Or should I say “challenge”?
Lee Fang hits on the most important parts of this presentation the drone lobby made last year, most notably the way they admitted they needed global conflict as a selling point for their drones.
Drone lobbyists claimed access to airspace and “Global Conflict – particularly U.S. and allied nation involvement in future conflicts” will “either positively or negatively” influence “market growth” for the industry.
But given that the US will be rolling out six test sites for drones in US airspace in the next year, I’m pretty troubled by the problems the drone lobby admits they see ahead.
Notably, cybersecurity (see page 12).
Obviously, if the Iranians can bring down one of our more sophisticated drones, we’ve got a cybersecurity problem. Though of course, this presentation was given–on June 2, 2011–six months before Iran took down our Sentinel. And four months before Wired reported that keylogger software had infected the computers at Creech Air Force Base.
So it seems that the drone lobby was aware it had this little, uh, challenge on this front. And yet DOD seemed totally unprepared anyway.