‘While such systems may not appear sophisticated in a traditional military sense, ground-emplaced IEDs have caused thousands of American deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and proved profoundly hard to defeat. Drones will enable airborne IEDs that can actively seek out U.S. forces, rather than passively lying in wait. Indeed, low-cost drones may lead to a paradigm shift in ground warfare for the United States, ending more than a half- century of air dominance in which U.S. ground forces have not had to fear attacks from the air.  Airborne IEDs could similarly be used in a terrorist attack against civilians or in precision strikes against high-profile individuals or landmarks.’

But the report also makes much of the US’s continued military-industrial investment in high-end drones.  Here various forms of stealth technology make much of the running, or at least issue most of the promissory notes, since today’s Predators and Reapers can only operate in more or less undefended air space – which is another way of saying they can only be used against the weak and/or with the complicity of other states (as in Pakistan and Yemen) – and face immense difficulties in what the US Air Force calls A2/AD [anti-access/area-denial] environments (see here and here). But I’m particularly interested in what the report has to say about the use of large military drones to act as communications relays.  Here the emphasis is on the ability of these remote relays to integrate what is otherwise often remarkably un-networked warfare and to extend the range of operational control and transmissable data.

Steve Graham and I are presently working on an essay on drones and satellite communications: so much of the discussion of geospatial intelligence has focused on satellite imagery, but the geographies of satellite communications (and, crucially, bandwidth) play a major role in the deployment of drones and in the highly variable quality of the imagery they transmit to users across the network.