This is the Micro-Drone Can Be Removed from Tube Flare F-16

On top of Alaska last summer, the Pentagon experiment with new things namely, the prototype micro-drones that can be launched from a flare dispenser fighter F-16 and F / A-18. Tube containing a small plane with a parachute down from the jet. Along with the release of a parachute, wing drones and expands and propeller at the rear of the rotating provide propulsion.

Experiments carried out by the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), a Pentagon organization that was launched in the summer of 2012 to find out how best to confront growing strategic threat from China and Russia.

Specification of the mini-drone is still a secret, but they can be used to confuse enemy troops and carrying out reconnaissance missions using equipment that is cheaper than a large unmanned aircraft.

SCO staff working on the program with a very secret with almost everything kept secret from the American public. But the veil of secrecy lifted a few weeks ago by the Minister of Defense Ashton B. Carter when presenting the draft budget 2017. He said the Pentagon requested funding of US $ 902 million funding for the SCO in 2017, or almost double than they received this year, and 18-fold when the program was started.

Carter disclosure raises the question whether the Pentagon has finally been unwittingly reveal confidential information when it was or indeed vital information it was time thrown to the public. But in a rare interview, the Director of the SCO to the Washington Post said that the defense minister has given the green light to reveal a bit of a mini-drone pilot program in Alaska and some other programs as part of a broader effort to get the attention of potential opponents.

"I have been in the black for the rest of my career, so all this is new to me and I really wish I could go back," said Director of the SCO, William Roper, a physicist who previously worked on missile defense. "You can not win a war if all of them were outside the door, but you can not prevent war if it all behind them."

Mini-drones tested in Alaska last year as part of a military exercise Northern Edge, which focus on training for the crisis in the Pacific. The program is named Perdix, a character in Greek mythology who turned into a partridge by Athena god. It costs about US $ 20 million, said Roper. The plane was built using 3-D printing.

SCO has been tested mini-drones since 2014, but the experiment last year during Northern Edge show that they can find each other while the air and make thousands.Drone Perdix tested 150 times during practice in Alaska, including 72 of the fighter jets. They can also be launched from the ground by US forces, either with a slingshot launcher or by throwing them.

SCO (usually pronounced "Skoh") is one of the Pentagon's efforts to move for more than a decade in counterterrorism operations and combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan to prepare a new strategic threat. Initially the office was diPentagon, but later moved in Virginia and becomes one with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Defense Department agency that is known to focus on futuristic technology.

But DARPA and the SCO are different organizations with different missions. DARPA, created during the Cold War in 1958, focused on looking for every way to revolutionize the military operation with the discoveries and new technologies. This institute has an annual budget of about US $ 3 billion. While SCO charged with creating "trick play" for the Pentagon through creativity and technique, using old weapons combined with a number of equipment or adding new technology.

Roper is still the 36-year-old US military compares with a football team that has been studied rigorously for years by opponents who want to find and exploit the weaknesses of the team.

"The football team did not waste their guidelines when it happened," he said. "They say, 'Okay, well, my opponent has optimized what I do today, so I had to make a surprise and new tricks." So they made a new trick to fighting them. "

DARPA Director, Arati Prabhakar, said in a statement that the focus of the SCO is to address the urgent need to add strong research ecosystem that includes public and private sectors. "In the world of technology and the development of a variety of threats quickly, there is no strategy or the ability of a single military technology development that will ensure our national security," he said.

The emergence of the SCO came as the Pentagon continues to look for new ways to adapt more quickly. Last week, the Defense Department announced it would build a new Defense Innovation Advisory Board which is run by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It also opened an office in Silicon Valley last spring to strengthen relationships with technology companies that were there, which historically have not collaborated much with the Department of Defense.

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