Drone Warfare: "Filling the Skies With Assassins" (Engelhardt article)

Terminator Planet
Launching the Drone Wars

By Tom Engelhardt

SNIP

In other words, our drone wars are being fought with the airborne equivalent of cars with cranks, but the "race" to the horizon is already underway. By next year, some Reapers will have a far more sophisticated sensor system with 12 cameras capable of filming a two-and-a-half mile round area from 12 different angles. That program has been dubbed "Gorgon Stare", but it doesn't compare to the future 92-camera Argus program whose initial development is being funded by the Pentagon's blue-skies outfit, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Soon enough, a single pilot may be capable of handling not one but perhaps three drones, and drone armaments will undoubtedly grow progressively more powerful and "precise." In the meantime, BAE Systems already has a drone four years into development, the Taranis, that should someday be "completely autonomous"; that is, it theoretically will do without human pilots. Initial trials of a prototype are scheduled for 2010.

By 2020, so claim UAV enthusiasts, drones could be engaging in aerial battle and choosing their victims themselves. As Robert S. Boyd of McClatchy reported recently, "The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons."

It's a particular sadness of our world that, in Washington, only the military can dream about the future in this way, and then fund the "arms race" of 2018 or 2035. Rest assured that no one with a governmental red cent is researching the health care system of 2018 or 2035, or the public education system of those years.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175056/filling_the_skies_with_assassins

Worse, what happens when a drone falls into "enemy" hands? Presumably comm channels in a saturated drone environment would let you pinpoint other drones using a captured drone and either interfere with them remotely or directly attack them.

Better (or worse) yet, reconfigured drones would make public appearances by the president or any at risk public official a thing of the past.

This sky full of assassins thing is a very sharp two edged sword.

It would be similar to saying I have a Direct TV Dish/Receiver so know I can find all the other Direct TV subscribers in the area.

Even better my Direct TV Dish allows me to change channels on other peoples Receivers and/or determine which channels they are authorized to view.

In other words not possible.

for the most part, but that's not practical (at least not exclusively) with a fleet of drones in close or networked operation, due to link latencies. It's an absolute given there will be local signaling, especially with lower value collateral.

Axe me how i know. :P

seriously, don't - I can say I've worked directly on the link latency issue though for other forms of alar and ballistic craft.

Your tax dollars at work

http://www.wildstrawberryfilms.com/Images/Drones,%20Clones%20and%20Pheromones%20poster%20med.png