Killer Drones Converge on California, Ready to Take Off | Danger Room | Wired.com

Killer Drones Converge on California, Ready to Take Off | Danger Room | Wired.com: "High-endurance armed drones such as the General Atomics Predator have been a fixture of U.S. military operations since the mid-1990s air war over the Balkans. Besides being cheaper to buy and operate, robot aircraft carry fuel in place of a pilot and so can stay in the air longer.

Plus, if they crash or get shot down, nobody gets hurt. That means the military can assign drones to what a robot-industry insider from Boeing called the “worst down-and-dirty missions that even the nuttiest pilot wouldn’t want to do.”

But today’s drones are “fair-weather” killers, too slow to survive the sophisticated air defenses of, say, China or Iran. To bring the advantages of robot aircraft to high-intensity warfare, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency along with the Air Force and Navy sponsored J-UCAS starting in 2003. Boeing’s X-45 (pictured) competed with the Northrop Grumman-built X-47 to “demonstrate the technical feasibility, military utility and operational value for a networked system of high performance, weaponized unmanned air vehicles,” according to Darpa."