J. Boyle’s ‘The costs and consequences of drone warfare’, International Affairs 89: 1, Jan. 2013, pp. 1–29.

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power for over a decade. And further, their use for ‘targeted killing’ in what the Obama administration prefers not to call the ‘war on terror’ does not constitute a step change in technology from the use of cruise missiles, manned systems or even special forces. Nevertheless, in this article I will argue that drones do indeed consti-tute a ‘disruptive technology’—that is, ‘an innovative technology that triggers sudden and unexpected effects’ and represents the potential for discontinuity from what went before.4 My contention is that, both in their use by the United States, Israel and the UK, and in their potential as terrorist weapons, drones and their proliferation represent a new development in aerial warfare the implications of which have not yet been fully grasped, debated or responded to.

Over the centuries, warfare has seen the development of various ‘disruptive technologies’ including gunpowder and the atomic bomb. More recently in the commercial world disruptive technologies such as the iPod have transformed the music business and smartphones have revolutionized communications. The impact of disruptive technologies is not always immediately apparent, and may repre-sent an evolutionary progression building on other technologies. So, for instance, smartphones have changed the way we communicate but evolved in turn from mobile phones. Drones in the form of Predators and Reapers are in some senses just remotely piloted combat aircraft, as their users claim, but to describe them thus is to underplay the ways in which their use disrupts how we think about conflict. The coincidence of this technology with the post-9/11 security environment has led to a new form of warfare that presents a series of challenges to traditional ways of thinking about combat. Rather paradoxically, at a time when heroism and self-sacrifice have become prominent themes in public discourse as a result of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, drones present warfare as the antithesis of these values. They represent warfare as post-modern and post-heroic. In a sense they are the technological western response to Al-Qaeda terrorism and Taliban insurgency. In this respect they present a series of challenges to our conceptions of warfare. They blur the distinctions between the military and intelligence worlds, between warfare and law enforcement, between combat and assassination; between the battlefield and the hinterland, between the territories of allies and enemies, between domestic and foreign threats, and between counterterrorism and counter-insurgency. They disrupt the calculus of risk of the participants in this form of combat by transforming the balance of vulnerabilities. By disem-bodying these weapons platforms, the technology enables their use with domestic political impunity, minimal international response and low political risk and cost. It is now politically and technically easier to kill suspected terrorists than to arrest them.5 Drones are the enabling technology for a new era of targeted killing on an

4 See Committee on Forecasting Future Disruptive Technologies and National Research Council, Persistent forecasting of disruptive technologies (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2010), p. xv. Details at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=12557, accessed 24 July 2013.

5 David Ignatius, ‘Our default is killing terrorists by drone attack. Do you care?’, Washington Post, 2 Dec. 2010, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/01/AR2010120104458.html, accessed 4 July 2013. Ignatius cites Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, as asking: ‘Have we made detention and interrogation so legally difficult and politically risky that our default option is to kill our adversaries rather than capture and interrogate them?’

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unprecedented geographic scale. Both physically and politically they fly below the radar, thus ushering in a new permissive form of interventionism. They are the counterterrorism weapon of choice, facilitating the US military drawdown from Iraq and Afghanistan while allowing the surveillance and elimination of targets on a growing global scale.

Yet while much has been written on this aspect of drone warfare, it is not the only consequence of this disruptive technology. Rather like the longbow, the drone may be ushering in a revolution whose effects reach far beyond the front lines of distant wars. Indeed, the greatest innovation to warfare that drones repre-sent may be their potential use by would-be Robin Hoods to whom they offer a new means of circumventing traditional notions of security and safety. Just as with the longbow, realization of the significance of this technology is a necessary prerequisite to the establishment of appropriate and necessary defences in this new age of aerial warfare.

A revolutionary technology

While it is the use of drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia that has—understandably—generated most of the controversy and debate on this topic, the use of large-scale systems such as Predator and Reaper actually repre-sents the least innovative aspect of this new technology. 6 Indeed, most of the innovation is neither in large-scale systems nor in military technology. Where the real novelty lies is in the way that breakthroughs in drone technology promise to change the way these vehicles operate in the changing aerial environment of the twenty-first century.

