What are drones? (The Week)

This came from a site called "The Week", from a google search... it explains..

 What are drones?
They are heavily armed flying robots—planes without pilots. Drones constitute a class of unmanned aerial vehicles, known as UAVs, ranging from surveillance craft small enough to fit in your hand to Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk, which has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 and is slated to supplant the U-2 as the nation’s pre-eminent spy plane. The best-known U.S. military drone is the Predator, a 27-foot-long aircraft made of lightweight graphite and carbon fiber, which is used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan, and increasingly in Pakistan. “The key thing in a UAV,” says Damian Kemp, an editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, “is it does missions that are dull, dirty, and dangerous.”