What the Air Force and Navy actually fly in 2026 — and the rules that govern them.
On the opening night of the war in Afghanistan, a Predator drone sat overhead watching a convoy that American intelligence believed was carrying Mullah Mohammed Omar. The aircraft was armed. The pilot had the shot.
A lawyer at CENTCOM said no.
There was a structure near the target that might have been a mosque, and nobody could resolve the question fast enough. The debate ran nearly three hours. By the time the answer came back, the convoy was gone.
I spent twenty-two years as an Air Force JAG, and that story has always stuck with me — because it’s the whole subject in miniature. People argue about drones as if the machine is the interesting part. It isn’t. The interesting part is that a remotely piloted aircraft flying at 15,000 feet over Kandahar is subject to precisely the same law as an F-16 in a valley, and somebody has to make that call in real time. Here’s a plain-English guide to the US military drones the Air Force and Navy actually fly right now, how these aircraft went from cameras to shooters, and how the rules really work.
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How US Military Drones Went From Watching to Shooting
Armed US military drones are younger than most people assume. For the first six years of its life, the Predator was a camera with wings and nothing else.
It first flew on July 3, 1994. Its first operational deployment came in the summer of 1995 — not to Bosnia, as the story usually goes, but to Gjadër Airfield in Albania, under an operation called Nomad Vigil, flying reconnaissance over the former Yugoslavia. The move to Taszár, Hungary came the following March. Both places show up in the histories, and the order gets scrambled constantly.
The real hinge was Kosovo. In April 1999, in the middle of Operation Allied Force, the Air Force told its Big Safari rapid-development shop to put a laser designator on the Predator — and gave them three weeks. First test flight came May 4. By June 2, a Predator was lasing targets for manned strike aircraft over Serbia.
That’s the moment the aircraft stopped merely watching and joined the kill chain. Arming it wasn’t a leap after that. It was the obvious next step.
The three weeks a treaty nearly killed the armed drone
General John Jumper pushed the arming through across three different jobs — as commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, then Air Combat Command, then as Chief of Staff. He announced the intent on May 1, 2000. The Hellfire was selected that June.
Then, on August 30, 2000, the entire program stopped cold. Not for engineering reasons — for legal ones. Lawyers raised the question of whether a Hellfire-armed Predator counted as a prohibited ground-launched cruise missile under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Work froze for three weeks until Congress signed off, and treaty lawyers didn’t formally clear the aircraft until January 2, 2001.
Six weeks after that, the first Hellfire came off a Predator in flight over the Nellis ranges in February 2001. One account has the first round landing about six inches right of dead center.
Did You Know? When the Predator was given the ability to shoot, its designation changed from RQ-1 to MQ-1 in February 2002. In the Pentagon’s designation system the “R” stands for reconnaissance and the “M” for multi-role. One letter, and the aircraft’s entire legal and doctrinal identity changed with it.
The MQ-9 Reaper made the shift permanent. When the Air Force named it in September 2006, the Chief of Staff was blunt about what it was for: the service had moved from using drones primarily for intelligence and surveillance “to a true hunter-killer role with the Reaper.”
If you want one number that captures the change — the Predator’s engine made 119 horsepower. The Reaper’s makes 900.
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What Drones Does the Air Force Use in 2026?
MQ-9 Reaper — and an inventory problem nobody expected
The Reaper is still the workhorse, but the story around it flipped completely this year. For most of the last decade the Air Force was trying to get rid of Reapers, arguing they couldn’t survive against a serious air defense system. Then Operation Epic Fury happened.
Combat losses against Iran ran somewhere between roughly two dozen and thirty aircraft, depending on whose accounting you use — around a billion dollars’ worth. In congressional testimony on May 13, 2026, the Air Force put the surviving fleet at 135 aircraft against a stated requirement of 189.
So the service is now trying to buy Reapers back. That turns out to be hard. The MQ-9A is out of production, General Atomics has fewer than ten available to any customer on earth, and there are no Reapers sitting in the boneyard to pull from. More than fifty retired Predators have already been cannibalized for Reaper spare parts.
In April 2026 the Air Force put out a request for information for what it’s calling an Attritable ISR Aircraft — the successor. Read that word again. The replacement for the Reaper is being designed from the start on the assumption that it will be shot down. Over fifty companies responded.
