drones’. Based on the model designed by the British actor Reginald Denny, with the company Radioplane, the US Army introduced the OQ-2 Radioplane, while the US Navy had its own contract and designated the drone ‘Target Drone Denny 1’ (TDD-1). Notwithstanding the technology’s limitations, in the 1940s radio-controlled models were also used to bomb German targets, although their military applications would not come into their own until the outbreak of the Cold War.

In point of fact, as of 1964 the USA began to use drones to monitor sensitive areas, such as Cuba, North Korea, and the People’s Republic of China, and during the Vietnam War it frequently resorted to Lightening Bugs, which were widely used to take aerial photographs of the armed conflict. The experts call this and other models at the time ‘pre-drones’, which could be equipped with cameras and whose flightpath could even been modified. Even so, they associate contemporary drone history with the appearance of the Predator model in the 1990s, a remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) that was the first to use the global positioning system (GPS), which made it more reliable than its predecessors. Based on this model, other more advanced prototypes were designed with many improvements: longer ranges, faster speeds, and higher ceilings.

Drones were first fitted with missiles at the end of the 1990s, and in February 2002 the CIA used a Predator armed with Hellfire missiles to eliminate someone who had been identified as Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. A man died in the attack, but it was not the leader of al-Qaida. The USA continued to deploy surveillance and combat drones in the region in the context of the War on Terror, whose use was justified by the argument that they were a necessity that could save American lives, a justification that still holds today. More recently, the Predator and Reaper models armed with laser-guided missiles and bombs have also been used against targets in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Yemen. All this has led to the widespread deployment of this new remote-controlled weapon of war, capable of targeted killing with no risk to the person pulling the trigger.

Different experts in international law have argued that they increase the accuracy of attacks, thus helping to reduce collateral damage. For their part, Gustavo H. Krasñansky and María Elena Rossi (2014: 18) conclude that the particular nature of drones ‘is not intrinsically abhorrent per se to international humanitarian law,’ for

it is more of a transport than a weapons system or a combination of both, at the very least just as permissible as any other type used in a theatre of operations, with control, surveillance, and precision capabilities resulting from cutting-edge high technology (idem.).

These authors put the spotlight on the people who operate the system, identify the target, and fire the missiles, for ‘they are no different from the pilots of manned aircraft with regard to their duty to respect international humanitarian law’ (idem.).

On the contrary, there are many authors who insist on the dangers posed by these devices when waging war with them. Javier Valenzuela (2012) revealed in El País that military drones, which cost about 13 million dollars each, have become the new remote-controlled weapons of war. He calls them ‘metal birds of death’ and notes that the Pentagon has some 19,000 for espionage or combat purposes, while the CIA has its own fleet. The military use of drones continues to prevail in the coverage that the media give this technology. As a matter of fact, at least half of the first 10 news stories on drones offered by Google News focus on their military applications and accident rates.