Hitherto, aircraft have had to be big enough to transport a pilot and associ-ated support and control systems. They have been expensive to acquire, operate and learn to fly. Drone technology changes this picture profoundly, with revolu-tionary consequences. Many things previously done by a helicopter or small plane can now be done more cheaply and easily by drones; and many other things that were previously not even contemplated, owing to size or cost constraints, are now made possible through the use of these flying robots. Drones are now routinely used in crop dusting in Japan, Europe and America, for the use of GPS points, a constant flying speed and programmable height means that they are cheaper, use less chemicals, and are more precise and versatile than other methods.7 Indeed, the potential for drone use in ‘precision agriculture’, optimizing water and land use and monitoring crops and livestock, is predicted to be enormous.8 Drones are now being used to deliver medicines in areas such as Maseru in Lesotho where roads

6 See e.g. David H. Dunn, Nicholas J. Wheeler and Stefan Wolff, ‘Legal, legitimate, and effective drone warfare: grand illusion or future reality?’, The Birmingham Brief, 4 Dec. 2012, http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/thebirminghambrief/items/Legal,-Legitimate,-and-Effective-Drone-Warfare-Grand-Illusion-or-Future-Reality.aspx, accessed 24 July 2013.

7 ‘Unmanned drones used for spraying to better assist crop growth’, 9 June 2013, http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/06/09/unmanned-drones-used-for-spraying-to-better-assist-crop-growth/, accessed 24 July 2013.

8 Michael V. Copeland, ‘Beyond surveillance: envisioning the future drone workforce’, http://www.wired.com/business/2013/05/the-business-of-putting-robots-in-the-sky/, accessed 24 July 2013.

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are sparse and poor—and they can do it cheaply, delivering 2 kilograms over 10 kilometres for 24 cents.9 They are also being used to monitor orang-utan popula-tions in Indonesia; search for poachers in Kenya; monitor traffic congestion in the United States; conduct infrastructure inspection (for example, spotting leakages along the length of oil pipes and breaks in power lines or levees); photograph properties for real estate agents; patrol the US border with Mexico and Canada for illegal immigrants; survey construction sites, coalfields and archaeological sites; fight forest fires; spot lost hikers; and even transport food in restaurants.10 Reports of their applications seem endless.

A series of technological innovations lie behind these new devices, a lot of them developed for mobile phones and tablets. Improvements in battery technology now give drones greater power, lift, range and endurance. Cameras are now tiny and highly capable, and the chips that run them are both intelligent and fast.11 Improvements in hyperminiaturized sensors, accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, ultrasound altimeters and robotic control systems have also driven the development of these devices. Without the friction of ground motion, it appears that robots actually work better in the air. As Grossman observes: ‘When robots take to the air, they’re faster and nimbler and more graceful than humans will ever be. All along, robots just wanted to be drones.’12 Crucially, they are also cheap and easily available. Three hundred dollars buys a quadcopter through mail order with real-time video streaming to a smartphone from which it is controlled through an app.

While US law currently prohibits the use of drones for other than recreational purposes, this is about to change. Under intense lobbying from drone manufac-turers and potential customers, in February 2013 President Obama signed the Federal Aviation Authority Modernization and Reform Act, which mandated the integration of drone use in US airspace by September 2015.13 Elsewhere they are legal and operational for a variety of uses, and their employment and availability are likely to increase rapidly as their price and cost of operation come down. More than 500 firms in the United States alone are eagerly awaiting deregulation to offer either drones or the services that these devices offer to a waiting market.14 More widely, according to a report on drones by the Teal Group in 2011, spending on drones has become ‘the most dynamic sector of the world’s aerospace industry’ and within a decade is expected to double to a value of US$94 billion, with more

9 Bruce Upbin, ‘Drones can save the world, drones can destroy us all’, Forbes Magazine, 11 June 2013, http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2013/06/11/drones-can-save-the-world-drones-can-destroy-us-all/, accessed 24 July 2013.