RQ-4 Global Hawk — mostly gone, but not entirely
This one gets reported wrong constantly. The Block 20s were divested in 2021 and the twenty Block 30s finished retiring in July 2022, when the last one left Beale Air Force Base after eighteen years. But the Block 40 fleet — nine aircraft with a radar built to track moving ground targets and cruise missiles — is still flying out of Grand Forks, North Dakota. Congress pushed its retirement out to at least 2030.
The retired airframes got a genuinely strange second career. Northrop converted them into “Range Hawks” that now support hypersonic missile testing.
RQ-170 Sentinel — the one that broke cover
The stealthy flying wing operated out of Tonopah Test Range in Nevada is normally invisible in public discussion. Then in January 2026 Lockheed Martin’s CEO confirmed on an earnings call that RQ-170s flew reconnaissance for Operation Absolute Resolve — the raid that captured Nicolás Maduro. Analysts noted it was roughly the first public acknowledgment of the aircraft in five years.
You’ll also see the RQ-180 discussed as a large classified flying wing. Be careful with it. There’s no Air Force fact sheet, no budget line, no official acknowledgment — just persistent reporting and some photographs. Widely believed, never confirmed.
Collaborative Combat Aircraft — the drone that flies with fighters
This is the big one, and it moved faster in 2026 than almost anyone predicted.
Collaborative Combat Aircraft — CCA — are uncrewed fighters designed to fly alongside F-35s and F-22s. General Atomics’ entry flew first in August 2025; Anduril’s followed that October. The General Atomics aircraft crashed on a test flight in April 2026 after what the company attributed to an autopilot fault.
Ten weeks later, on June 17, 2026, the Air Force did something unusual: it put both aircraft into production, about four months ahead of schedule. Not a downselect — a split buy. Both dropped their prototype “Y” prefix in the process:
- FQ-42A “Dark Merlin” — General Atomics
- FQ-44A “Fury” — Anduril
Then on July 10, 2026, a YFQ-44A fired an AIM-120 AMRAAM over the Mojave Desert — the first live air-to-air missile ever launched by a Collaborative Combat Aircraft.
Sit with that for a second alongside the rest of this section. Thirty-one years from an unarmed camera over the Adriatic to an uncrewed aircraft shooting an air-to-air missile on its own. That’s the entire arc of this story in one lifetime.
The Air Force wants at least 150 of these by the end of the decade, at a target under roughly $30 million each — about a third of an F-35A — with an eventual ambition closer to a thousand. Required combat radius is at least 700 nautical miles.
Did You Know? The Air Force has quietly stopped calling these aircraft “attritable” and started saying “optionally attritable.” As one program colonel put it, a CCA “will have a very long service life if they need to, or they could be attritable.” Which is a wonderfully bureaucratic way of saying: we haven’t decided yet whether these are disposable.
The small stuff
In April 2026 U.S. Air Forces Central signed a deal worth up to $270 million for the K1000ULE — a solar-powered surveillance drone with a 16-foot wingspan that weighs under 40 pounds. Its AI mimics the way birds soar, shutting off propulsion up to 80% of the time; it set a 75-hour unrefueled endurance record in 2023. Its software takes continuous updates from Ukrainian drone operations against Russia.
A two-person crew launches it. That’s the other end of the spectrum from a $30 million fighter drone, and both are now “what the Air Force flies.”
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The $500 Drone That Beat the $30 Million One
Everything above this line is expensive. The Reaper ran about $50 million a copy fully equipped. The new fighter drones are targeting under $30 million each and the Air Force calls that a bargain. The Stingray is running roughly $257 million per aircraft at this stage of production.
Now hold that against a different number. A first-person-view attack drone in Ukraine costs somewhere between $300 and $500. It is a quadcopter with a camera, a radio link and a warhead strapped to the front, flown by a kid with goggles from a treeline two miles away. And it kills tanks.
The math that broke everybody
Ukraine built about 3,000 to 5,000 FPV drones in 2022. By 2025 it was producing roughly three million a year, and by early 2026 its industry had the capacity for more than eight million annually. Over 500 companies make them. Around 90% of that production is private sector, which is why a design flaw discovered on Monday can be fixed by Thursday — something no traditional defense program on earth can do.
