The skyrocketing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has generated intense debate about how useful they are against insurgent/terrorist networks. Some prominent counterinsurgency experts have decried the "siege mentality" among non-combatant locals caused by collateral damage from the drone strikes. But despite the charge that drones represent a technology (i.e., a means) in search of a strategy (i.e., end goals), there's no question that: 1) drones are here to stay, and 2) they're truly re-symmetricizing the battlefield in a much-needed manner.
Over the past generation, warfare has dramatically downshifted, from the Cold War's system-level rivalry/standoff to the strong focus on regional rogues across the 1990s and then, following the attacks of 9/11, to non-state-actor networks. As an example of the change, when I got into this business nearly 20 years ago, the dominant threat scenario was a nuclear weapons launch killing millions in the process. Now, the most compelling operational standard centers around using a UAV to kill a single bad actor on the other side of the world. Both involve roughly the same scant minutes of response time. ...