A War of Robots, All Chattering on the Western Front

SINCE the United States military campaign began in Afghanistan, the unmanned spy plane has gone from a bit player to a starring role in Pentagon planning. Rather than the handful of "autonomous vehicles," or A.V.'s, that snooped on Al Qaeda hideouts, commanders are envisioning wars involving vast robotic fleets on the ground, in the air and on the seas — swarms of drones that will not just find their foes, but fight them, too.

But such forces would need an entirely new kind of network in which to function, a wireless Internet in the sky that would let thousands of drones communicate quickly while zooming around a battle zone at speeds of up to 300 miles an hour. Such a network would have to be able to deal instantaneously with the unpredictable conditions of war and cope with big losses.

Designing this network is a monumental task. Consider how poor much cellphone coverage is in some areas. Now imagine how much worse it would be with no base towers to direct signals, and with hostile forces trying to jam calls and blow up phones.

An association of nearly 300 scientists and engineers spread across 45 project teams and coordinated by the Office of Naval Research is about a year and a half into a five-year, $11 million effort to determine what it will take to build such a system.

The project is called Multimedia Intelligent Network of Unattended Mobile Agents, or Minuteman (not to be confused with the nuclear missiles). While the program is not about to produce anything like the droid army from the Star Wars movies anytime soon, it has already delivered some important theoretical breakthroughs.