National Defence committee  I think the case may be the opposite. If you can sit over a target for eight hours watching it calmly before you drop, you won't end up with something such as we had at Tarnak Farms. There, we had soldiers out on a rifle range shooting. A pilot was flying by and saw the shooting thousands of feet below him and decided that he was going to roll in in self-defence, and we ended up with a huge disaster.

National Defence committee  As an example, there's a German machine called a micro drone. It's a small machine. The Iranians just put out a big press release about how they developed their own small drone. It was a photograph from the micro drone website, so I don't know if they're actually buying microdonts, or just copying them.

National Defence committee  Right at the end of World War II the Germans were firing V-2 rockets at London. The Americans came up with a remotely controlled airplane, a bomber, and they filled it full of bombs. They put a remote radio control inside the aircraft. The guys would take off, they would parachute out of the airplane, another airplane would fly along controlling it, and they would guide it into the missile sites.

National Defence committee  Sir, I think for one thing, it's very likely to happen against our own deployed forces before too long. I know that's not North America, but still, if you're a Canadian warship, wherever you are, you're in Canada—sort of. So that's likely going to happen. We've already had imagery taken against us in a hostile manner.

National Defence committee  You're also feeding it with signals intercepts, so that you're taking the pattern of signals intercepts and you're overlaying them onto the maps. You're getting little breadcrumbs of where the ship was, for example, even if you never saw it—or the guy, the camel, or whatever it is you were trying to follow.

National Defence committee  The world is a long way behind in the defence part as opposed to the offensive part of UAVs. For example a couple of months ago two UAVs were found crashed in South Korea that had originated from North Korea. They were dinky little things, but they had filmed the presidential palace and a few military installations.

National Defence committee  Civilian satellites are getting very good. The gap between military and civilian satellites is closing to the point where I know there are discussions about whether or not we're going to need a military satellite system at all, really, eventually, because the technology closes. However, if it's cloudy, it's still cloudy, and satellites can't see through clouds very well.

National Defence committee  No, but you can do it if you have an aircraft in.... I remember one time I was at Defence and we got a call. It was a shipment going to Alaska, and it had gone missing along the coast highway. The guy just hadn't called in. So we called the local RCMP detachment and said, “Could you please drive the highway between here and here and just see if this truck is there?”

National Defence committee  If I may, I wouldn't out of hand dismiss the armed bit of the problem as well. When the Russians send their bombers up to Tiksi and Anadyr, their northern bases, we send our CF-18s up to our northern bases, and they're armed. If we are speaking at some point in the future of more robotics and fewer humans, you can't discount the fact that at the end of the day they can't just look, in some cases.

National Defence committee  I'll just quickly say that the categories of the robots are basically all established. You're going to see incremental changes like the iPhone 4 to the iPhone 5. The cameras will get better, and the batteries will get better. There's no huge jump that way. The huge jump that's coming is that these robots are going to all start cooperating.

National Defence committee  Thinking really quickly, the Royal Navy is already working on a program to buy an unmanned surface vehicle, a USV, that will go to sea for three months on a single tank of gas with some rotors and stuff to keep the power up. That thing can go out to sea and patrol for three months at a time.

National Defence committee  I'm convinced that we will. The one bit that becomes tricky is when you arm them. Once you arm a UAV or a robot of some sort, and you can't get communications with it.... For example if you have a submarine, and it's out and it sees what it needs to see, the people on board can make the decisions about whether or not they are going to use force.

National Defence committee  I did mention the fellow in the United States who was planning to attack the Capitol building. That's an attack profile using unmanned systems that we are going to see, I'm afraid, for the rest of our lives. It's just an absolute inevitability. When we discuss the ability of the other side, as it were, to get access, if you think back to Google Earth, I remember when Google Earth came out everybody over at Defence went “Yikes” because most of the countries had never had satellite imagery before.

National Defence committee  If I may jump in really quickly, I showed you earlier that very small Canadian one. If you were to supply something like that to the guys defending the town of Kobane, for example, it doesn't go very far. It only goes a few kilometres but it can fly out over the town, see exactly where the enemy is, give you a latitude and longitude, and you can call NATO now on your cellphone and tell them, I can actually see the bad guys three blocks away.

National Defence committee  I don't make UAVs. I sell them, set them up, and get the systems working for other people. A good gamut of what we would normally do is intelligence gathering. You can get great imagery by day and night. As Mr. Glenn said, you can get way down to the resolution that's far beyond what you can get from satellite.