The Army is experimenting with arming small, soldier-operated drones with guns to shoot enemy targets with either a 9mm pistol or tiny ink-pen-like gun barrel mounted on.
“We are looking right now at a remotely operated single-shot weapon which looks like a pen,” Col. Sam Edwards, Director of Robotics Requirements, Capability Development Integration Directorate, Ft. Benning, Ga., told The National Interest in an interview.
First and foremost, a small drone armed with a pistol controlled remotely by a human operator can attack an enemy soldier on the other side of a ridge, behind a rock, or even inside a building. It can enable point-to-point small arms fire while protecting the shooter. Such a possibility could clearly bring new possibilities to close quarter battle by offering new angles of attack. The presence of an armed drone might force enemies to reposition and move, potentially exposing themselves to targeting opportunities.
Armed drone aerial small arms attack would be very difficult to defend against, particularly if there were numerous mini-gun tubes loaded onto the drone as is the case with the ink-pen-like drone.
Unlike drones that are themselves engineered to become explosives, mini-armed drones could be recoverable and, for example, return to an operator for reloading and retasking. The system will need to have the right kinds of hardware configuration, software, and camera systems enabled by some kind of data link transmission sufficient to send targeting information.
This article is from 2020. If this weapon was made public at that time, you can be sure it was operable even sooner, let alone today.
A reasonable hypothesis today is Charlie Kirk was shot from a drone like this carrying a small caliber round fired through a ‘pen-like barrel’.
This would explain the super-fast drones observed on that day and the anomalous neck wound on Kirk; and, so far, the absence of an exit wound or a spent bullet.
I have posted on a drone doing the shooting several times.
The projectile could have been designed to home in on a signal coming from Kirk’s earpiece or it could have been aimed by a remote operator or AI program.
Only a nation or powerful private organization would have the means to obtain and use a weapon like this.
Kirk’s autopsy will reveal what happened if it is credible, which is highly unlikely. ABN