10 For sushi delivery on an ‘I-Tray’ see http://mashable.com/2013/06/12/sushi-drone-delivery/?utm_campaiashgn =Feed:+Mashable+%28Mashable%29&utm_cid=M-Product-RSS-Pheedo-All-; on the orang-utans, see http:// www.orangutan.com/projects/conservation-drone-project/, accessed 22 July 2013. See also Lev Grossman, ‘Drone home’, Time, 11 Feb. 2013, pp. 18–25.

11 Grossman, ‘Drone home’, p. 23.12 Grossman, ‘Drone home’, p. 22.13 Nick Wingfield and Somini Sengupta, ‘Drones set sights on US skies’, New York Times, 17 Feb. 2012,

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/18/technology/drones-with-an-eye-on-the-public-cleared-to-fly.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0, accessed 24 July 2013.

14 Grossman, ‘Drone home’, p. 23.

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than 50 countries having already purchased surveillance drones to date.15 Singer states that 87 countries have so far ‘used drones militarily’.16 But what started as a military technology is rapidly becoming used in the civilian world; as Kenneth Anderson has noted, ‘everybody will wind up using this technology because it’s going to become the standard for many, many applications of what are now manned aircraft’.17

The proliferation of drone technology will present many challenges, not least to the laws of privacy and how to prevent aerial collisions or damage from debris and crashes. What is potentially of much greater consequence is the use of these technologies with malign intent. There is little doubt that this technology is now ripe for commercial exploitation in hundreds of applications. Comparatively little attention, however, has been given to the impact of these technologies on traditional notions of safety and security. While drone use against terrorists and insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan has been hotly debated, much less has been written on the potential exploitation of this dual-use technology by terrorists and insurgents; and most of what there is tends to focus on the use by Hezbollah of drones supplied by Iran to overfly Israeli airspace.18 Partly because these craft were used by Hezbollah for surveillance and propaganda purposes, they have not provoked much reaction from Israel, although there is a concern that they could be used to crash into the Israeli nuclear reactor in Dimona. Attempts by Hamas in the early 2000s to use model aircraft packed with explosives to mount short-range attacks across the Gaza border were also dismissed as gimmicks, in part because at that time these devices lacked range and needed ‘line of sight control’ to be effec-tive, and so were not seen to represent much of an additional threat to the rockets being launched from Gaza.19 That said, it would appear that Israel took the threat sufficiently seriously to counter it by booby-trapping a UAV supplied to Hamas and exploding it remotely, killing six of the team operating it as it was being readied to fire.20 Al-Qaeda has also shown interest in using such systems. In 2001 it considered using remotely controlled aircraft to attack the G8 summit in Genoa, but rejected this idea in favour of the more destructive use of guided jumbo jets each filled with 60 tonnes of jet fuel.21 Another plot to bomb the Pentagon and US Capitol with a model aircraft filled with explosives was foiled in 2011 by the FBI before it could be put into action.22 Even though this involved a seven-foot plane

15 William Wan and Peter Finn, ‘Global race on to match US drone capabilities’, Washington Post, 4 July 2011, http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-07-04/world/35238016_1_surveillance-drones-general-atomics-aeronautical-systems-zhuhai-air-show, accessed 24 July 2013.

16 Peter W. Singer, ‘The proliferation of drones’, IP Journal, 19 June 2013, https://ip-journal.dgap.org/en/ip-journal/topics/proliferation-drones, accessed 24 July 2013.

17 Kenneth Anderson of American University in Washington DC, cited by Wan and Finn, ‘Global race on to match US drone capabilities’.

18 Wan and Finn, ‘Global race on to match US drone capabilities’.19 Mohammed Najib and David Eshel, ‘Exploding toy planes: the next threat to Israel security’, 25 Feb. 2003,

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/851749/posts, accessed 24 July 2013.20 Najib and David Eshel, ‘Exploding toy planes’.21 Dennis Gormley, ‘Unmanned air vehicles as terror weapons: real or imagined?’, 1 July 2005, http://www.nti.

org/analysis/articles/unmanned-air-vehicles-terror-weapons/, accessed 24 July 2013.22 Abby Goodnough, ‘Man is held in a plan to bomb Washington’, 28 Sept. 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/

2011/09/29/us/massachusetts-man-accused-of-plotting-to-bomb-washington.html, accessed 24 July 2013.

