NYT Story: War With Drones, Some as Tiny as Bugs

bill190

Lead story in the New York Times this morning...

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

"...The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago..."

"...the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone..."

Full Story...
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/20drones.html

Ravenkallen

It's amazing that we went from almost no UAV's/ UGV's to having as many as we do now. War has been forever changed by these advances and i think for the better. It seems like the news never talks about unmanned ground vehicles very much anymore? Machines like the armed SWORDS robot's show a lot of potential... Lets say we have this remote desert city that has a bunch of terrorists holed up in it and it is to dangerous to send in our infantry. We have already softened the place up with artillery and air strikes, but there is still a significant enemy presence. Imagine sending in a whole army of UGV's(Armed with machine guns and maybe even guided missiles) backed up with aerial drones, like the Reaper or more advanced for close air support, right into the town! The machines would engage the enemy and wear them out to a point where our human infantry could come in and mop up the rest easily...But what if the enemy had drones as well? This is a very real possibility. Making a armed drone is not really that difficult and soon every country could be fielding these. There might be more machines of the field fighting than humans pretty soon:)