Drone Alliance, Assemble?

It may sound like the awfully-named superhero group of some stock, Bay-esque summer blockbuster. Cue the explosions and slow-mo'd babes, running. But just as the global drones race raises the specter of damn near every last country--even "rogues" like Iran and North Korea--owning and operating their own unmanned aerial vehicles, so too is the democratization of drones forging robo-spy coalitions between certain world powers.

Let's step back. This alliance is not happening, at least not yet. But the prospect of a globe-spanning, 'round-the-clock drone collaboration is very real, and very close. This sort of Coalition of the Drone Willing, so to speak, is between the US, Australia, Japan, and South Korea. And as David Axe reports in Reuters, the shared system centers around the RQ-4 Global Hawk, the airliner-sized reconnaissance drone that can loiter undetected for days at a time--the proposed acquisitions of which would see Canberra, Tokyo, and Seoul on par with the US. That they'd all be utilizing identical hard- and software systems would allow for a free flow of reconnaissance, mainly of China and neighboring North Korea, with Washington, and vice versa.

"The resulting network," Axe writes, "could monitor millions of square miles of land and sea around the clock and in real time."

Not like this sort of thing, where a handful of nations operate their own (yet basically identical) unmanned spy systems and share the intel, hasn't been done before. There's a precedent, if you'd like to call it that. Joint US-British forces have field-tested the collaborative model in southern Afghanistan. As Axe notes, "US and British airmen now operate a pooled force of missile- and bomb-equipped MQ-9 Reaper drones, which are smaller than the unarmed Global Hawks."

But of course, as with anything else there's China. Beijing is making strides toward its own spy-drone fleet, and could very well see the People's Republic matching (that could be a stretch) the capabilities of the coming US-Aussie-Japan-SoKo drone alliance. Now where's that conch shell?

Reach Brian at brian@motherboard.tv. @thebanderson // @VICEdrone