■ In nine years the Pentagon has increased its drone fleet thirteen-fold and is spending $5 billion a year adding to it.23
■ A recent Defense Department plan calls for a 30 percent increase in the size of the U.S. drone fleet in coming years.24
■ In August 2011 the United States revealed it would be investing around $23 billion in advancing its drone program. This at a time of steep military cutbacks.25
■ Since 2001 the military has spent more than $26 billion on drones.26
■ Globally over the next decade more than $94 billion is expected to be spent on drone research and procurement.27
■ British military officials have said that almost one-third of Royal Air Force aircraft will be drones in twenty years.28
■ More than fifty countries have built or bought drones. Even the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah has used Iranian-built drones. Many observers are worried about a future drone arms race that will see countries other than the United States hunting down their enemies with remote-control planes.29
■ The UK has developed a $225 million jet-propelled drone capable of hitting targets on other continents. Known as the Taranis, it was named after the Celtic god of thunder.30 Unlike the ungainly Predator and Reaper, the stealth technology–equipped Taranis has an internal bomb bay that can carry a wide array of weapons.
■ In March 2013 General Atomic Aeronautical Systems agreed to sell $197 million worth of drones to the United Arab Emirates, in the first sale of drones to a non-NATO member. The unarmed version of the Predator is to be known as the Predator XP and will be used for surveillance missions.31
■ The Pentagon intends to spend approximately $37 billion on a variety of drones including the MQ-9 Reaper and the Global Hawk, a high-flying drone spy plane.32
■ The U.S. military currently has sixty-five advanced MQ-9 Reapers, and it plans to receive four hundred more of them.33
■ The U.S. military has procured more than 250 MQ-1 Predator drones.34
■ The 2011 defense budget sought funds for a 75 percent increase in drone operations.35
■ The military plans to buy more than eighty Global Hawk surveillance drones, which cost $141 million per aircraft.36
■ The U.S. Navy is developing a carrier-based jet drone known as the X-47B, which can fly ten times farther than manned planes and defend aircraft carriers from threats such as “carrier killer” missiles.37
■ The United States recently launched a surveillance drone, known as the Phantom Eye, that can remain aloft for four days gathering intelligence.38
■ The U.S. Air Force is developing nanodrones, such as the Wasp, that weigh less than a pound and can fly to a thousand feet. The Air Force has also planned Project Anubis (named for the Egyptian god of death) to build small killer drones that weigh less than a pound. The small drones will be used to terminate HVTs and could one day fly in swarms against an enemy.39
■ The U.S. Army recently developed a small backpack-size drone, known as the Switchblade. This kamikaze aircraft carries explosives that can be launched from a tube, loiters in the sky, and dives at targets upon command.40
■ China unveiled twenty-five new drone models at an air show in 2011, and Iran claims to have two drones, known as “messengers of death,” that are capable of long-range missions.41
■ By late 2011 U.S. drones had logged 2.7 million hours of flight with the majority of that time (87 percent) being flown in combat.42
■ The U.S. Army has developed a surveillance drone that can be flown by the crew of an Apache AH-64D Longbow attack helicopter to help it find its targets on the ground.43
■ Predator drones are already being used to monitor the U.S.-Mexican border. Recently a Mexican police drone crashed in the United States.44
■ America has already experienced its first attempt by a terrorist to use a drone to carry out a terrorist act. In September 2011 Rezwan Ferdaus was arrested in the Boston area after the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) found him plotting to use seven-foot remote-control toy planes loaded with C-4 plastic explosives to blow up the Pentagon and other targets in Washington, DC.45
■ Palestinian sources say more than eight hundred people have been killed by Israeli drone strikes in the Gaza strip in recent years.46
■ The U.S. Air Force has begun purchasing a new jet drone known as the Predator C, or Avenger, that will allow it to deliver munitions to a target at a much faster speed than the propeller-driven Predators and Reapers in its current fleet. The Avenger carries even more ammunition than the Reaper.47
■ Since the United States began its drone war in Pakistan, more than two thousand people have been killed by U.S. drones.48 That is more than the total U.S. combat loses in Afghanistan in a decade of fighting.
■ In December 2010 the U.S. Air Force announced that it had test-flown the X-37B, a drone modeled on the space shuttle, into space. This development caused many drone critics to worry that the Air Force was involved in weaponizing drones for space warfare.49
■ In February 2012 the NATO alliance agreed to deploy a fleet of its own drones after seeing how useful the American drones were in the joint NATO-U.S. air war on Gaddafi forces in Libya.50 NATO has already begun building a 1.3 billion Euro drone base at Sigonella in Sicily.51
Weaponized and surveillance drones are clearly the future of American counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations, and perhaps even of conventional warfare. Whereas the first drone attack on al Qaeda, which took place in Yemen in 2002, was greeted with tremendous coverage by the international media, drone strikes today are considered so mundane that they are now relegated to small articles on newspapers’ back pages, if they are picked up at all. The vast majority of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, seems to have accepted this radical development with little real debate. In fact 83 percent of Americans approve of Obama’s stepped up drone policy, including liberal Democrats, 77 percent of whom support the president on the issue of drone strikes.52 For Americans, drone attacks in distant locations seem to be an accepted part of the post-9/11 world.
Despite the CIA’s reluctance to enter the drone assassination business prior to 9/11, former CIA head David Petraeus once said, “We can’t get enough drones.”53 In 2010 former defense secretary Robert Gates said, “We are buying as many Reapers as we possibly can.”54 That same year the commander of the 147th Reconnaissance Wing, Col. Ken Wisian, said of drones, “The demand for this kind of capacity is insatiable.”55
With little discussion, the United States (along with as many as fifty other nations) has inaugurated what amounts to a drone revolution. Although the CIA is the only intelligence agency in the world that currently flies killer drones beyond its borders to hunt terrorists and insurgents, it is perhaps only a matter of time before Russia, China, Israel, and other countries deploy drone fleets abroad in search of their foes.56 David Cortright of Notre Dame has fretted, “What kind of a future are we creating for our children? We face the prospect of a world in which every nation will have drone warfare capability, in which terror can rain down from the sky at any moment without warning.”57