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that could travel at 100 mph, the fact that it was thwarted and involved limited amounts of explosives went some way towards accounting for the minimal impact of this threat at the time.23

The possibility of model aircraft being used to attack the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games, however, was taken seriously by those responsible for security at the event. For the duration of both sets of games model use was banned in the metropolitan area, Rapier anti-aircraft missiles were stationed in London, and the skies were patrolled by RAF Puma helicopters crewed by marksmen prepared to fly alongside any drone, model aircraft or otherwise, and shoot it out of the sky.24 After the games, however, these measures were withdrawn, indicating that the UK authorities did not consider such a level of protection necessary for everyday security. What lies behind such thinking is the debate on risk assessment.

A dangerous complacency

The view that drones do not constitute a different order of threat is reflected in such practice and in the literature. Gormley, for example, states that ‘if there is any lesson that 9/11 provides it is that security planners must avoid confusing unfamiliar threats with improbable ones’, and goes on to argue: ‘Achieving successful autonomous flight of a UAV is a daunting task for any terrorist group, even were they to have all the necessary technical skills. It would require at least two years of determined effort and some level of outside or foreign assistance.’25 A similar view is taken in a 2009 study by the RAND Corporation, which states: ‘Terrorists will not think about UAVs in isolation and security planners should not do so either. For terrorists planning an attack, UAVs are one possible attack mode among many, and their use will be driven by how they compare to other options.’26 According to this approach, rather than fly over defences, terrorists are more likely to attack undefended targets or choose to penetrate defences in another way—for example, using a person with an explosive vest, or another form of attack from the air, ‘e.g. using mortars or rockets that many terrorist groups already routinely use’.27 For these authors, ‘many of the alternative ways of solving this operational problem are weapons and tactics that are much more familiar to terrorists and would not require them to acquire and learn to operate a UAV or remote-controlled plane’. This particular report even goes as far as to argue that ‘security planners may actually prefer he or she use the UAV since doing so would limit the potential damage and casualties from the attack in many cases where other means of striking the target are feasible’.28

23 See Jeevan Vasagar, ‘Students “planned terror attack using remote control planes”’, Daily Telegraph, 25 June 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/10140642/Students-planned-terror-attack- using-remote-control-planes.html, accessed 24 July 2013.

24 Interview with senior RAF officer, Birmingham, 10 June 2013.25 Gormley, ‘Unmanned air vehicles as terror weapons’, p. 7.26 Brian A. Jackson and David R. Frelinger, Emerging threats and security planning: how should we decide what hypothetical

threats to worry about?, occasional paper (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), p. 7, http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/occasional_papers/2009/RAND_OP256.pdf, accessed 24 July 2013.

27 Jackson and Frelinger, Emerging threats and security planning, p. 8.28 Jackson and Frelinger, Emerging threats and security planning, p. 9.

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To describe this line of argument as woefully complacent would be a vast understatement. What the 9/11 attacks showed more than anything was a willing-ness on the part of the perpetrators to think creatively and to employ technolo-gies and tactics that were entirely unconventional in order to achieve strategic surprise, shock and destruction. They have also shown a propensity to attack symbolic targets like the Pentagon or the World Trade Center in part because they are defended and have been attacked previously. By attacking the same targets they seek to make the point that nothing is invulnerable or off limits. As defences against suicide bombers by vest or car bomb are tightened, the increasing costs attached to penetrating them by this means will increase the attractiveness of drones as ‘one possible attack mode among many’, and perhaps also as an alternative, dramatic and eye-catching way to strike at enemies. Dismissing the terrorist use of these systems also fails to grasp the point that drones are attractive weapons in their own right for their own symbolic reasons. Given the controversial use of drones by the US and UK in many parts of the Muslim world, the ability to strike at the homeland with such a device must be very attractive to many terrorist groups as the ultimate expression of a paradoxically symmetrical asymmetric warfare. The fact that Faisal Shahzad, the would-be Times Square bomber, cited US drone use as part of his motivation for his planned attack is testimony to the political saliency that drones have among terrorist recruits.29 While the RAND study may be right in arguing that motors and rockets might be more attractive weapons for terrorists who are familiar with their operation, this overlooks the crucial detail that most would-be terrorists, especially domestically based ‘home-grown’ terrorists, do not have easy access to these systems. By contrast they could easily and cheaply acquire a commercially available drone. Nor do the other objections hold up. Modern drones such as quadcopters are very easy to operate and are self-stabilizing. The observations that they are ‘very sensitive to the wind and weather’ and could end up ‘stuck in a tree’ do not constitute valid reasons to dismiss this technology in such a flippant manner.30

