That is the one, polished side of the coin. The other is this:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/...8314-4,00.html
Quote:
The unmanned assassin can fly for more than 20 hours and kill at lightning speed. But they are not always reliable. According to official reports, 38 Predator and Reaper drones have crashed while on combat missions in both Afghanistan and Iraq, while a further nine have crashed during test flights on military bases in the US. Each crash costs the government between $3.7 million (€2.8 million) and $5 million.
The US Department of Defense accident reports show that system failures, computer glitches and human errors are common occurrences during drone missions. It seems that serious problems were ignored because of the need for the drones to be deployed as quickly as possible. The new weapon was urgently in demand following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and the hasty start of the invasion of Afghanistan.
"The drones were not ready for going into combat," says Travis Burdine, manager of the Air Force Unmanned Aircraft Systems Task Force. "We had no time to iron out the problems." Burdine's statement is backed up by reports in the war logs. Indeed, the quiet killers seem to have a lot of defects.
|
Before we have fully automatted combat drones that not onyl do recce missions and ground attacks, but one day maybe also fly against enemy fighterplanes, many more years will pass by. They are no wonder-weapon, and possibly never will be.
I am not against drones in principle. I am just not enthusiastic about them, and I am against fielding them when they are in a state where their technology still is not reliable even in normal flight conditions, not even mentioning combat situations.
Other reports in that set of leaked documents seem to hint at the igh number of occasions when drone intel was unreliable, or led to misidentification of targets or bad targetting, resulting in aimed killing of civilians/non-combatants. the number of incidents when civilians/non-combatants ket intentionally targetted, obviously is much, much higher in Afghanistan than has become known to Wetsern public and media in the past years.