Where the Drones Are

3 comments to Where the Drones Are

• JustPlainDave

  August 4, 2012 at 12:57 pm Log in to Reply

  …listing. Just off the top of my head, the CF isn’t there, PAF isn’t there. I wouldn’t be surprised to find others.

  “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs

• Anonymous

  August 4, 2012 at 1:30 pm Log in to Reply

  that the numbers are incomplete — US is acknowledged to be most open about UAV stocks, whereas Russia, China, and Turkey haven’t released drone info.

• JustPlainDave

  August 4, 2012 at 1:50 pm Log in to Reply

  For them, this sounds like “found data” (i.e., data that they are visualizing rather than having actively constructed). To be clear, I’m not slamming Simon (he’s spent some time helping out a good friend of mine and falls into my category of “good data people”). I’m just highlighting that this is not a comprehensive list – IISS for whatever reason has not mentioned some operators.

  The story on these things is reasonably going to end up with a very large percentage of the world’s militaries having some sort of drone capability. The differentiating criteria will be that a few operators will have a strategic capability (i.e., the ability to conduct operations and project power well beyond their shores), but most will have more limited, and potentially much more limited capabilities (e.g., tactical recce of the battle space). We’re already a little longer along in that development trajectory, MHO, than one might think just based on this dataset because it is incomplete.

  “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.” ~ Steve Jobs