What are drones?
They are heavily armed flying robots—planes without pilots. Drones constitute a class of unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, ranging from surveillance craft small enough to fit in your hand to Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk, which has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 and is slated to supplant the U-2 as the nation’s pre-eminent spy plane. The best-known U.S. military drone is the Predator, a 27-foot-long aircraft made of lightweight graphite and carbon fiber, which is used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan, and increasingly in Pakistan. “The key thing in a UAV,” says Damian Kemp, an editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, “is it does missions that are dull, dirty, and dangerous.” Have drones been effective? Enormously so. In the past six months, Predators operating in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan have been credited with helping to capture or kill nearly half the terrorists on a list of 20 “high-value targets,” and some U.S analysts believe al Qaida has been seriously crip
