Following a November 2022 Pentagon report on China’s military build-up that used the term “uncrewed aerial systems,” the “uncrewed” adjective has become an increasingly fashionable alternative to the previously dominant “unmanned” descriptor. The term has been used in DoD, NATO, and congressional defense publications, by defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, and among popular defense intellectual authors—one well-respected analyst declaring, “Its official—now its ‘uncrewed,’ not ‘unmanned’ vehicles.” The concern appears to be that the déclassé “unmanned” terminology is problematic in today’s gender-integrated force. Representation matters, and unmanned vehicles excludes.
Although searching for more gender-neutral and precise alternatives to “unmanned” is not a bad thing—and “unmanned” definitely has its own flaws—replacing it with “uncrewed” does more harm than good. The problem is “uncrewed” vehicles have crews, and sometimes quite extensive ones. Failing to recognize the crewed nature of drones risks distorting the way we conceptualize them—and consequently risks inhibiting the way we plan for their employment and integration into military operations—while being needlessly confusing. Conversely, thinking about how the composition of drone crews changes over time is quite critical to understanding their long-term security implications.
In Ukraine, a first-person view (FPV) drone team typically consists of three to four people: not just a pilot, but intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance specialists, maintainers, and observers. These teams also maintain significant electronic warfare capability, both to ensure friendly drones keep flying and to provide countermeasures against Russian drones. In this respect, despite FPV drones like quadcopters often being thought of differently than much larger and more expensive, fixed-wing drones, they are not dissimilar. The US Air Force states that for the MQ-9A Reaper, “the basic crew consists of a rated pilot to control the aircraft and command the mission, and an enlisted aircrew member to operate sensors and guide weapons.” Likewise, in the United Kingdom, the Reaper requires “a crew comprising a pilot, sensor operator and mission intelligence co-ordinator.” Teams of intelligence analysts may also provide support, analyzing the reams of data the drones collect. So, if the Air Force adopted the new, in vogue terminology, it would find itself describing “the basic crew” of the “uncrewed” MQ-9A Reaper”—which makes little sense.
By its strict dictionary definition, a crew is “a group of people who work together, especially all those who work on and operate a ship, aircraft, etc.” Although clearly “crew” is used to refer to individuals working on the platform, the military frequently uses the term to refer to teams off a platform. Both the Army and Marines refer to “mortar crews,” despite operators not being on a platform. The Air Force also refers to drone pilot teams as “air crews,” and also uses the term “ground crews” for the folks who provide critical support tasks like maintenance, refueling, and making sure traditional manned aircraft don’t crash into one another. In fairness to proponents of “uncrewed,” in a naval context “crew” more typically refers to shipboard personnel—although, as we will see below, the continued emergence of surface and subsurface drones may challenge this usage.
Definitional debates might seem overly pedantic (fair), but they carry serious real-world implications. Discussing and debating the composition of drone support crews is absolutely essential to understanding the implications of drones for warfare. Here are five reasons why:
First, a significant argument for drones being impactful is their relatively low cost compared to manned systems. However, crew costs can significantly change the equation. An FPV drone might only cost $500, but increasingly, both sides of the Ukraine-Russia conflict are targeting the drones’ crews. A drone does not have a family or children, and so destroying it inflicts less cost than killing the human crew supporting the platform. Crew costs can be a significant financial expense too: a 2012 Time report found a typical Air Force MQ-9A Reaper combat air patrol had at least 171 personnel supporting it, to include numerous personnel for mission control, launch, recovery, and maintenance, and exploitation. Along with various hardware costs, the result is the annual operating costs for a Reaper unit are “about four times” higher than those of an F-16 or an A-10.
Second, another significant argument for the impact of drones on warfare is that reducing personnel costs means they may favor states with fewer military personnel, because they can use masses of drones to offset fewer people. However, if drones still require significant personnel to provide support functions, that weakens the advantage. Small militaries would still need to recruit, train, equip, organize, and support all the personnel supporting drone operations.
