According to the Department of Defense, the U.S. military needs to get more, better drones if it wants to continue being as successful as it is now. While current unmanned aerial vehicles still rely on a human operator, the Pentagon wants to develop fully autonomous machines by 2030 or beyond.
The Defense Department released its updated roadmap for the future of military drones this week, outlining the 25-year plan to “take the ‘man’ out of ‘unmanned'” warfare, to quote one of the more colorful bullet points in the report. According to the DoD, getting more, better drones in combat is crucial for the future success of the U.S. military. The blueprint lays out the government’s strategy for how to make modernized unmanned systems “ubiquitous on the battlefield,” even as the defense budget faces $487 billion in cuts over the next decade.
