Back then, they were called remotely piloted vehicles, or simply drones, but unmanned aircraft have proved themselves useful in wartime before, only to be ignored in peacetime. Not this time round-not after Iraq. Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, signaled the seismic shift in April when he said unmanned Predators and Reapers were beginning to supplant some of the mission space occupied by F-15s and F-16s, allowing the U.S. Air Force to retire 250 older manned fighters.rnGen. Norton Schwartz, Air Force chief of staff, underlined the message in testimony to Congress in May. "This is an inflection point," he told lawmakers. "And the trend lines are that the U.S. Air Force will be an increasingly unmanned aviation service."rnBut it's not the routine use of unmanned aircraft for surveillance and strike missions in Iraq and Afghanistan that will assure their continued relevance after war is over. It is the fact the Pentagon is putting in place the bureaucracy to "institutionalize" unmanned systems-the mechanisms for development, procurement and sustainment that did not exist before.
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