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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JustTradeEm who wrote (94663)	4/18/2003 5:37:47 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Most of us have seen the "Terminator" movies, with the future full of machines fighting people. That is the way we are going. Cover story in the "New York Times" magazine. Except and URL. The Unmanned Army The revolution, thus far, has seen its clearest expression in the air. Lt. Col. Anthony Lazarski, who has logged more than 2,200 hours on some of the world's most advanced combat aircraft, including the F-15E and the F-117 Stealth fighter, recently showed me some just-declassified footage of what's already in the skies. The video is in slow motion, black-and-white and grainy. Half a dozen S.U.V.'s and Toyota pickups inch their way up a winding mountain road. The terrain seems foreboding and bleak, almost extraterrestrial. The camera zooms in closer, and you can see that the convoy is moving at a pretty good clip. Suddenly the screen fills with white flashes and smoke, and the trucks vanish. ''A few less bad guys to worry about,'' Lazarski says, beaming as he surveys the smoldering wreckage. The bad guys in the picture were suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives fleeing United States forces in Afghanistan, and the footage was shot entirely from the latest weapon in the Air Force arsenal: a hunter-killer Predator drone. It's an airplane without a pilot, a primitive version of the flying robots now being designed and built, though not yet used in combat. The RQ-1 Predator isn't much to look at. It's a glider with an engine just powerful enough to reach the cruising speed of a Chevrolet. But back in 2000, when the C.I.A. thought it had Osama bin Laden under live aerial surveillance in Afghanistan, it pressed for a weaponized version of the Predator. In the fall of 2001, with Hellfire missiles grafted to its fragile wings, the little reconnaissance drone made its first remote-controlled kills. Just last month, the Predator again made history, taking out Iraqi antiaircraft batteries while its operators remained safely away from the battlefield. nytimes.com