This video is “today tech.” Imagine 3-5 years from now.

Musings 2 Minutes

Watch the video. This is “today tech.” Then envision this:

It’s 3-5 years from today.

PHANTOM, Inc. has produced prototype quadrupeds extending this technology. Some are variants of this form factor. Slightly heavier, armored, and with longer battery life. They’re turreted, with dual 5.56 and LLD (less-lethal dart) guns. A model with twin grenade auto-launchers is spec’d but not yet complete.

Hybrid controls support teleoperation via secure mesh or sat-link, augmented by onboard AI. They’re capable of autonomous operations in certain scenarios, with risk. Multimodal sensor fusion grants visual, IR, and acoustic senses rivaling predatory animals, all feeding into an integrated ballistic computer.

Pair these quadrupeds with similarly capable bipedal combat avatars and control systems that provide such immersion that the teleoperators become present in the avatars they’re controlling.

Add a flight of quadcopters with similar better-than-FPV immersion, armed and equipped for combined-arms tactical execution.

Marry this unit to a delivery platform that can deploy the team at almost 700mph via an adapted Anduril FQ-44B CCA (unmanned collaborative combat aircraft) airframe. These turbofan-powered aircraft are capable of dropping these avatars into a mission site via today-tech, patented, “DropHawk” pods that carry the bots from 10,000’ to the ground, ready to fight, in less than 75 seconds.

The same DropHawks can carry humans, of course, but it takes a bit of a gut check. Some missions will call for someone willing to do this.

The force is lethal in CQB. They’re faster onto the X than the quickest SWAT, HRT, or QRF.

It’s plausible now. It’ll be certainty in 3-5 years. Or less.

These are the tools that Army veteran Sam Knightsbridge and his team bring to counter terrorism on U.S. soil in “Ghost Drop,” the first book of the DropHawk thrillers.

The thing is, there are three things that technology will never change: When it comes to combat, there’s no such thing as a silver bullet; the enemy always gets a vote; and risks and consequences are never constrained to the immediate battlefield.

Ghost Drop is available worldwide for Kindle and in paperback on Amazon.

Book two of the DropHawk Thrillers, “Terror Swarm,” comes out soon, in August, 2026.

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Published by Kevin H.

Bio: I grew up a Navy brat, then enlisted in the U.S. Army Infantry at age 21. I entered as a private, earned selection for and admission into Officer Candidate School, then spent the rest of the time wearing bars. After several years training force-on-force unit combat in the Mojave with the Army's elite mechanized OPFOR, and then the joy of command while at Fort Carson, CO, which included the challenges and rewards of taking a company of soldiers to Saudi Arabia and bringing them all home safely, I left the military in search of new experiences. Like many who leave the military, I hit some hiccups trying to figure out how to communicate to civilians that a decade of training soldiers to aggressively close with and kill the enemy was an experience that would translate swimmingly into their company culture. Eventually I overcame that communication challenge. That led to several years doing the "corporate thing," pursuing a career that led from retail to IT, following my passions for computers and communications developed as a(n) (unlikely) hobby while a soldier. In the late nineties, I had the good fortune to hire into one of the pioneer companies in the (then new) massively multiplayer online game industry. While there I saw opportunity to start my own company and used all my experiences (and no small amount of learning new skills on the fly!) to build an online payment processing company. My first company, PayByCash, brought local non-credit-card payment methods from around the world to Internet content providers with one very simple integration. After growing for 8 years and earning the trust of the largest game content providers in the world (and most of the smaller ones as well), we merged with a VC-funded Silicon Valley company and were later acquired by Visa. In my on-again-off-again "retirement," as a serial entrepreneur, I develop (and occasionally launch) new ventures. When not torturing myself with the responsibility to nurse my whackadoodle ideas into profitability, I spend the time with my family that I rarely had when running my first (and to date most successful) company. And I write, sporadically and spasmodically. When not writing, I race cars and enjoy improving my skills in the shooting sports.

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