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Pentagon Documents the Military's Growing Domestic Drone Use (zdnet.com)
New data on the Pentagon's domestic drone use documents 11 missions during the 2018 fiscal year. That's up from 11 missions over the entire span of 2011 through 2017, as noted by Dan Gettinger, co-director of Bard College's Center for the Study of the Drone. ZDNet reports: Most of the military's 2018 missions fell under the category of "Defense Support of Civil Authorities." That meant responding to requests from the governors of California and Oregon for support during last year's wildfire season, as well as helping the South Carolina National Guard with its Hurricane Florence flood response. Defense Department drones were also on call throughout 2018 to provide Southern Border support for a regiment of the Army. In 2018, the military also used its unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in three cases to provide Defense Department installation and airspace support. It also responded to a request from the governor of New York for support during an emergency response training exercise. And for five months during the fiscal year, it used drones to support the US Customs and Border Patrol's counterdrug operations.
Unarmed drones are just sky cameras - fairly cheap, and basically a slightly different shade of the other sky cameras we have in the form of satellites.
As long as they're coordinating with the FAA, and validly serving the public interests rather than doing it for income or favors to third parties, I'm generally cool with it. It's actually a relatively cheap way to keep those folks busy and maintaining a large-scale force of pilots and software that would likely be useful in future intelligence-focused hot zones.
Armed drones on the other hand have WAAAY too many forms of major liability - from theft, to crashes, to irresponsible use, to accidents even with responsible use. I say don't even have them installed with hard points to install weapons, and make converting them to armed drones require several forms of permission and emergency confirmation at the least - and even then, that's more the job of the police during emergencies.
If you want to train with armed drones, do it in simulations, or rarely in the desert in existing ordinance testing zones. Don't risk the liability of using them anywhere near populated areas or in any kind of unrestrained use - that's way outside the military's realm of responsibility.
Ryan Fenton