"MQ-9 Reaper: Not the 'Revolution in Warfare' You've Been Told." by Winslow Wheeler

The Summer 2012 issue of Common Defense Quarterly is running my article, "MQ-9 Reaper: Not the 'Revolution in Warfare' You've Been Told."  To sum it up, I conclude "The proclamation of drones, such as Reaper, to be the future of warfare, a revolutionary transformation, is an empty, data free proclamation. The MQ-9 neither saves money nor improves performance compared to analogous, even primitive, aircraft. Such equipment only has a future in a defense system that prefers to degrade combat performance while increasing cost."

 

To see the article and its data and arguments, find the complete magazine at http://www.commondefensequarterly/CDQ13/CDQ13.pdf, and below.  The article starts on page 27.

 

If you want to review still more data, references, and of my analysis, find a five part series I wrote for Time's Battleland blog at http://battleland.blogs.time.com/2012/03/02/5-revolutionary-or-routine/.