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The Diffusion of Drone Warfare: Industrial, Infrastructural and Organizational Constraints

SSRN Electronic Journal
2015
  • 7
    Citations
  • 8,837
    Usage
  • 18
    Captures
  • 14
    Mentions
  • 33
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    7
    • Citation Indexes
      5
    • Policy Citations
      2
      • Policy Citation
        2
  • Usage
    8,837
    • Abstract Views
      7,730
    • Downloads
      1,107
  • Captures
    18
  • Mentions
    14
    • News Mentions
      13
      • News
        13
    • Blog Mentions
      1
      • Blog
        1
  • Social Media
    33
    • Shares, Likes & Comments
      33
      • Facebook
        33
  • Ratings
    • Download Rank
      40,541

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Article Description

Many scholars and policy-makers are concerned that the emergence of drone warfare – a first step towards the robotics age – will promote instability and conflict at the international level. This view is consistent with the widely shared assumption among International Relations scholars that military hardware spreads easily, especially in the age of globalization and real-time communications. In this article, we question this consensus. Drawing from the literature in management, we advance a new theory of diffusion of military innovations and test its two underlying causal mechanisms. First, we argue that designing, developing and manufacturing advanced weapon systems require laboratories, testing and production facilities, as well as know-how and experience that cannot be easily borrowed from other fields. Second, we argue that the adoption of military innovations require both organizational and infrastructural support. We test our two claims on three types of combat-effective drones: loitering attack munitions (LAMs), intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance drones (ISR) and unmanned combat autonomous vehicles (UCAVs). We find that even wealthy, advanced and militarily capable countries such as the US, the UK, Germany and France have struggled to produce or adopt such platforms. We conclude that concerns about the diffusion of drone warfare appear significantly exaggerated as do claims that globalization redistributes military power at the global level. More generally, our analysis sheds light on how the interaction between platform and adoption challenges affects the rate and speed of diffusion of different military innovations.

Bibliographic Details

Andrea Gilli; Mauro Gilli

Elsevier BV

Drones; UAVs; Warfare; Military Technology; Diffusion; Proliferation

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