I am somewhat reading between the lines but from the article it sounds like military contractors handle the local take-off and landing then hand over the drone to the military for the actual combat missions.

I'm guessing they are using microwave communication locally for a more reliable link (than satellite). Since you need twitch responsive communications for take-off and landing.

Once the drone is in the air if it loses communications with the ground then it just either flies it predetermined route or at least flies straight and level until communications are re-established.

The problem here seems to be that people both on the military side and contractor side are cutting tons of corners and we are starting to see the fallout from that here.

I think failure to communicate with ATC (e.g. taking off without permission) is a massive concern. If a traditional pilot did that then they would soon have their licence ripped up, not sure why drone pilots aren't held to the same standard.

...contractors + buggy software + hackable systems that could even allow a hacker to take control of the drone = 99% unaccountability

you can do everything with these things and get away with it ...and if you do something really genocidally horrible you can always blame "terrorist hackers" or "criminally incompetent" contractors ...bone chilling scary shit (oh, and I can even start to imagine the international situations provoked by doing stupid things with drones outside the USA - "oh, no, it wasn't an act of war against you country, we just had a software bug - now take please take this money for the damages and don't mention anything to the press" :) )

I can assure you, the communication links between the ground and the drone was not an afterthought. There is an extensive amount of regulation/standardization surrounding this.

It's common to give contractors a bad wrap, and certainly some deserve it. But, many DOD contractors are ex-military persons, either retired, discharged, physically unable to remain in service, or simply choose to work "on the other side of the desk" (as they say).

Almost all the contractors I know were in the Air Force, Marines, Navy or Army for some period time. (It's usually very helpful as they still have the necessary clearances and don't need to be sponsored to get one.)

Yeah it's not an operational failure to use contractors, but it is an accountability failure, because both sides of the table use the contracting relationship as an excuse to break the law and commit treason, as there is no legal culture in place to handle these "organizational" crimes vs traditional mutiny or war crimes committed by a unit in the hierarchical military.

Understood.

But in context, this is a very small amount of the total set of government contractors, most of which are designers, analysts, aircraft/ship building and maintenance, software developers, among a host of other areas. Only a few have a big hand to play in questionable/Black Ops/mercenary roles.

These missions are unaccountable to the local civilian population regardless of who is at the controls. If you kill my family member how do I seek prosecution in court? This disdain for the rule of law is entirely consistant with post-war US foreign policy.

Mercenary groups like Academi (nee XE (nee Blackwater)) count as contractors.

The 2000s were the era of military privatization. Military personnel pay rates are set by law and are paid by the government to the employee/soldier. Private corporations can't take a cut when military personnel do the work, therefore everything except shooting has to be privatized.

They're used for a lot more than the military, and contractors have the flight time to qualify as pilots for them.

Why should military pilots be flying them? Lots of them are on non-military missions.

These[1] are military aircraft flying military missions. I think it is pretty self evident why the military should be flying them. My guess is that having contractors flying them introduces a level of "indirection" reducing any one organization's responsibility and, therefor, its accountability.

1. Of course there are other, non-military drones out there, but they aren't what we are discussing here.

The 2000s were the era of military privatization. Military personnel pay rates are set by law. The point is that private corporations can't take a cut when military personnel to do the work, therefore everything except shooting has to be privatized.