Last year, U.S. Special Operations Command quietly began taking delivery of 10 Boeing-built Hummingbird robotic helicopters, and outfitting them for two-gigapixel spy cameras, foliage-penetrating radars, small guided missiles and even 800-pound-capacity cargo pods.
Now the command has announced it will buy another 10 Hummingbirds, re-designated MQ-18, by 2017 — and deploy three of them to an “undisclosed location” next year, according to British aviation magazine Air Forces Monthly. But it’s a safe bet that the undisclosed location is west of Pakistan, east of Iran, south of the former Soviet Union and crawling with Taliban. A small fleet of quiet, lethal robots, each with a 30-hour endurance and a bunch of equipment options, could come in quite handy there.
This is the single most important VTOL program we have...and the SpecFor guys have ordered more. That's actually encouraging.
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