*Well worth a look for fans of tech evolution.
*A clear line of development here. Someday, these devices are gonna merge with model aircraft and flit around shooting .22 bullets at people. If they had evolved within today's paramilitary landscape, instead of being repurposed from giant lumbering Cold War gizmos, they would be there already.
*The better these sky-robots get, the more anxious insurgents will be to create them and deploy a few. Think of the improvements in landmine IEDs over the years. One incompetent shoe-bomber was enough to ritually strip every jet-traveller on the planet.
*Sometimes it takes a while. The political gesture precedes the military reality.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3990773.stm
*One wonders why IEDs haven't seen more focussed development by organized governments. Like, couldn't you just build IEDs into all the parking meters, threatening occupied populations with instant death during any street demonstration? Why not make it obvious to civilians that you can blow them up at any minute without warning? Just mine the whole town, pre-emptively, like a built-in artillery barrage. There's no reason why these gizmos can't become effective weapons of state terror, as well as the garage-shop weapon of choice for insurgent cells.