Another idea that has been advanced is that terrorist groups, from the IRA to Al-Qaeda, have never previously embraced unconventional technologies such as poison gas or drone technology.31 This, of course, is to ignore both the use of sarin gas on the Tokyo underground in 1995 by Aum Shinrikyo and the possibility that modern terrorists may have a very different modus operandi from that of groups like the IRA. The conclusion of the Rand report and the standing down of drone defences after the Olympics reflect the view that ‘UAVs are a niche threat’ and that they ‘should be largely viewed as simply one more means among many of delivering a moderately-sized bomb to a target rather than a novel threat in their own right’.32 Viewed in this way, drones ‘are neither game-changers nor impactful enough that they represent more than a small slice of the overall threat faced by

29 See Boyle, ‘The costs and consequences of drone warfare’.30 Jackson and Frelinger, Emerging threats and security planning, p. 8.31 Interview with retired senior MOD civil servant, Birmingham, 3 June 2013.32 Jackson and Frelinger, Emerging threats and security planning, p. 9.

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a modern nation from terrorism’.33 Yet this view is both outdated in its view of the latest drone technology and seriously lacking in imagination in contemplating possible threats.

Drones possess many qualities which, when combined, make them potentially the ideal means for terrorist attack in the twenty-first century. They can be operated anonymously and remotely; they present little or no risk to their operators; they can be acquired cheaply and easily; their operation can be mastered simply and safely; and they can be used in isolation or in large numbers (given their avail-ability and cost) to devastating effect. The aerial dimension they inhabit presents a means of surveillance, reconnaissance and attack that was previously reserved for large piloted aircraft, which conversely require specialist training to operate, are expensive to acquire and use, are subject to controlled and monitored operation, need an airstrip to launch from, and require an act of self-destruction in order to be used as a terrorist weapon. The ready availability of drones changes the risk calcu-lation—on both sides. Conventional thinking about the security of buildings and high-value targets assumes the absence of a serious aerial threat. Security for such sites has traditionally been thought of in terms of perimeter defence and entry point control. It is for this reason that the US Embassy in London is to be relocated to a new site in Wandsworth as its existing site, in Grosvenor Square, cannot be protected against the threat of truck bombs. The new design includes an artificial lake, a moat, grass berms and a 30-metre blast zone precisely in order to protect against truck bombs. The entry point will be guarded by US marines, screens and the latest sensors. But while the new building’s glass will be protected by polymer coating, it is unclear how secure it is against aerial attack by drones packed with explosives. With a drone, an individual office could be identified and attacked with precision and impunity by an explosive device or even a kinetic collision. Crowds at sporting events or rallies are vulnerable in a similar way. What works for crop dusting can be applied with malign intent to a large crowd. A crop-spraying drone could even target one group of supporters at such an event. As Gormley notes, ‘dispersal of chemical or especially biological agent is ideally suited for a UAV; its flight stability permits the release of agent evenly along a line of contamina-tion’, and while these substances may not be easily available ‘it is important to note that even gasoline, when mixed with air, releases 15 times as much energy as an equal weight of TNT’.34 Nor is it necessary to explode gasoline: flammable liquids need only be ignited over a crowd to have a devastating effect. If a simple Chinese lantern can cause millions of pounds’ worth of damage to a recycling plant, as occurred in Birmingham in July 2013, the potential damage to property or popula-tions by guided fire-bombs could be immense.

What is true of the vulnerability of crowds and buildings is also true for convoys and cars. In this as in other areas, conventional thinking about threats on the ground needs to be challenged. Rethinking about the aerial environment is also needed. In 1987 Matthias Rust flew a single-engined Cessna for 500 miles,

33 Jackson and Frelinger, Emerging threats and security planning, p. 9.34 Gormley, ‘Unmanned air vehicles as terror weapons’, p. 5.

