March 07, 2017
Drone Proliferation and the Use of Force
An Experimental Approach
As more countries acquire drones, will their widespread availability lead to greater military adventurism and conflict? Will countries be more willing to put a drone in harm’s way? If so, how will other nations respond? Would they be more willing to shoot down a drone than a human-inhabited aircraft? And if they did, are those incidents likely to escalate?
To help answer these questions, in 2016 the Center for a New American Security conducted a survey experiment to better understand how experts and the general public viewed the use of force with drones. The survey evaluated expert and public attitudes about the willingness to use force in three scenarios: (1) deploying an aircraft into a contested area; (2) shooting down another country’s aircraft in a contested area; and (3) escalating in response to one’s own aircraft being shot down. For each scenario, half of the survey respondents read questions where a drone was used and half of the survey respondents read questions where a human-inhabited aircraft was used.
This experimental design was intended to better understand how the introduction of drones into militaries’ arsenals might change expert and public attitudes about the use of force relative to human-inhabited aircraft. Given the continuing integration of robotics into national militaries, as well as the proliferation of drones, this is a critical question for global politics. Moreover, while several studies approach the topic by looking at public opinion in the United States, we know less about how communities of foreign policy experts view drones.
Download the full report on drones.cnas.org.
Authors
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Michael Horowitz
Former Adjunct Senior Fellow, Technology and National Security Program
Michael C. Hororwitz is a former Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Technology and National Security Program at CNAS. He is currently the Director of Emerging Capabilities Policy Of...
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Paul Scharre
Executive Vice President and Director of Studies
Paul Scharre is the executive vice president and director of studies at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). He is the award-winning author of Four Battlegrounds: Po...
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Ben FitzGerald
Former Adjunct Senior Fellow, Defense Program
Ben FitzGerald is a partner at Lupa, a private investment firm, and a former adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). At Lupa he leads the firm’...
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