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To the best of our knowledge the US executive branch has yet to engage in a serious cost-benefit analysis of targeted UAV strikes as a routine counterterrorism tool.

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It is not clear where the White House will come out," Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign relations, tells me. "The nonproliferation folks, centered at [the State Department], do not support liberalized armed drone exports," he wrote over email. "On the other side are [Defense department] folks, and some State regional bureaus, who want to export this capacity to allies, like Turkey, and non-allies like Singapore, as part of 'building partnership capacity.'

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The proliferation of military robotics ... is likely inevitable," says Michael Horowitz, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies military technology. "Much better for close allies and partners to get systems from the US and learn to use them responsibly than to build them themselves or buy them from other countries.

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I think it is entirely sensible. Whether it is foreign citizens who are involved with Al Qaeda or American citizens, we are in a war. They have attacked us. We have a congressional authorization to use military force in response. And that’s what’s at stake here.

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I think it’s a good program and I don’t disagree with the basic policy that the Obama administration is pursuing now in that regards.

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Curbing the proliferation of Weapons of mass destruction and their delivery vehicles is a challenging task. Many potential proliferators are convinced they need to develop WMD and their associated delivery systems to protect their national security. It is estimated that some nations will begin exploiting the full range of UAVs, including delivering WMD in the next decade.

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“Drone strikes outside a declared war by a state on the territory of another state without the consent of the latter or of the UN Security Council constitute a violation of international law and of the territorial integrity and sovereignty of that country.”

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In some respects it’s a perfect assassination weapon. . . . Now we have a problem. There are all these nations that want to buy these armed drones. I’m strongly opposed to that.

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I think this idea of being able to execute, in effect, an American citizen, no matter how awful, having some third party being – having a – having a say in it or perhaps some – informing the Congress or the intelligence committees or something like that, I just – I think some check on the ability of the president to do this has merit, as we look to the longer term future.

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It just makes me uncomfortable that the president, whoever it is, is the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner, all rolled into one. So I’m not suggesting something that would slow down response. But where there is time to submit it to a third party, a court, in confidence, and get a judgment that, yes, there’s sufficient evidence, that feels to me like that’s, its not full compliance with the Fifth Amendment … but some independent check on our executive is healthy for the system.

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To the United States, a drone strike seems to have very little risk and very little pain. At the receiving end, it feels like war. Americans have got to understand that. If we were to use our technological capabilities carelessly—I don’t think we do, but there’s always the danger that you will—then we should not be upset when someone responds with their equivalent, which is a suicide bomb in Central Park, because that’s what they can respond with.

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Since when is the intelligence agency supposed to be an air force of drones that goes around killing people? I believe that it has to be the Department of Defense.

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What I think is absolutely true is it’s not sufficient for citizens to just take my word for it that we’re doing the right thing. … There has never been a drone used on an American citizen on American soil. We respect and have a whole bunch of safeguards in terms of how we conduct counterterrorism operations outside of the United States. The rules outside of the United States are going to be different than the rules inside the United States.

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That's something that you have to struggle with, if you don't, then it's very easy to slip into a situation in which you end up bending rules thinking that the ends always justify the means. That's not been our tradition. That's not who we are as a country.

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No second thoughts.

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When children from other countries are telling us that we've made them fear the sky, it might be time to ask some hard questions.

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Drone strikes are one of those things that it's really convenient not to think about that much. Like the daily life of a circus elephant or that Beck is a Scientologist.

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The president, a politician, Republican or Democrat, should never get to decide someone’s death by flipping through some flash cards and saying, ‘You want to kill him? Yeah, let’s go ahead and kill him’.

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Blood is "expensive, lifesaving but doesn't last very long," Zipline co-founder and CEO Keller Rinaudo said. "So traditional supply chains do a very poor job of distributing it. Using drones, we can deliver blood 10 times as quickly as cars, on demand."

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The reason Zipline has raced ahead in Rwanda is because the government has been more flexible than many other regulatory regimes around the world. That's also why Google is piloting drones in Australia and Amazon is working in the U.K. But the United States is finally taking steps to allow drone business models to experiment and develop on a local level around the country.

