NY Times: US Military Admits To Having Spy Drones As Small As Bugs

The US military reveals its latest publicly releasable spy drone technology – drones the size of bugs used to fire missiles and track “enemy combatants”..

Before I continue, notice my headline says “ADMIT” because whenever the military makes something public knowledge the technology is usually decades old. Case in point, the internet was developed in the 60′s. There are plenty of more examples.

Personally discussions I have with people “in the know” tell me about nano drones that sneak into your house inside of your electrical wires. Anyway, that is all conspiracy. Here are the “facts” that “we know” from the corporate media”.

Chang W. Lee/The New York Times – A microdrone during a demo flight at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. More Photos »

The NY Times reports:

War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

WRIGHT-PATTERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Ohio — Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base’s indoor flight lab is called the “microaviary,” and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. “We’re looking at how you hide in plain sight,” said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.

Half a world away in Afghanistan, Marines marvel at one of the new blimplike spy balloons that float from a tether 15,000 feet above one of the bloodiest outposts of the war, Sangin in Helmand Province. The balloon, called an aerostat, can transmit live video — from as far as 20 miles away — of insurgents planting homemade bombs. “It’s been a game-changer for me,” Capt. Nickoli Johnson said in Sangin this spring. “I want a bunch more put in.”

From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.

The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

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Source:War Evolves With Drones, Some Tiny as Bugs

Multimedia

From Blimps to Bugs: The Miniaturization of Drone Technnology

The Changing Shapes of Air Power

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