The single cleanest illustration came in June 2025. Ukraine ran 117 FPV drones — roughly $117,000 worth of hardware, less than the price of a nice pickup truck and a half — against Russian airbases, and damaged or destroyed more than forty aircraft valued at over $7 billion.
That is a return of about sixty thousand to one. There is no procurement system in the world designed to compete with that, and every air force on the planet spent the following year staring at the ceiling about it.
The defensive side is worse
The problem runs the other direction too. A Shahed-type one-way attack drone costs somewhere in the range of $20,000 to $40,000. A Patriot interceptor to shoot it down costs over $3 million.
You can win every single engagement and still lose, because the other side can build a hundred drones for the price of one of your missiles. That is not a tactical problem. It is an arithmetic problem, and arithmetic does not negotiate.
Ukraine answered it the obvious way — with more cheap drones. Interceptor drones running about $2,500 each, produced at up to a thousand a day, accounted for roughly 70% of Shahed intercepts in the Kyiv region by February 2026. A two-person crew reportedly took down 23 Russian drones in a single night.
Did You Know? Ukraine measures its heavy bomber drones in dollars per sortie. The Skyfall Vampire hexacopter costs about $8,500 and averages around 69 missions before it is lost — roughly $123 per sortie. For comparison, an MQ-9 Reaper flight hour has historically been budgeted in the thousands.
What the US is actually buying now
The Pentagon noticed. What it does about it is the interesting part, because buying cheap things badly is its own kind of expensive.
The current effort is a program called Drone Dominance, and it is structured nothing like a normal acquisition. Phase I ran as a competition at Fort Benning from mid-February to early March 2026 — 25 companies, scored on a leaderboard. A fiber-optic drone called the Shrike, built by a company named Skycutter, topped it with 99.3 points. Eleven companies walked away with prototype delivery orders worth about $150 million.
The target is 300,000 munitions by 2028, and the price ceiling is designed to fall as volume climbs:
- Phase I — 30,000 units at $5,000 or less each
- Phase II — 60,000 units
- Phase III — 100,000 units
- Phase IV — 150,000 units at roughly $2,300 each
Read that last line again next to the $30 million fighter drone. Both are on the books at the same time, in the same Air Force.
Switchblade, and the price problem
The American workhorse in this category is the Switchblade — a loitering munition that ships in a tube, launches out of it, circles until the operator picks a target, then flies into it. The 300 is small enough to carry in a backpack. The 600 is the tank-killer.
Here is the uncomfortable part: a Switchblade 300 has cost more than a hundred times what a Ukrainian FPV drone costs. Same basic mission, two orders of magnitude apart on price. Not because American engineers are worse, but because the thing was built to a military specification with a military supply chain and a military test regime, and the Ukrainian one was built to survive contact with a Russian tank on Thursday.
The Air Force is also standing up a second Experimental Operations Unit for one-way attack drones in mid-2026, likely at Nellis, initially under Air Force Special Operations Command alongside the 53rd Wing. These are fixed-wing, not quadcopters, with launch ranges reported between 600 and 1,000 miles.
Where this collides with the law
This is the part that keeps me up, and it is not the part most people worry about.
Everything I said earlier about distinction and proportionality assumes a system that can support the judgment. A Reaper crew has a full-motion video feed, a sensor operator, an intelligence cell, and a lawyer on a radio. That whole apparatus exists because the aircraft is expensive enough to justify it.
A $500 drone does not carry any of that. It carries a camera and a warhead. When you field them by the hundred thousand, the deliberation that used to sit around a strike gets compressed into a nineteen-year-old with goggles making a call in four seconds — and increasingly, into software making a terminal-guidance decision after the radio link is jammed.
Nothing about the law changes. Distinction still applies. Proportionality still applies. Somebody is still accountable. What changes is how much machinery is standing between the decision and the explosion, and cheap mass is the thing that strips that machinery away. That is the real legal story of this decade, and it will not be settled by the people building the drones.
Can Drones Launch From an Aircraft Carrier?
Yes — and the Navy proved it more than a decade ago, though it’s only now becoming routine.