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“Given that countries are getting access to larger drones that can operate with larger payloads, and some of those countries have nuclear weapons, how should we be reacting?” says Paul Scharre, project director for the 20YY Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). “It hasn’t gotten much attention in the U.S. defense community because it’s considered a crazy idea, but other countries may think about this quite differently.”

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In a new report called “Limiting Armed Drone Proliferation,” published by the Council on Foreign Relations, Micah Zenko and Sarah Kreps argue that the time has arrived for the U.S. to set regulatory limits on the use of drones. Because drones do not have pilots, they write, the threshold for launching war is lower -- and the planes cannot avoid sudden danger as easily. Countries may also fire on manned fighter planes -- confusing them with drones.

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“We’ve been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It’s been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.

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Although drones can be extremely cost effective for certain applications—in place of, or in combination with, dollies and jibs, for example—when it comes to aerial views, they haven’t fully vanquished the use of helicopters and cranes. Their limited battery life still makes some uses impractical, and they can be flown legally only at relatively low altitudes. But when they can be used, the savings are significant.

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The aerial perspective—of sheep or anything—is liberating precisely because it’s destabilizing, Biro says. “Drone vision allows us to see that there are multiple ways of seeing ourselves and seeing the rest of the world. We step out of ourselves to some extent. That’s its positive potential.”

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Curbing the proliferation of Weapons of mass destruction and their delivery vehicles is a challenging task. Many potential proliferators are convinced they need to develop WMD and their associated delivery systems to protect their national security. It is estimated that some nations will begin exploiting the full range of UAVs, including delivering WMD in the next decade.

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… the dual-use nature of UAVs (intended to be reconnaissance/ surveillance vehicles but possessing the capability for strike missions) and chemical and biological production facilities (which are used for medical purposes as well as weapons) makes detecting their development as weapons extremely difficult.

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“Flying is inherently a dangerous activity. You don’t have to look very far, unfortunately, to see examples of that,” said Dyke Weatherington, director of unmanned warfare for the Pentagon. “I can look you square in the eye and say, absolutely, the [Defense Department] has got an exceptional safety record on this and we’re getting better every day.”

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Pent-up demand to buy and fly remotely controlled aircraft is enormous. Law enforcement agencies, which already own a small number of camera-equipped drones, are projected to purchase thousands more; police departments covet them as an inexpensive tool to provide bird’s-eye surveillance for up to 24 hours straight.

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Inside ground-control stations, drone pilots sit with binders of checklists that guide them through every conceivable scenario. But costly errors are still easy to make. One recurring mistake: forgetting to turn on the Stability Augmentation System, which prevents the drone from going wobbly or into a spin. In at least five cases, pilots did not switch it on, or accidentally switched it off, then sat perplexed as the aircraft went into a nose dive.

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Some U.S. officials and analysts contend that the widespread proliferation of armed drones is inevitable, and that any efforts to influence their use will fail. This assertion disregards the diplomatic, domestic, political, and, for some, technological restraints that have limited the spread of other military capabilities, and the logistical, normative, and legal principles that affect whether and how they are used.

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The total death toll from drone strikes in Pakistan is estimated at between two thousand and four thousand. Even if one accepts a civilian death toll of nine hundred and fifty-seven—the highest nongovernmental estimate—drones have probably spared more civilians than American jets have in past air wars. And if the numbers Feinstein cited are accurate, drones killed more than twenty fighters for every civilian—a huge leap in precision.

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In 2008, the last year of the Bush Administration, at least one child was reported killed in a third of all C.I.A. drone strikes in Pakistan, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism—a shocking percentage, if it is accurate. In Obama’s first year in office, the figure was twenty per cent—still very high. By 2012, it was five per cent.

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Musharraf allowed the C.I.A. to operate drones out of a Pakistani base in Baluchistan. He told me that he often urged Bush Administration officials, “Give the drones to Pakistan.” That was not possible, he was told, “because of high-technology transfer restrictions.”

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After mid-2008, the drone program changed quickly into a more conventional, if unacknowledged, air war. In the three months between August and October, drones struck North and South Waziristan at least twenty times—more strikes than in the previous four years.

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