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But the Pentagon wants the UCAVs to be able to do more than chat with one another. The unmanned planes should be able to take off, fly and defend themselves as a group without a human telling them what to do. Darpa is working on a "decision aid system" that will automatically handle the many tasks of directing a UCAV team, explained Marc Pitarys, a deputy program director at the agency. Let's say there's a problem with the route a drone is following. The decision-aid system would pick a new one and upload it to the UCAV -- or it would enable the vehicle to "make up one on its own," Pitarys said. Such a system has already been demonstrated in the lab, noted Michael Francis, Pitarys' boss. And, within the next few months, it will be loaded onto the planes themselves. But at least one of the pilots who remotely operate the drones of today doesn't want to take humans too far out of the loop. "Any time we go to automation -- things just happening, a guy not thinking -- that's the wrong direction," said Michael Keaton, commander of the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron (PDF), one the few Air Force groups that use unmanned planes. "You've got to make sure there's a person to make the split-second, instantaneous decisions." It's unclear whether the software will be smart enough to handle the job, in any event. On a scale from zero to 10, Boeing official Stan Kasprzyk told National Defense magazine, the UCAV is "heading toward an autonomy level of 1 to 2." Even if the system's autonomy climbs higher, that may not be an entirely beneficial thing, some outside analysts say. "We already have in this country a predisposition that the world is a set of problems with military solutions. One of the only checks on that is the threat of American boys coming home in body bags," said GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike. Unmanned systems could remove one of those final checks. Pike asked, "What happens when we can resort to violence, when we can hurt others, without being hurt in return?