The important thing to understand is that carrier operations are a completely different problem from land-based drone flying. A Reaper needs a runway. A carrier gives you about 300 feet, a steam catapult, four arresting wires and a deck that’s moving in three dimensions. That’s why you will never see an MQ-9 or a Global Hawk operate off a carrier — no tailhook, no catapult provisions, and nowhere near enough deck.
The X-47B: three firsts nobody has repeated
Northrop Grumman’s X-47B was a demonstrator — a tailless flying wing with no cockpit, built to answer one question: can an uncrewed aircraft operate off a carrier deck? It answered it emphatically.
- May 14, 2013 — first catapult launch of an uncrewed aircraft from a carrier, off USS George H.W. Bush.
- July 10, 2013 — first arrested landing aboard a carrier by an uncrewed aircraft, and the first tailless flying wing ever to land on one.
- April 22, 2015 — first fully autonomous aerial refueling, taking on over 4,000 pounds of fuel from a K-707 tanker.
Two airframes did all of that. Then the program ended — it was a demonstrator, and the Navy chose to put its money toward an operational aircraft instead.
Did You Know? On a carrier deck, the drone doesn’t taxi itself and it isn’t flown from a control station. A deck operator walks alongside it wearing an arm-mounted controller — essentially a forearm remote — and takes taxi directions from the same yellow-shirted aircraft directors who marshal every other airplane on the boat. The signals are unchanged. The thing following them just doesn’t have a pilot in it.
MQ-25A Stingray: the first operational carrier drone
The Stingray is the aircraft the X-47B made possible, and it’s a tanker — which sounds anticlimactic until you understand the problem it solves. Carrier air wings have been burning up their own strike fighters as tankers for years, putting hours on F/A-18 airframes just to pass gas. The MQ-25 takes that mission and hands the Hornets back to the air wing.
Where it stands now:
- The T-1 testbed refueled an F/A-18 in June 2021 — the first air-to-air refueling in history performed by an uncrewed aircraft.
- The first operational aircraft flew on April 25, 2026, a two-hour pre-programmed flight from Boeing’s facility at MidAmerica Airport in Illinois.
- It was certified for low-rate initial production in May 2026.
- Initial operational capability has slipped to 2029 — three years later than planned, blamed on a mix of carrier availability and manufacturing delays.
- Program of record is 76 aircraft. The FY27 request asked for three at $771 million, which works out to roughly $257 million apiece at this stage of production.
- USS Theodore Roosevelt became the first fully MQ-25-capable carrier in March 2026.
Control comes from a compartment called the Unmanned Aviation Warfare Center — the first test installation went aboard USS George H.W. Bush in August 2024. It looks a lot like an Air Force ground control station, except it’s inside a ship.
The Navy’s other flying drones
- MQ-4C Triton — a Global Hawk derivative built for maritime patrol, flying broad-area ocean surveillance the P-8 fleet can’t cover on its own.
- MQ-8 Fire Scout — an uncrewed helicopter for small ships. The MQ-8B retired in 2022, and the larger MQ-8C was pushed toward retirement only about two years after reaching operational service. A short, unhappy career.
- ScanEagle and similar small catapult-launched aircraft, which have quietly done more day-to-day shipboard surveillance work than anything else on this list.
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The Drones You’ll Never See: The Navy Underwater
Here’s the part almost nobody writes about. While everyone argues about what’s overhead, the Navy has been quietly building a fleet of uncrewed submarines.
The headline program is the Orca XLUUV — an extra-large uncrewed undersea vehicle built by Boeing. It isn’t a torpedo-sized gadget. It’s a genuine submarine with no people in it, designed to leave a pier under its own power, transit thousands of miles, do a job, and come home. The first test vehicle was delivered in December 2023; the second was christened in March 2026. The FY26 plan allocated roughly $1.13 billion toward sixteen more, aimed squarely at the Pacific. Mine-laying is a core mission — a vehicle that can seed a minefield in contested water without risking a crew is a very different proposition than one that can’t.
Not everything has gone well. The Snakehead large-displacement UUV was cancelled in 2023 after about a decade of development, and Congress ratified the termination. Undersea autonomy is genuinely hard — you can’t use GPS underwater, you can’t reliably communicate in real time, and a vehicle that gets confused doesn’t glide to a stop, it sinks.
