Much ink has been spent to present independent analysis on different facets of these developments. The past decade has witnessed a steadily growing popular and academic interest in these systems, the legal and ethical questions surrounding their use, and their impact on armed conflict and society more generally. 7 More than 90 states operated military UAVs as of 2017, and almost 30 possessed or were capable of using armed UAVs. 6 In 2018, the RAND Corporation, tasked to produce a report on how the proliferation of UAVs will impact US national security interests, concluded that these systems pose an incremental but growing threat to US and allied military operations, predicting that, in future conflicts, US forces will have to cope with adversaries equipped with different types and sizes of UAVs, with and without ordinance on board. The estimated market 5 is expected to grow from around $6 billion in 2015 to about $12 billion in 2025. 3 UAVs are “valuable assets in achieving a variety of strategic, operational, and tactical objectives, including ISR missions and kinetic-strike operations.” 4 Because of their numerous battlefield advantages over manned systems, UAVs continue to proliferate on a global scale at an accelerated speed. Military operations involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), 1 also known as “drones,” 2 represent a complex sociotechnical system with the human element at its core.
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