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.
Introduction
