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.”
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.
