Let's play a guessing game! San Diego? We've got Miramar and Camp Pendleton here, along with crumbling infrastructure and terrible potholes. Although the city certainly doesn't need help finding potholes around here...
Using drones for this kind of thing actually makes a lot of sense, although not a $20 million militarized Predator.
The later might make some sense, though, as part of training for the drone operators. Spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street such as a pothole could require similar skills to spotting a small disturbance in the surface of a street due to someone having buried a timed or remote-control explosive there.
Similar considerations could apply to many other uses of military drones in civilian operations. Using a military drone to find a missing hiker in a state park, for example, would involve similar skills to using a drone to find a missing military pilot shot down in hostile territory.
In fact, aside from actually shooting guns or missiles at people or dropping bombs, I'd expect that for most skills that a military drone pilot needs for their military missions there are civilian situations where those same skills are useful, and for which using their skills in those civilian situations would improve their ability to do their military missions.
As long as proper safeguards are in place to make sure that they are not put to use in ways that violate our rights, and these civilian uses have a military justification (such as providing cheap or convenient training for the drone operators), I'm open to considering allowing these uses.
Okay never thought of that situation, it would be a good training scenario.
Militarizing cities for potholes is just plain wrong. That's something you'd expect to hear from a Stalinist regime, not a democratic nation.
[0] http://www.wkyt.com/home/headlines/Kentucky-Transportation-C...
I wonder, which do we have?
According to Time Magazine the operating cost of a single MQ-1 Predator per flight hour is $3,679 which might actually make it cost effective depending on the size of the area to be imaged.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_MQ-1_Predato... http://nation.time.com/2013/04/02/costly-flight-hours/
For just potholes, yeah, but there is a lot of other municipal infrastructure that could benefit from aerial inspection, especially if they are in non-public, low traffic or otherwise inaccessible areas.
Waze also has Morgan Freeman's voice for navigation. Glorious!