WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Drone Attack Swarms Take Off From F-16.

Using fast-developing computer algorithms for autonomous flight engineered to prevent mini-drones from crashing into one-another, the swarms are intended to perform a wide-range of strategically relevant missions.

The Pentagon’s once-secret Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), aimed at harnessing promising technologies for nearer-term development than most acquisition programs, has already launched these drones from F-16 and F-18s numerous times in testing.

The mini-drones, called Perdix, are government designed yet built with commercial off-the-shelf elements. William Roper, who reports to Defense Secretary Ashton Carter as the Director of the Strategic Capabilities Office, said the effort was showing promise for possible near-term combat advantage.

“They are expendable and fly low as a surveillance asset. You can have a lot of them for a saturation approach. Saturating has an advantage over the thing it has to defend against. Its defender has to take more time and money to defend against it,” Roper told a small group of reporters.

The prospect of facing 21st Century precision combined with mid-20th Century mass ought to give anyone pause.