I should say, a weapons equipped version. I can imagine these things being both agile enough to perform in urban environments and fast enough to perform in rural, open environments.

Imagine a dozen of these swarming an objective in Afghanistan, expiring their batteries over the course of a 30 minute attack, disappearing, and just when the combatants thought it was safe, another dozen show up because there is a drone acting as a recharging hive for dozens of these things and it's is doing slow circles around the objective.

That's sci-fi sounding and yet seemingly plausible.

"An objective", "combatants" -- you mean people, right? If so, say it.

We should not hide the uncomfortable truth.

Oh sure, I don't mean to validate the dehumanizing language of the military, it's just how I wrote it. At least I didn't refer to these things as being instruments of kinetic operations.

Not that the machines care much about that, though.

Neither does the government, these days.

'To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"'

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/

This thread reminded me of one of my favourite skits from Mitchell & Webb, Needlessly Ambiguous Terms:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6cake3bwnY

Wow, I didn't know about that. That's ridiculous. I remember watching this comedy bit from Chris Rock about the end of the 'innocent bystander', and I never thought it would actually happen one day.

No female militants?

Of course there is, why else.Obama would explode the 67 year old grandma with a direct hit while she was at.home with her grandchildren while enjoying her flower garden? ( and yes, this actually happened )

Why indeed, Mrs. Sartre?

http://i1.ytimg.com/vi/imxb8IShtoc/hqdefault.jpg

Skeet practice.

IOW, pretty easy to defend against with a shot gun, netting around your position, and so on. An air strike, on the other hand, not so much.