摘要：The use of remotely piloted aircraft (UAV) to make lethal strikes in the current Global War on Terror (GWOT) has become as commonpla ce as it has controversial, even while aspects of it remain as clichéd as the American love for acronyms. From command and control centers largely in the United States, multiple drone strikes were launched in the first week of 2013, and all indicators suggest that this weaponry and its enabling technologies will become increasingly central to the American way of fighting current and anticipated wars.1The Obama administration claims to have decimated the leadership ranks of al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations through systematic targeting and drone-enabled strikes deep into Pakistan, Afghanistan, and increasingly the Yemen and the African Sahel. How many UAVs have been downed by resistance will remain unknown, but no pilots have been risked and no American lives have been lost.2Pilots of conventional fighter-bomber aircraft are also rarely lost, but the symbolic significa nce of lethal force exercised by UAVs across a vast geographical domain spanning most of half of Asia and Africa with pilots safely nestled into command and control centers scattered across the Midwestern United States is not lost on anyone. An arms race is well under way, and partly in response other nations are rapidly developing their own drone fleets to deter or to compete
