Hunter-killer drones armed with Hellfire missiles are patrolling the Pentagon’s expanding global battlefields: It’s a scene right out of Terminator….
The skies of our world are filling with round-the-clock assassins. They will only evolve and proliferate. Of course, when we check ourselves out in the movies, we like to identify with John Connor, the human resister, the good guy of this planet, against the evil machines. Elsewhere, however, as we fight our drone wars ever more openly, as we field mechanical techno-terminators with all-seeing eyes and loose our missiles from thousands of miles away (“Hasta la Vista, Baby!”), we undoubtedly look like something other than a nation of John Connors to those living under the Predators. It may not matter if the joysticks and consoles on those advanced machines are somewhat antiquated; to others, we are now the terminators of the planet, implacable machine assassins.
So is this leftist anti-war agitprop or are drones really the wave of the future? A hint:
This year, the US Air Force will train more drone operators than fighter pilots, and last month, the service’s prestigious weapons school graduated its first group of students who know more about munitions for unmanned aerial vehicles than they do weapons for fighter jets.

Shams al-Nahar 7:42 am on July 18, 2009 Permalink |
Johnpi, military R&D runs on about a ten-year cycle, plus or minus 5.
In Gulf I, we were in deployed C3I.
That is 3rd generation.
4th gen is C4I, command, control, communications, computers.
We used that in Gulf II.
Now we are bridging into 5th gen….teleoperation and telepresense.
6th gen will be Strong AI…..should coincide with the technological singularity.
There is controversy about 7th gen.
Either nanoweaponry or space weapons or both, depending on where the wars are.
aziz 9:26 am on July 18, 2009 Permalink |
singularity? bah.
(take issue at haibane, not here, please
Shams al-Nahar 7:22 pm on July 18, 2009 Permalink |
Habbibi, that is milspeak, not my personal taxonomy.
And n/e ways, it is going to be a Sufi Singualrity.