Oh great! Barcalounger square-assing, joystick operating, dogfight jockeys rejoice all over the world. Now you can be a fighter ace too and get one of those SPECIAL medals like the Pentagon was pushing recently (haven’t heard much about that lately).
HARUMPFFFF!
Interesting. How long before drones will sabotage or disable drone making factories or other serious infrastructure on either side? Who takes the hit(s)? Who is responsible for the hit(s)? How will the hit(s) be verified? What are the intended/unintended consequences of the hit(s)? The race towards oblivion is on.
Ya know, one day a drone is going to decapitate someone and then what?
I can see the future from a long way away, here. It is not the high tech drones that will matter most, but the bargain basement low tech drones - flying armadas of them.
Military history has many examples of the balance between quality and quantity in weaponry. If you do not have both, then you become vulnerable.
A single F-22 Raptor costs about $150 million. If the production costs of cheap, mass-produced drones could be kept under $50,000 each, you could buy THREE THOUSAND drones for the price of one F-22.
Keeping it simple, each drone could carry a common, 250 pound bomb. It would also need some shielding to protect its electronics, and some other things, but there would be no practical way to stop such an armada short of a nuclear detonation.
