[CoryG89]

Disclaimer: I am not a UAV operator. I am basing the following on information from mostly documentaries, but various other sources as well.

I believe that is correct, current UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) used by the US military always have a human operator that is controlling the vehicle. If I understand correctly they do not control the flight of the vehicle in real time, but rather they give commands along the lines of "circle above this area" or "track/follow this particular target on the ground". The vehicles is semi-autonomous in that it figures out what it needs to do to fulfill the operator's command (ie. adjust yaw, pitch, roll, thrust, etc). I believe to actually engage a target the operator must manually trigger it.

However, this is not the same as the new swarming drones this article covers. Most do not consider UAVs currently used by the military to actually be drones (which implies a high degree of autonomy), instead they are typically thought of as remotely controlled. In contrast, it sounds like these drones are fired once with a target specified ahead of time and these drones are completely autonomous from that point on, swarming, swarming around and firing on a target all on their own. These drones are probably small and they probably dont have a video feed for each one for people to monitor.

[SEJeff]

Disclaimer: I was a Shadow 200 TUAV pilot in the US Army from 2001-2005, and yes, I spent a year in Iraq (OIF II circa 2003-2004) where I got 480+ combat flight hours.

You basically wrote the exact same comment I was about to write with striking similarity. For reference, this is a 18 year old me in the back of a Shadow GCS at Ft Huachuca, AZ, where all Shadow pilots are trained: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ground_control_station

The military never uses the word "drone", but prefers UAV aka Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, just as you mentioned. For what it is worth, this new navy thing isn't really that novel. The latest generation of Tomahawk cruise missiles do something very similar. You launch several of them into a battle theater and they circle around sending / receiving target information and telemetry between each other and the control stations. See: https://medium.com/war-is-boring/u-s-marines-can-now-call-in...

[josefresco]

So in this case, what makes these drones any different than a cruise missile? You give them coordinates to destroy a target, the weapon then deploys to the target and uses technology to navigate without a pilot directly "steering" it or deciding when it goes "boom".