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6 Outsourcing War to Machines is an enormous, unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. It is not remotely flown in the sense of more familiar RPVs, as it performs the vast majority of its flight activities without human input. However, it does not decide for itself whether or not to engage in a mission, and it flies only where it is ordered to go. In order to remain aloft, the Global Hawk must sense its environment, which includes changes in altitude, airspeed, weather conditions, and the presence of other aircraft in its vicinity. However, it also has a sensor suite that is subject to human controls—in essence, the Global Hawk airframe primarily exists as a platform to deliver its sensory equipment to the airspace above or near a reconnaissance target, and the Global Hawk does not rely upon that sensory data to perform its own functions. A drone is a machine that follows a set of instructions without any degree of autonomy—it simply does what it has been programmed to do, regardless of environmental factors. This is by far the most misused of military robotic terms in the twenty-first century, and it is primarily inap- propriately applied to remotely piloted aircraft being used for airstrikes in the War on Terror. The term “drone ” more accurately refers to target platforms that fly preprogrammed routes for gunnery practice or recon- naissance aircraft that simply fly a planned route without a human pilot in control, even from a distance. The term most certainly should not be used to refer to combat platforms like the MQ-1 Predator or its larger cousin, the MQ-9 Reaper, both of which are under the positive control of a human operator and which cannot utilize any lethal weapons without a deliber- ate act by the operator. Calling such a machine a drone grammatically absolves the operator of any actions that might result from its utilization, as if lethal airstrikes simply “happened.” A cruise missile might be con- sidered a drone, although as Timothy Sundvall notes, “The line between cruise missile and UAV is beginning to be blurred by technology.”13 Rich- ard M. Clark argues that cruise missiles do not rise to the level of the term “drone,” in large part because they are only used a single time, making them only a very advanced projectile.14 A machine’s “autonomy” refers to the level of decision making that it may undertake without human intervention. Kenzo Nonami, Farid Ken- doul, Satorshi Suzuki, Wei Wang, and Daisuke Nakazawa collaborated to create a classification system for autonomous machines, in which they broke down the distinct levels of autonomy into 10 classes: 1. Remotely guided: certainly achieved by the Pioneer in 1986, arguably by ear- lier systems 2. Real-time health/diagnosis: the RQ-1 Predator began reporting system self- checks to human operators in 1995 3. Adapt to failures and flight conditions: the RQ-4 Global Hawk corrects its flight path based upon environmental conditions, without human input, and has done so since 1998