'nuff said.

Remember folks, trust is a moral action. Machines are not moral actors. If you can't trust pilots not to shoot up folks on the same side, you are going to trust an autonomous UACV?

Oh, and some NATO countries fly MIGs.

Why not just stick a troll inside and convince him it's just a game? Trolls iz cheap. Or pigeons.

Why not just install CCTV on all the street corners in afghanistan - it magically cuts crime by just being there.

All through this story I was wondering why they don't have a really cheap drone/blimp of some sort that can have a high endurance and just act as a relay. It wouldn't even take much to turn loose a fleet of them and using off the shelf kit make them into a fully meshed wireless network that can be fault tolerant (say while the replacement birds are heading up to position or bad weather) and get all the data back to the ground stations.

>Is it satalight or ground based problems.

Satellites are extremely expensive to put into geosynchronous orbit. A big communications sat comes at 1 billion Euros or more. The heavy lifter (like the Ariane V) alone is easily 500 million Euros a "shot". The SpaceShuttle launches are even more expensive.

Nevertheless, modern Sats do GBit/s transfers and actually outcompete fiber even in some stationary applications like big software R&D projects (exchanging tons of source code etc).

Probably, cheap high-altitude a/c like the Global Hawk, the U-2 or the Grob Egrett could help out. Even the WW2 Mosquito might be able to do the job.

These a/c could carry either mulit-Gbit/s Laser or microwave comms. I recently read something about high-speed laser comms channel research to deal with the problem of temporal signal dispersion in the atmosphere. It's basically solveable with a ton of FPGA's or ASICs.

Pythagoras will tell you

d=sqrt(2*R*h+h*h)

with R=6300km and h the altitude of the a/c

with h=20km (Global Hawk, U-2 or Egrett) that's d==502km (==1004km if used as a relay)

Google turns up this: http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/global_hawk_10.gif