Debate around terminology surrounding ‘drones’ remains active with little agreement on terms and definitions. The commonly used terms to characterize larger military drones like unmanned, uncrewed, or uninhabited aerial vehicles, or the term drone itself is inaccurate, too general, or even misleading.
I propose a new term, or a correction if you will, which essentially adapts another commonly used term, remotely piloted aircraft system (RPAS), to a new form—remotely commanded aircraft system (RCAS), which acknowledges the rapid technological advance in machine autonomy and the ethical demand to retain human oversight over autonomous machines. Let me explain why this term fits the bill more accurately than the existing litany of unsatisfactory or misleading terms.
Today’s demand for greater gender neutrality has rendered the frequently used term unmanned aerial vehicle unsatisfactory. Alternative terms like uninhabited and uncrewed aerial vehicles have been widely adopted but do not fare any better to accurately characterize the nature of the vehicles in question. For starters, according to the Oxford dictionary, the word inhabit refers to someone living in or occupying something. Humans do not inhabit aircraft! They merely borrow them.
Moreover, as Zachary accurately breaks down, the term uncrewed aerial vehicle is also a misleading one. Uncrewed aircraft have an actual crew, albeit not physically onboard the vehicle. Most of today’s drones are in fact remotely piloted. Therefore, the term that most accurately characterizes today’s drones, such as the American MQ-9 Reaper, the Turkish Bayraktar or Chinese Wing Loong is ‘remotely piloted aircraft system’ (RPAS).
The RPAS underscores the centrality of the human operator, which remotely controls the aircraft. The RPAS crew uses either line-of-sight or satellite link to manipulate an RPAS’s flight path, sensor payloads, and deploy its weapons.
In practice, however, much of RPAS’s operation today is automated. Automation reduces the need for human intervention in the most mundane tasks like flying and navigating—maintaining attitude, altitude and speed—over long distances and extended durations of time, allowing the crew to focus on mission tasking instead. This semi-autonomous human-in-the-loop (HITL) mode still requires human intervention and manipulation of sensor payloads and employment of weapons.
However, as explained in the beginning, the term RPAS is also rapidly becoming obsolete. Today’s RPASs already take off and land autonomously, increasing operational safety, especially in adverse weather conditions or when operating under degraded connectivity.
Nowadays, RPASs have vastly expanded autonomy, which allows them to execute a preplanned mission, including, for example, autonomous take off, navigation, and execution of simple tasks such as surveillance of a predetermined area and recovering back to base with little human intervention.
This supervised human-on-the-loop (HOTL) autonomy maintains human command over the vehicle, while loosening strings of direct human control (i.e., piloting). In other words, humans continue to maintain command on important mission decisions such as legitimizing a target or approving employment of a weapon against the target.
Figure 1.
Source: Author.
Therefore, adopting the term remotely commanded aircraft system (RCAS) helps us to elegantly capture the technological shift from remotely piloted (HITL) to remotely commanded (HOTL) machines. See Figure 1 for reference.
It acknowledges the fact that the aerial vehicle’s control, most efficient employment of sensor payloads, and launching of weapons is left almost entirely to machine autonomy. Instead, humans are left to make critical decisions about the use of force (i.e., target verification, considerations of legitimate use of force, and the final weapon’s employment decision) and re-tasking of the machine if necessary. Therefore, the new term is also sensitive to important ethical considerations underscoring the continued human command over increasingly autonomous machines.
The term is also flexible enough to accommodate the future RCASs like the USAF’s future Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) or “loyal wingman” vehicles. Despite their highly autonomous nature, CCAs are still required to maintain effective, secure communication with their crewed counterparts. Human commands in this case could include tasking and re-tasking of CCAs, decisions of use of force, or changes in the combat ‘play book’ to mention but a few.
In addition, the term can be easily applied to highly automated or autonomous vehicles in other domains as well, including land, sea or space. The term remotely commanded system or remotely commanded vehicle can therefore be adopted as an umbrella term for such machines.
Critically, the substantial reduction in the need to directly control today’s aerial vehicles has turned humans from remote pilots to remote commanders.
