A day in the life of an Air Force drone pilot
latimes.com
latimes.com
On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree. While the drone pilots may grasp the full ramifications of their actions, it's a certainty that the general public does not. We see no body bags and hear no casualty reports. There are no lists of the fallen. Sending out a platoon of 18 year old kids is difficult. Sending out a squadron of MQ-9 reapers is easy.
War is horrific beyond imagining. The emotional toll has always been shared by both sides to some degree, and I would like to believe that such costs act as a deterrent. I worry about the decision-making of a society that has their portion of that horror comfortably abstracted away.
On the other hand, it abstracts warfare to an uncomfortable degree."
I wouldn't worry too much. Within five years, the "bad guys" will have drones (or equally lethal weaponry) too. Then their combatants would be safely ensconced somewhere too while pursuing the destruction of the "good guys". Technology is a great leveller, over time.
Also, a person who could get shot at makes snap and sometimes bad decisions (ex. killing bystander). The dude in the office can be positive (failure just looses a drone not his life).
During the American Civil War, a bloody struggle of brother and against brother involving carnage on a scale never seen before, families would bring picnic baskets out to watch the battle. When the first photographs of all the carnage starting coming in, it had no affect at all on public support. In fact, the pictures were marveled and praised.
More primitive societies that live with death on a daily basis have no problem dealing with it up close and personal -- and they have no problem either going to war or sending others to war. Later societies -- especially those with a pampered middle class and instantaneous communications -- have all kinds of problems with any use of violence at all that might inconvenience them. It may be one button that kills a hundred enemies (making the assumption that only combatants are killed and the war is just) but there will be videos of it instantaneously on the web and commenters from all over the world will weigh in on the atrocity of "war by pushbutton"
Eventually, war will consist of people hiding in underground bunkers controlling big robots to do the fighting. Then maybe we'll all realize how pointless war actually is.
It's surreal how they "drive to work/war" then come home that night. Having said that from the documentary you also get the impression that they do treat it like they are at war.
Building an AUV is ridiculously cheap, and can be done with off-the-shelf components. Moreover, other countries have learned from the success of our drone programs, and are rapidly developing their own. It is almost a certainty that we will have drones deployed against us in our next major conflict.
People tend to forget that there was a brief period where America was the sole nuclear power, and we could destroy whole countries with negligible risk to 'friendlies'. We had very similar discussions then. However, that monopoly of power didn't last, and the costs of deploying those weapons suddenly became infinite.
I suspect that a similar symmetry will arise with robotic weapons. War will get weirder, but it isn't going to get any less risky.
I doubt networks will respond by creating their own drones. Building a drone may not be too hard, but building one that can be operated from the other side of the world is much harder. Furthermore, it turns the conflict to an arms race in which they will find it extremely hard to beat wealthier nations.