Wednesday Night at RAND about Drones

On Wednesday evening I attended a forum on Drones at RAND in Santa Monica.  RAND stands for research and development and has over 2000 employee s over the world with headquarters in Santa Monica. 

Ted Harshberger, V.P and director of RAND Project Air Force was the moderator.  Randall Steeb, a senior engineer at the RAND Corporation was on the panel as was Steve Gitlin, VP for marketing strategy and communication at AeroVironment, Inc. where he is responsible for the company's Drone business segments.  He said that the U.S. currently has about 10,000 deployed Drones with about 85% of them being the small variety, less than 3 feet long.

Steve Gitlin said that the small variety fly for about 40 minutes and are used for surveillance, sent by a single user in the field for defense, agricultural, policing uses.  Very small drones may be carried in a person's pocket.  The large drones require many people to launch and control.  For example one of the large drones is called Grey Eagle and requires 100 people to operate over a 24 hour period..

The scientists do not call them drones.  They call them U.A.S's for unmanned aircraft systems.  They see many more uses in the future and to focus on safety.  However, privacy issues are real even though today there are surveillance cameras everywhere.  This raises ethics issues even though the UAS's may save lives.  

Randy Steeb said that UAS's are the center piece of the counter-terrorism efforts.  Targeted killings usually result in less collateral damage.  Taking out terrorist leaders can result in a major blow to their efforts.  UASs can also be used in a swarm and working together can have a major impact.

Some of the challenges are that with many drones in the air of different sizes, it is difficult to shoot them down...it is hard to distinguish the good guys from the bad or from birds.  Another issue is the stress of operations.  Even when they are being operated in the Nevada desert, the operators experience post traumatic stress.  He said some of the 'bad guys' have them like the Mexican Mafia.  He said we need to give the same technology to the police. 

Even with the technology, war cannot just be conducted remotely.  Community policing is very important.  Also there are the issues of hacking...thus more challenges ahead.