56% of our air war in Afghanistan is by drone

Always interested in tipping points. The headline of this article is anodyne, Afghan drone war - data show unmanned flights dominate air campaign by Josh Smith but the more explicit intro paragraph is interesting.

The article is cluttered with factoids and data that hasn't been synthesized to match the narrative. You have to work a bit to make sense of it. What it comes down to is this:

Drones fired more weapons than conventional warplanes for the first time in Afghanistan last year and the ratio is rising, previously unreported U.S. Air Force data show, underlining how reliant the military has become on unmanned aircraft.

[snip]

Data reviewed by Reuters show strikes by unmanned aircraft accounted for 56 percent of weapons deployed by the Air Force in Afghanistan in 2015, up dramatically from 5 percent in 2011.

AI, drones, autonomous weapons. Moore's law, digitization and all our other technological capacities are fast changing both the nature and the capacity of our military systems in ways that are yet unfamiliar. Not necessarily bad, just unfamiliar.