Did You Know? The Navy’s mine-hunting force still includes bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions. The Marine Mammal Program has been running since the 1960s, and the Navy has been trying to replace the animals with underwater drones for years — but for finding a buried mine in cluttered, murky water, dolphin biosonar still outperforms the machines. The drones are catching up. They haven’t caught up yet.
One more, because it’s the best illustration of how seriously other countries take these things: in December 2016, a Chinese naval vessel physically seized a U.S. Navy ocean glider out of the South China Sea while an American survey ship was recovering it. It was an unclassified oceanographic drone measuring water conditions. China returned it a few days later. Nobody fired anything — but a foreign navy reached into the water and took an American vehicle, and the incident set off a diplomatic scramble precisely because nobody was sure what the rules were.
The Law: How the Rules of War Apply to US Military Drones
This is the part I get asked about most, and it’s the part that’s most often gotten wrong in both directions — by people who think drones are lawless, and by people who think the technology makes the law simpler. Neither is right.
Standard disclaimer: I’m a retired JAG, not your lawyer, and this is background rather than legal advice.
There is no separate “drone law”
This surprises people. Armed drones are not prohibited by any treaty, and there is no distinct body of law that applies to them. The International Committee of the Red Cross puts it plainly: armed drones aren’t expressly prohibited under treaty or customary international humanitarian law. A Hellfire fired from an MQ-9 is analyzed exactly the same way as a Hellfire fired from an Apache.
So the same three principles govern every strike, crewed or not:
- Distinction — you may attack combatants and military objectives. Not civilians, not civilian objects. You must be able to tell the difference.
- Proportionality — expected civilian harm cannot be excessive relative to the concrete military advantage anticipated. Note that this is a forward-looking judgment made with the information available at the time, not a scorecard graded afterward.
- Precautions — you must take all feasible measures to avoid or minimize civilian harm. Choice of weapon, timing, angle of attack, whether to wait.
Law of war versus rules of engagement — the distinction that matters
If you take one thing from this section, take this one, because it’s the source of most public confusion.
The law of armed conflict sets the outer boundary of what is lawful. Rules of engagement are policy — the commander’s direction about what you may actually do, and they are almost always more restrictive than the law requires. ROE can be tightened for diplomatic reasons, force-protection reasons, strategic-messaging reasons, or simple prudence.
So when you read that a strike was “cleared” or “denied,” that usually isn’t a finding about legality at all. It’s a decision inside a policy envelope that was drawn tighter than the law. That Mullah Omar convoy on the first night of the war? The problem wasn’t that killing him would have been unlawful. It was that nobody could resolve a collateral-damage question about a nearby structure inside the approval window they had.
A lawful strike can be forbidden by ROE. An ROE-compliant strike can still be unlawful if the underlying facts were wrong. Both things are true at once, and that’s the daily reality of the job.
Who’s responsible?
Distance changes nothing legally. The ICRC’s formulation is that drone operators are no different from pilots of crewed aircraft in terms of their responsibilities. The crew, the commander who approved the strike, and the chain above them carry the same obligations they’d carry sitting in a cockpit. Sitting in a ground control station in Nevada is not a legal shield.
And the crews are rated pilots. Air Force RPA pilots are FAA-certificated and instrument-qualified, which is also the answer to the perennial argument about whether they’ve earned the flight suit. Service policy authorizes it for flight duties, and “flight duties” was explicitly defined to cover remotely piloted operations.
The question CCA is about to force
Everything above assumes a human makes the decision to engage. A remotely piloted aircraft is a delivery system — a very long extension cord with a camera on the end. The law handles it comfortably.
Autonomous weapon systems are a different question, and the ICRC’s position is that existing rules don’t fully answer the humanitarian, legal and ethical problems they raise. The concrete version of the problem: a person attempting to surrender must not be attacked, and surrender is a judgment call made from context, posture, and intent. An autonomous system may not reliably recognize it.
Which brings us back to that AMRAAM over the Mojave in July. The Air Force insists a human stays in the decision loop. I believe them today. But the aircraft now has the physical capability to complete an engagement, and once a capability exists, the pressure to use it in a fight where the extension cord gets jammed is not hypothetical. That’s the live legal question of the next decade, and it won’t be settled by engineers.
