The Drone Wars

Originally shared by Kevin Kelly

The Drone Wars

“But to offset China’s numerical advantage and technological advances, the United States Navy is betting heavily on drones — not just the X-47B and its successors, but anti-submarine reconnaissance drones, long-range communications drones, even underwater drones. A single hunter-killer pairing of a Triton reconnaissance drone and a P-8A Poseidon piloted anti-submarine plane can sweep 2.7 million square miles of ocean in a single mission.

The arms race between the world’s largest navies undermines the likelihood of attaining a new balance of power, and raise the possibility of unintended collisions as the United States deploys hundreds, even thousands of drones and China scrambles for ways to counter the new challenge. And drones, because they are cheap and don’t need a human pilot, lower the bar for aggressive behavior on the part of America’s military leaders — as they will for China’s navy, as soon as it makes its own inevitable foray into drone capabilities (indeed, there were reports last week that China was preparing its own stealth drone for flight tests).

From the NYTimes http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/opinion/drones-and-the-rivalry-between-the-us-and-china.html?smid=go-share&_r=0

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