I think the scariest part of this drone trend is the opportunity to wage war without losing human life. This shift in risk will dramatically reduce the barrier to starting a war and will further reinforce the power of those already on top.
I have no problem with this part. When you're in a war, having the other side doing all the dying is what you're striving for. The decision to go to war is a weighty thing, but once made you don't hold back.
Made weighty in large part by the risk to your soldiers' lives. Drones make the decision a less-weighty one, which is a problem, I think.
I really have no idea though, I can't even pretend to be informed on this.
All this can be done with manned aircraft, it's just a bit more expensive because you have to refuel them every four to six hours and the pilot will eventually be too tired to continue.
The real change isn't automation, but rather the targeting pods that allow you to see what's happening on the ground from miles away at 10,000 feet and precision weapons (like laser-guided bombs and missiles) that allow you to hit exactly what you intend to hit. Whether the aircraft is manned or not manned really doesn't change anything from the perspective of capability. It just changes the cost.
None of this is a substitute for boots on the ground - the conflict in Afghanistan would have over years ago if we could put soldiers in Pakistan. There's just no substitute for having a guy on the ground with a rifle when it comes to enforcing your national will.
The winner of the war gets to do whatever it was they were fighting about, and no real people get killed.
It's a full spectator sport in the book, and the combatants enjoy it too - they have special helpers (will full battlefield immunity by both sides) who collect the recently dead to upload their memory back into the host (i.e. real human).
That's a matter of definition. If a clone is created (assuming for the moment that is possible) with full memory then the clone is a person, and therefore real people.
The fact that in that book they have defined such people as 'not real people' conveniently bypasses the fact that they actually are, they're just not originals.
See Bladerunner.
Also, as long as we're not able to actually do this we are bound to find our examples in fiction rather than in real life. How people think about such issues can be revealing, even if it is mostly theoretical. But you could make a case for dolphins or primates being 'people' without too much effort.
For two, to the people living in that world such clones are temporary copies, and their flesh has little value - but their memories are real. In that world preventing a clone from reuploading memories back to the host is akin to murder. But killing the clone is nothing. (Is memory a person, or is flesh?)
And for three the actual clone does not consider itself a real person, clones created for menial purposes sometimes chose not to upload their boring memories back to the host, but are willing to do their menial work anyway to benefit their host. Since the clone is an extension of the host it's willing to act to benefit the host without benefit to itself, like a cell in a greater organism. Or a bee that will suicide to protect the hive. (What if the clone refuses to help the host?)
Notice how all my arguments are in the context of the book (was the reasoning in the book contorted?), not the real world. It doesn't exist in the real world and the context of how such clones are created and live matters a lot, so I won't want to argue from infinite possibilities.
And finally the entire philosophical part of the plot in the book revolves around "are clones real people", with considerably more detail and nuance than I can possibly list here, but I added a few in parenthesis near each paragraph.
This sort of thing does give more room between shouting and shooting (people) but it won't actually prevent the all-out war unless one side realizes it'd lose and gives in. Otherwise it's just a smoother escalation.
In the same way that the space race was an economic proxy of the Cold War, and fairly successfully bankrupted and toppled the USSR.
If you play drone vs drone, eventually someone is going to run out of drones, and the means and funds to build more - they are the de-facto losers.
It'll be nigh-impossible to keep this contained though, when the enemy realises that for a modest loss of their drones, they can take out your C&C bases or level your munition factories.
One of the most recent Culture novels by Iain M Banks -- Surface Detail -- explores in part a similar issue, where two factions agree to settle their differences in a virtual-reality war simulation, but those losing decide to escalate it into the physical realm.