got geoint?

We have been covering the idea of “small being the new big” for sometime now when it comes to new innovations in warfare. From the development of nanosatellites that are more effective and less expensive than traditional satellites to the use of nanomissiles for launching these tiny satellites, it is a whole new world of innovation and things are getting, well, smaller. According to a recent New York Times article, the next innovation is drones that are as tiny as bugs and birds. Yes, you heard that correctly. These will be tiny drones that mimic animal flight patterns and will fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan.

The innovators behind this technology are actually trying to mirror the flight patterns of moths and bugs:

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.

And as many of us know in the GEOINT sector, drones are here to stay:

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.

The Pentagon has asked Congress for nearly $5 billion for drones next year, and by 2030 envisions ever more stuff of science fiction: “spy flies” equipped with sensors and microcameras to detect enemies, nuclear weapons or victims in rubble. Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and the author of “Wired for War,” a book about military robotics, calls them “bugs with bugs.”

Yes, indeed it is a whole new world of warfare. The sheer fact that researchers are developing drones that mimic the flight patterns of animals of flight reinforce that we are in war-like situations that require us to gather intelligence in a completely anonymous way. Is that a flock of birds in the sky? Our enemies will never know the difference…

Tags: Drones, Drones the size of insects and birds, GEOINT and drones, geospatial intelligence, got geoint?, Nanosatellites, smaller GEOINT, UAVs, USGIF