Developing the technology in secret is probably quite possible. Large-scale deployment, though, building a large army of them, would probably be quite hard to hide, especially from modern satellite photography and information technology.
I suppose. Would that really give you enough of an advantage to be worth the diplomatic cost, though? The difference between a semi-autonomous Predator drone and a fully-autonomous Predator drone in military terms doesn’t seem all that significant.
Now, you could make a type of military unit that would really take advantage of being fully autonomous and have a real advantage, like a fully autonomous air-to-air fighter for example (not really practical to do with semi autonomous drones because of delayed reaction time), but it would seem like that would be much harder to hide.
One issue is how easy it is to secretly build an army of autonomous drones?
Developing the technology in secret is probably quite possible. Large-scale deployment, though, building a large army of them, would probably be quite hard to hide, especially from modern satellite photography and information technology.
Why? Just build a large number of non-autonomous drones and then upgrade the software at the last minute.
I suppose. Would that really give you enough of an advantage to be worth the diplomatic cost, though? The difference between a semi-autonomous Predator drone and a fully-autonomous Predator drone in military terms doesn’t seem all that significant.
Now, you could make a type of military unit that would really take advantage of being fully autonomous and have a real advantage, like a fully autonomous air-to-air fighter for example (not really practical to do with semi autonomous drones because of delayed reaction time), but it would seem like that would be much harder to hide.