It’s never been a good look when American drones plummet, for reasons known or unknown, into remote, tribally held areas across the Middle East, or over the U.S. for that matter: today a giant $176 million Navy surveillance drone crashed in Maryland, bringing the U.S.’s crash count for 2012 up to 10.Only now the U.S. has poised its spy- and kill-drones to start dropping out of the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan in increasing numbers – on purpose.The Pentagon has announced that a sizable fleet of Switchblade drones will soon take to fall from the skies over Afghanistan and Pakistan. Developed by the Pentagon’s No. 1 supplier of micro drones, Simi Valley-based Aeroenvironment Inc., these so-called “kamikaze drones” are small, lightweight and collapsable – take one to-go in your rucksack! – and can be packed with miniature explosives. Shot out of spud-gun-like mortar tubes, the 2-foot-long Switchblades stream live video and GPS coordinates back to field operators who then command the ’lil killer planes to lock onto targets and plummet, blasting apart bad guys.It’s this breed of suicide-drone tech, military officials and industry folk argue, that promises to wholly avoid messy, unintended civilian casualties, not to mention the costs associated with scrambling helicopters or fighter jets. “This is a precision strike weapon that causes as minimal collateral damage as possible,” William I. Nichols, who led the Army’s Switchblade trials, told the Los Angeles Times.Skeptics say pint-sized kamikaze drones really only shave off rungs from the “kill chain.” Naureen Shah, associate director of the Counterterrorism and Human Rights Project at Columbia Law School, told the Times that when the Obama administration weighs drone strikes lawyers, assorted military brass and other analysts are brought to the table to help determine whether or not to proceed with lethal force. But Switchblades, Shah said, delegate “full responsibility to a lower-level soldier on the ground. That delegation is worrisome. It’s a situation that could end up in more mistakes being made.”For now, just how Switchblades cut across the U.S.‘s shadow drone wars remains to be seen. And yet the Pentagon greenlighting the deployment of kamikaze aircraft across regions of the Middle East is a clear indicator that the real girth tacking onto the military’s (and domestic law enforcement’s) drone ranks is coming in the form of small- and middle-sized UAVs, not bigger toys like Reapers, Predators and Global Hawks.Sure, it’s not like we didn’t know this was coming, or anything. Something like a dozen Switchblades divebombed in special-ops trials last year in Afghanistan, where Army officials say the craft proved their mettle. But Aeroenvironment did just rake in a $10.1-million Army contract to supply 50 Switchblades this summer to outfits in Afghanistan, according to the Times. The Army is even considering shelling out another $100 million worth of kamikaze drones should everything fall accordingly to plan.In other news, “political suicide” may have just took on a whole new meaning.Reach this writer at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson
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