Armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

The rise in unmanned aerial vehicles these days should alarm quite a few. I have watched this progress to this point from a child playing video games. When I was young, I knew that one day, remote controlled aircrafts would be used in the armed forces, and highly trained video game pilots would control them from a remote location.

Sure enough, eventually we got to that point. Look at a few lines from this article about the US and UK putting unmanned aerial vehicles into their arsenal.

The US Air Force has announced it has ordered a further quartet of MQ-9 'Reapers', worth $59m, to supplement its initial fleet of seven.

A decision on full-rate production is expected in 2009. Meanwhile, the head of the Royal Air Force said last week that the UK will also deploy its first fully-armed Reapers "later this year".

The MQ-9 is the most formidable killer robot currently in operation. It's a big beast, 36 feet long with an 86-foot wingspan. It can fly for 14 hours without refuelling, going at a maximum speed of 300mph and as high as 50,000 feet - nine and a half miles up.

The US Air Force describes it as an "unmanned hunter/killer weapon system". This term might perhaps have been coined by a fan of the classic Terminator movies, in which dystopian future battlegrounds are overflown by murderous Flying-HK death-droids intent on wiping out the last vestiges of human resistance to the machine overlords.

Look at this article that discusses how the machines can work completely "hands-off" after telling it what to do.

...Scan Eagle recce drones used by the US Marines and Navy can now be autonomously handled in groups by intelligent software. Completely hands-off, they can be told to sweep a given area. They can be informed of an important target - for instance a suspicious vehicle - using only a cellphone/PDA, and move in without further input to gather video and follow the target covertly.

...the US Navy has recently awarded a contract for a full-sized drone demonstrator jet able to operate from carriers autonomously, and has already proven that Fire Scout robo-copters can land themselves on ships underway at sea.

These machines aren't good for our future. Imagine what is to come 20 years from now from the companies developing these. You really should investigate these things for yourself.