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Unmanned aerial systems could become so individualized that every soldier will have one.

The Army envisions a 1:1 ratio of soldiers to handheld UAVs.

In an ideal world, every soldier will have a flying robot. “We're talking about getting into nanotechnology that will allow us to reduce unmanned systems' size to the point that a soldier would not have to stand up or launch one by hand,” Carlile says. “In the future they will have something man-packable that a soldier can carry. They might even have the ability to have a soldier fire his own personal weapon and that weapon would have a guidance system to help him hit his target, completely from defilade or under total concealment.”

Optionally piloted vehicles could make any helicopter or airplane fly like a UAV.

Cargo helicopters like the Chinook could one day follow each other in flight, like baby ducks swimming after their mother.

The road map puts a premium on converting existing fleets into unmanned platforms. “Ideally we'll have three switches in the cockpit—zero for unmanned and flying autonomously, one for a single pilot in a two-pilot aircraft and two when there is a co-pilot,” says Col. Chris Carlile, director of the Army's UAS Center of Excellence. Another cockpit switch could command an unmanned vehicle to follow a manned flight for aerial convoys, he says.

Rotorcraft will take on the roles of airplanes.

New unmanned tilt-rotor craft, such as this Bell Boeing Quad TiltRotor model in a wind tunnel, could ferry Army cargo.

The report contains an interesting line in predicting what Air Force aviation might look like in 2030: “Improved rotorcraft will close the performance an airworthiness gap with fixed wing systems.” Helicopters are slow, tough to maintain and are limited by range and altitude. But the Army sees advances in rotorcraft engines and airframes as a chance to increase their use. Tantalizingly, the report says that “hybrid configurations” could provide deliveries of troops and cargo. When they say hybrid, think of tilt-rotor craft such as the Marines' Osprey that can take off and land like helicopters but fly fast like an airplane.