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Little-Known US Military Drone History
The first American drone mission killed a Kennedy
On August 12, 1944, Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. — JFK’s older brother, and the son his father expected to become president — took off in a PB4Y Liberator packed with 21,170 pounds of high explosive.
Operation Aphrodite worked like this: two pilots would fly the explosive-laden bomber off the ground, hand radio control to a pair of “mother” aircraft, then bail out over England while the drone flew on to a V-weapon bunker in occupied France. Kennedy radioed the code phrase for transfer of control. Eighteen minutes into the mission, two explosions destroyed the aircraft. He and Lieutenant Wilford Willy were killed. Neither body was recovered.
The cause was never definitively established. Mechanical failure remains the leading theory.
The drone helicopter that kept falling in the ocean
The QH-50 DASH was a small uncrewed helicopter that let destroyers too small for a manned helicopter deliver an anti-submarine torpedo — or a nuclear depth bomb — at range. 755 were built.
Over half of the Navy’s 746 drones were lost at sea. More than 80% of those losses came from single-point electronics failures rather than anything mechanical. The program was cancelled in 1969.
The detail I love: some were fitted with television cameras and used in Vietnam as artillery spotters — a mission nobody designed them for, invented in the field because the aircraft happened to be there.
Vietnam’s forgotten drone war
More than a thousand Ryan Firebee reconnaissance drones flew over 34,000 sorties during the Vietnam War. They were launched from under the wing of a DC-130, flew a programmed route as high as 60,000 feet, then came down by parachute — and were snatched out of the air mid-descent by a helicopter.
Read that again. In the 1960s, the United States was routinely catching falling drones with helicopters. We had a functioning unmanned reconnaissance program thirty years before the Predator, and almost nobody remembers it.
The first drone dogfight
On December 23, 2002, a Predator over southern Iraq was engaged by an Iraqi fighter — widely reported to have been a MiG-25 — and shot down. It was the first time an Iraqi aircraft downed a coalition aircraft in the no-fly zones. Guinness recognizes it as the first aerial battle involving an unmanned aerial vehicle; by most accounts the Predator fired a Stinger that was decoyed away before the MiG killed it.
The Predator lost. But it shot first, and it took twenty-four years from that engagement to a CCA firing an AMRAAM and flying home.
Did You Know? In 2016 the Air Force began training enlisted airmen as Global Hawk pilots — the first enlisted personnel to fly Air Force aircraft since World War II. The first three graduated in May 2017, and the first all-enlisted RQ-4 crew operated in theater in October 2019. One of them summed it up: “Rank doesn’t matter, only ability.”
Where to See These Aircraft in Person
You can stand next to a surprising number of these. If you’re planning a trip around aviation — and we build trips around aviation regularly — these are worth the detour:
- National Museum of the U.S. Air Force (Dayton, OH) — an RQ-4 Global Hawk hangs in the Modern Flight gallery, along with Predator and Vietnam-era Firebee material. Free admission, and the single best drone collection in the country.
- Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum — holds an MQ-1L Predator. Check current display location before you go, since aircraft rotate between the Mall building and Udvar-Hazy.
- Pima Air & Space Museum (Tucson, AZ) — a deep unmanned collection, and it sits next to the boneyard.
- Hill Aerospace Museum (Utah) — has an MQ-1 Predator on display, and admission is free.
- U.S. Naval Undersea Museum (Keyport, WA) — the one almost nobody knows about, and the only place you’ll see the undersea side of this story told properly.
One honest tip: call ahead. Museum drone displays get moved and loaned more than almost anything else in a collection, and the aircraft you drove four hours to see may be in a different building or off the floor entirely.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the difference between RQ and MQ?
In the U.S. military designation system, “Q” means the aircraft is unmanned. The letter in front is the mission: “R” for reconnaissance, “M” for multi-role. So an RQ-4 Global Hawk only watches, while an MQ-9 Reaper can watch and shoot. The Predator changed from RQ-1 to MQ-1 in 2002 precisely because it had been armed.
Can drones land on aircraft carriers?
