Military drones: investigations overview from 2000 to 2023

This article aimed to investigate research on military drones. A hybrid methodology was adopted, with qualitative and quantitative approaches. Due to the growing use of unmanned aerial vehicles, scientific production on remotely piloted aircraft was investigated from 2000 to 2023. The results indicate that the terms drones, remotely piloted aircraft and remotely piloted aircraft systems are recurrently investigated in the sphere military, in a total of 860 surveys. The last 4 years analyzed, 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, correspond to 442 searches, at 51.39%. The most popular areas were engineering and computer science, with 54.1% of research. The most prolific researchers were David Fulghum, Ashok Kumar Das and Alon Ben-David, with 8, 6 and 5 searches respectively. USA, India, China and the United Kingdom account for 446 works, with 51.86% of scientific production. Brazil accounted for only 14 works, being higher than the indexes of Israel, Russia, Ukraine and Iran, which produced 11, 10, 5 and 2 searches, respectively. Such results suggest that certain countries with a military tradition are more concerned with expanding combat power to the detriment of scientific dissemination.