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DARPA's ICARUS Program To Develop Self-Destructing Air Delivery Vehicles (darpa.mil)
Zothecula contributes this excerpt from Gizmag that illustrates the latest chapter in the long history of denying equipment of military technology to the makers' adversaries: Two years ago, DARPA started developing self-destructing electronics as a way to prevent advanced military gear falling into the wrong hands. Now the agency is expanding on the idea with its Inbound, Controlled, Air-Releasable, Unrecoverable Systems (ICARUS) program, which is tasked with developing small, unmanned, single-use, unpowered air vehicles that can can be dropped from an aircraft to deliver supplies to isolated locations in the event of disasters, then evaporate into thin air once their job is done.
Always amused by the military's use of the world "delivery" though.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Let's call the powered one "missiles" and the unpowered ones "bombs".
Why would anyone with even an ounce of self-estime parrot bullshit like "that can can be dropped from an aircraft to deliver supplies to isolated locations in the event of disasters, then evaporate into thin air once their job is done."
This is not for disasters. When there is a disaster, and you deliver stuff via one-time use means, you want to keep these aur vehicles cause they are valuable and incredibly useful. For example some parachute can be easily repurposed as a tent, to keep out rain or simply people from freezing. These are valuable materials. Metals are equally useful, etc. There simply is no trash at a disaster site, only ressources
The only, really ONLY reason for self destructing air vehicles are to infilttrate spies and spec ops into foreign countries to cause violence.
They've had this idea for years; the old code name used to be "parachute". These new ones sure are fancy, but does the taxpayer really need to spend that much when a simple parachute would work equally well?
Given it gets colder as you go higher and wings don't work so well as the atmosphere thins I don't think it's the DARPA version with the most stupid :)
And those acronyms are important, it's harder to win popular support when things are called "We want to drop thousands of small bombs over populated areas with guidance mechanisms so they hit the targets we want, but since with that many it's certain some of them won't explode we also want the guidance system to self destruct so our enemies can't reverse engineer them when they find a bomb that didn't explode as designed and also didn't explode when picked up by a child years after the conflict is over".
No, you are right.
These days you just sell/give them to others to use..
Usually to destabilise governments you dont agree with.
Because arming such dissident groups is a good idea, right?