When charts like the one above surface inside the Pentagon, they’re generally some action officer’s guesstimate about how much her program’s top-line budget is going to grow in the out years (also known as the FYDP [pronounced fidd-IP], for future years defense program) Or, as we call it: the future.
But this chart is different. It’s an officially-sanctioned, finished product. It’s buried inside the Pentagon’s latest Aircraft Procurement Plan, 2012-2041. Bottom line: we ain’t increasing our numbers of manned aircraft, but the number of unmanned drones bought each year is, ahem, skyrocketing. Annual drone buys are slated to triple between next year and 2021. That would double the size of the Pentagon’s drone fleet over the coming decade, and could well represent as big a change in war-fighting as the tank, the jet or the atomic bomb. Or at least the tank and the jet.