Global Security and Intelligence Studies Volume 1, Number 1, Fall 2015 | Page 10

The Future of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
watch their fields. Builders will use them to survey construction sites. Hollywood will
use them to make movies” (Grossman 2013). These commercial predictions largely
focus on technological early adopters who will use UAVs simply because they exist
and are economically feasible. Economic feasibility was largely driven by forecasts,
like Grossman’s, that 50 dollars and a smartphone will buy you a complete UAV
system. However, the economic feasibility argument relies on the presumptive logic
that because a technology is (or will be) developed and could fulfill a function, it will
be an effective and efficient tool for that function.
On the military side, economic feasibility propelled debates on the potential
for widespread adoption of UAVs. Interestingly, there was a divergence between
policy-centric forecasters and the mainstream scholarly discourse. Policy forecasters
focused on the adoption of UAVs for additional tasks while the academic community
analyzed the proliferation across countries. For example, defense forecasters argue
that miniature UAVs will be used to “swarm” the enemy in order to defeat complex
networks such as an adversary’s air defense system (Scharre 2014). United States Air
Force (USAF) policy projects that UAVs will eventually conduct every core airpower
mission including command and control, airlift, air refueling, aeromedical evacuation,
search and rescue, air and missile defense, and electronic warfare (USAF 2014, 49).
There is little scholarly debate on whether or not these missions are appropriate for
a UAV. Instead, the current scholarly debates about the future of UAVs are fixated
on the potential proliferation of armed UAVs to additional countries. 1 To an extent,
this fixation is driven by ethical and legal concerns that are largely not applicable to
unarmed UAVs .
This study begins by applying military innovation theories to the development
of UAVs. After a brief review of current UAV capabilities and limitations, the core of
the study is an analysis of the potential use of UAVs for future missions including
air to air; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR); mobility; strike; and
command and control (C2). While the analysis for potential future use is valid for
all UAV programs across the globe, it is most applicable to the USAF since it has the
most developed and best funded program and will, therefore, most likely be the first
to test future concepts.
Innovation Theory and UAVs
Military innovation theory provides a framework to empirically analyze the
potential adoption of UAVs for additional missions or by additional military
forces. The framework starts with the identification of key factors that enable
or constrain the adoption of military technologies (Schwartz 1996, 101-102). Despite
the advantages of military innovations, they are not automatically adopted by other
organizations or militaries. Organizational adoption is constrained partly by finances
1
See, for example, Franke (2015); Joshi and Stein (2013); Horowitz and Fuhrmann (2014) and Kreps
and Zenko (2014).
3