摘要：The article argues that armed drones are weapons made for unconventional warfare and have little value for conventional interstate conflict. The rise of armed drones to prominence has to be considered as an indicator for the changed nature of contemporary armed conflict that has now become focused on countering terrorism, insurgencies, transnational organized crime and fighting ‘hybrid wars’ globally. The US military is preparing for both global counterinsurgency and for civil unrest at home as they are creating a global surveillance architecture reaching from outer space to cyber space, where everything and everybody can be continuously identified, tracked and located. Unmanned systems assist in global surveillance and provide the global reach for intervening in internal conflicts without the need of deploying large ground forces. The new technological capabilities, including drones, biometrics and cyber warfare, are very useful for global manhunts in the context of the ongoing war on terror and for the control of large populations from afar. Western governments are also increasingly concerned about the spread of extremist ideologies and the possibility of mass civil unrest, which means that many of the lessons learned in the counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq could be applied within the West.
