KENNETH ANDERSON: Search And Rescue And the Spread of UAVs Through Civilian Uses. “I raise this because there is a meme that still circulates with some velocity in the international law community, journalists, and others, that the US is risking setting off some kind of UAV arms race by its increasing roboticization of conflict — not just UAVs, but ground vehicles, and so on. I don’t think that’s right; the meme fundamentally misunderstands the technology and its application. Rather, UAVs are going to spread across a very wide range of aviation in any case, in which military uses will just be one of them. The same technology, cost, safety, efficiency, and so on, drivers that push for fire surveillance in the Sierra Nevada will be exactly the same ones that drive the military to use the technology. One can call it an arms race, I suppose, but only if one imagines that it is all about military use, otherwise it is a misleading way of thinking about the technology.”

It is, at any rate, ethnocentric to assume that things will only happen if the United States does them first, a common element in the “arms race” thinking.