I was looking over at Marginal Revolution, having been led there by Randy McDonald. There I found a link to a paper on drones. The paper purports to be a public choice analysis of drones. So I expected it to demonstrate that the sudden prevalence of drones was due to a change in domestic political incentives rather than military need.
The paper did not do so. On page 16, they wrote, “One key driver was increased demand for drones by the military for combat purposes.” They then went on to argue that military demand was not the only reason for the use of drones because defense firms (specifically Lockheed, Northrop, Boeing, General Atomics and General Dynamics) increased their lobbying more than others (in 2002-10) and then (after 2010) decreased it less.
This is less than convincing, given that it was a time of war and that the firms involved sell lots of different systems. (A better comparison would be a carefully-selected group of non-drone defense firms against drone firms, although that could still only be suggestive.) On page 21 they really undercut their argument by implicitly arguing that the Fiscal Authorization Act of 2007 had to be the result of lobbying, as if there were no military reasons why Congress might require the makers of new weapons system to certify that they needed to be manned.
Finally, they end by pointed out that in 2009 a group of Congresspeople from drone-manufacturing states and districts formed the Congressional Unmanned Systems Caucus. Problem is, the timing is wrong.
It is an interesting history, worth reading, but it is not served by calling itself a public choice analysis. It has no evidence for its implied causal argument; the circumstantial evidence can be explained by counter-hypotheses. I find this sort of thing odd. Am I missing something?
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