Yes. The X-47B made the first arrested carrier landing by an unmanned aircraft on July 10, 2013, and the MQ-25A Stingray is the first operational carrier drone, with initial operational capability now targeted for 2029. But only aircraft designed for it — an MQ-9 or a Global Hawk has no tailhook and no catapult provisions, and could never operate off a carrier.
Are Air Force drone pilots real pilots?
Yes. RPA pilots are rated, instrument-qualified and FAA-certificated. Since 2016 some enlisted airmen have also flown the Global Hawk — the first enlisted Air Force pilots since World War II.
Are drone strikes legal?
Armed drones aren’t prohibited by any treaty, and no separate body of law applies to them. A drone strike is judged by the same rules as any other attack: distinction, proportionality and precautions. Legality turns on how the weapon is used, not on whether a person was aboard the aircraft.
Does the Navy have underwater drones?
Yes, and it’s one of the least-covered parts of the story. The Orca XLUUV is a genuinely submarine-sized uncrewed vehicle capable of long-range independent missions including mine-laying, and the Navy operates a range of smaller UUVs for mine countermeasures and survey work. It also still uses trained dolphins and sea lions, which remain better than machines at finding buried mines.
How much does a military drone cost?
It depends enormously on which end of the spectrum you mean, and that gap is the story of modern drone warfare. A fully equipped MQ-9 Reaper ran about $50 million. The Navy is paying roughly $257 million per MQ-25A at this stage of production. New Collaborative Combat Aircraft are targeting under $30 million each. Meanwhile a front-line FPV attack drone in Ukraine costs $300 to $500, and the US Army is now buying loitering munitions with a price ceiling headed toward roughly $2,300 apiece.
What replaced the MQ-1 Predator?
The MQ-9 Reaper, which retired the Predator in March 2018 after 23 years. The Reaper’s own successor is now in the works — an “Attritable ISR Aircraft” that the Air Force is designing on the assumption it will be shot down.
Is the MQ-9 Reaper being retired?
The opposite, at the moment. After heavy combat losses in 2026 the fleet fell to 135 aircraft against a requirement of 189, and the Air Force is now trying to buy Reapers back — a challenge, since the MQ-9A is out of production and none are held in storage.
The Bottom Line
The thing worth holding onto isn’t any single aircraft. It’s the speed.
In 1994 the Predator was an unarmed camera nobody in the fighter community took seriously. In 1999 it started designating targets for other people’s bombs. In 2001 it carried its own missile, after a three-week delay caused by a treaty question. In 2013 an uncrewed aircraft landed on a carrier. In 2026 an uncrewed fighter fired an air-to-air missile and flew home, and the Navy is fielding submarines with nobody in them.
That’s thirty-two years. One career.
And then, while all of that was happening, a $400 quadcopter with a warhead zip-tied to the front turned out to be able to kill a tank — and the entire apparatus that built the Reaper and the Stingray had to sit down and rethink what an air force is even for.
The law has kept up better than people expect — distinction and proportionality don’t care what’s flying the aircraft, and the accountability doesn’t thin out with distance. What the law hasn’t answered yet is what happens when the aircraft decides. That question is arriving faster than the doctrine is, and it’s the one I’d watch.
Keep Reading
- SR-71 Blackbird: The Recon Jet That Outran Missiles — the crewed answer to the same problem the Global Hawk was built to solve.
- F-14 Tomcat: Top Gun, the Phoenix Missile, and the Real History — carrier aviation before anything landed on a deck without a pilot.
- F-22 Raptor: The Stealth Fighter Built to Be a Silent Killer — the aircraft the new CCA drones are designed to fly alongside.
- WWII Nose Art: The Story Behind Lucky 13 — where the cat-on-a-bomb came from.
- A-6 Intruder: The Ugly Jet That Owned the Night — the carrier attack mission the MQ-25 now supports.
Have you seen any of these aircraft in person, or worked with them? I’d genuinely like to hear about it — drop a comment below.
More from the shopBrowse the full WWII aviation & nose art collection — tees, prints, glassware and gifts, all original designs.
Ben & Nicole Mathews
We’re based in St. Augustine, Florida, sharing the places we’ve actually been — from our home turf to corners of the U.S. and abroad. Ben is an attorney and a retired Air Force JAG (22 years), and a private pilot, which is why aviation and military history shows up here too.