Third, greater integration of artificial intelligence and autonomy may shift the composition of those crews. Drones that are less dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum for command and control will need less support from electronic warfare personnel, while drones using inertial navigation may need less support from human navigators and have less dependence on GPS. Exactly how to balance needed skills in drone units will almost certainly be an ongoing, adaptive process changing as friendly and adversary doctrine, concepts, and technology evolve.
Fourth, as drones increasingly operate in domains other than the air, managing drone crews is likely to be a significant and critical challenge. If a large unmanned surface vehicle needs repairs, refueling, or magazine resupply while in the middle of the ocean, who will do it? A human support crew will be needed for a long time, perhaps until the field of humanoid robotics matures. How those crews are integrated carries significant implications for concepts of operations surrounding their use. For example, as ground drones increasingly enter the battlefield, they could be integrated into manned-unmanned teams with manned vehicles providing support. How human operators interact with and support the drones is a critical, and relevant, question, with major battlefield implications. During World War II, both France and Germany used tanks, but France used them as reconnaissance and infantry support, while Germany used them to puncture French defensive lines. A potential major advantage of ground drones is for activities like breaching defensive lines with limited risk to humans in support. However, how manned crews manage, maintain, and organize the unmanned swarm will no doubt be critical to success or failure.
Finally, all of these issues carry significant downstream implications for training pipelines, force composition, force protection, unit composition, doctrine, and concepts. The size, composition, and targetability of the drone crew will affect where and when they are deployed, as well as the type of skills and training they need. Those decisions carry operational and strategic implications: If the drone crews are all holed up in a base, why not focus on targeting the base with long-range strikes rather than fighting the drones? And if adversary personnel are less concentrated on the front lines of battle, shouldn’t weapons acquisition and related tactics, concepts, and strategies focus on longer-range strike options to target where the people are?
To be clear, none of this is to imply current terms should stay the same, or that a gender-neutral alternative is necessarily a bad thing. “Unmanned” systems may not have people on the platform, but they still have all sorts of offboard supporting personnel, so they’re not really “unmanned” either. The mild advantage for “unmanned” systems is the confusion is already a sunk cost and the wording does not conflict with established terms like “ground crew,” “mortar crew,” or the ground-based “air crew” of Air Force drones. The Air Force might prefer “remotely piloted vehicle,” but that breaks down too as drones become more autonomous, with less (or even no) remote piloting needed. It may also not work well as a joint term: Will there be Army infantrymen “piloting” drone tanks?
Personally, all this is why I tend to favor “drones,” as it’s not terribly confusing (even if it is imprecise), it’s commonly understood, and it also happens to be gender-neutral. Another alternative is “uninhabited” vehicles, occasionally used by military, NASA, and think tank publications. Although far less commonly used compared to “unmanned” vehicles, “uncrewed” vehicles, or drones, the term has the advantage of drawing attention to the salient aspect of these platforms: No one is onboard. Plus, folks get to keep the (frankly awkward) acronym UxS / UxV.
While the desire for gender-neutral terminology could help inclusivity, supporting a more integrated and effective force, it should not come at the expense of clarity in understanding the operating environment. Unfortunately, the small but growing use of “uncrewed” systems does exactly that. We should change course.
Zachary Kallenborn is an MPhil / PhD student in War Studies at King’s College London researching risk and uncertainty with topical focuses on global catastrophes, drone warfare, critical infrastructure, WMD, and apocalyptic terrorism. He is affiliated with Oxford University, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, George Mason University, and the National Institute for Deterrence Studies. His extensive research, writing, and analysis occasionally receives global news coverage, and influences a broad range of state, federal, and global security policies and strategies. Zachary appeared in Netflix’s “UNKNOWN: Killer Robots,” is an officially proclaimed US Army “Mad Scientist,” and is on the board of advisors of Synthetic Decision Group, Inc. and the Michael J. Morell Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at the University of Akron.
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.
Image credit: David Hylton, Army Program Executive Office for Aviation