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landing undetected in Red Square, because the Soviet authorities were concen-trating on a specific and known threat—cruise missiles and western military fast jets.35 Only Rust’s benign intentions saved them from a potential strategic shock.

While the biggest threat comes from converted ultra-light aircraft, kit aircraft that could be built undetected in a single garage could deliver 150–300 pounds of payload to any target that can be imagined.36 But even drones without a payload represent a potential threat that is as yet unaccounted for in conventional risk assessments. Their size, cost and ease of use make small drones ideal devices to be swarmed against vulnerable targets. By virtue of either their kinetic energy alone or their ability to function as mechanical bird strikes, drones pose a significant threat to commercial airliners. Sitting beyond the perimeter of a major airport, drones could also be swarmed into the engines of wide-bodied jets as they set off on transcontinental flights, heavily laden with fuel and passengers. With on-board cameras they can be guided in real time on collision paths. If both engines were hit at 200 feet, well within the capability of a swarm of drones, catastrophe would follow. At present no defence or precaution is in place to deal with this possi-bility, as the main drone debate lies elsewhere and the domestic assessment of this threat has so far proved complacent. In the United States, for example, the Federal Aviation Authority has no capacity to monitor flying objects below 3,000 feet.37 And yet the cost, ease of use and availability of drones at the present time mean that unfettered access to the air has never been easier.38

Much has been written about the legal, ethical and prudential use of drones in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. While the extent to which they constitute a disruptive technology in this context has formed a part of that debate, discussion of drone use has been overly focused on how much they differ from traditional conceptions of air power. It has also tended to focus solely on the employment of these systems for controversial targeted killing, to the exclusion of a wider evalu-ation of this new set of aerial technologies in general. This focus may be largely explained by the centrality of drone use to US security policy. President Obama can talk about ending the ‘decade of war’ and celebrate bringing US troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan only because of a massive increase in his use of targeted killing by drone strikes. Drone use in this setting is indeed a disruptive technology in that it enables a new form of combat by obliterating the traditional distinctions which characterized previous employment of air power. Drones have facilitated an increase in covert warfare and a blurring of what is meant by combat, interven-tion and indeed sovereignty. Yet debate on this aspect of drone technology has masked a wider discussion on their potential use by non-state actors. To the extent that this issue has been debated at all, it has been downplayed by contextualizing it as one new security threat among others such as chemical, biological or radio-logical security threats or the potential vulnerability to cyber attack. This is an

35 Chloe Hadjimatheou, ‘Mathias Rust: German teenager who flew to Red Square’, BBC News Magazine, 7 Dec. 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20609795, accessed 24 July 2013.

36 Gormley, ‘Unmanned air vehicles as terror weapons’.37 Gormley, ‘Unmanned air vehicles as terror weapons’.38 I am grateful to Flt Lt Ian Grogan, RAF, of the University of Birmingham Air Squadron, for this point.

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odd reaction, as defensive measures against all these other technologies are being actively taken, while none is being taken against domestic drone attack. What is more, these other threats could be combined with drones to maximize their effect. Drones could deliver chemical, biological or radiological material; computer hackers could divert military or civilian drones to nefarious purposes. Drones are also potentially more easily available and could be more readily diverted to terrorist purposes than other security threats.

The fact that we live in times of defence austerity is no excuse for avoiding a proper debate about the nature of new threats and how they might be met. While the challenge presented by drones as potential terrorist weapons is real and growing, this does not mean that nothing can be done to counter it. Various measures have been suggested as defences against drone attacks, such as electronic jamming, deeper perimeter defence of airports, physical barriers on buildings and even high-powered fibre optic laser guns, but such measures will only be imple-mented if the threat from drones is acknowledged, debated and acted upon.39 For this to happen, just as in 1415, it requires the knights of the Ministry of Defence and other august bodies to get off their high horses and take this threat seriously.

39 ‘US anti-drone weapon unveiled’, http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2010/07/22/US-anti-drone-weapon-unveiled/UPI-67511279821910/, accessed 24 July 2013.

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