Captain Greg Mordant, US Army Signal Corps, figured out how to shield Predators and Reapers from Soviet bloc high frequency jamming. Someone, probably Soviet Bloc, tried to kill him and the people he was training to do the shielding. He helped put down an assassin and then, with the help of RAF Security and a US Navy Seal Team, he managed to eliminate a Spetsnaz strike team. Promoted to Major instead of being given a medal for his courageous actions, he went into the private sector to build a new 'close-in' drone, RPV to help locate hostiles before they could ambush ISAF soldiers. 'Watchbird' was simple extension of existing technology. The next step was to concept a larger version of Watchbird that mounted a rifle receiver and barrel! Now a 'soldier-pilot' could now fly his eyes and a rifle out from a hardened base and strike hostiles almost silently and invisibly from the air!
About the Author: George Pinneo, an army brat, lived in 4 states and 8 different locations during WWII. He grew up in NW Ohio, graduating from Case Institute of Technology with a B.S.Ch.E. in 1959. His technical career spans 55 years of experience: front-end wafer fab microelectronics, diode laser and hybrid packaging with a focus on fully hermetic package design and manufacture. Along the way he was the fourth founder in a successful article surveillance startup in Hollywood Florida. This entrepreneur loves to the phrase: "you can't do that!" - and then to do it, of course! One of his specialties is fluxless, fully hermetic, hard soldering for microelectronic packages. Family vacations have taken the Pinneos through Canada to Alaska, to Hawaii, into Mexico and the Caribbean with sojourns to Western Europe and to New Zealand and parts of Australia. A recent trip took them through Baltic Europe to see some of the cities of the Hanse; another took them through Andalusia in the south of Spain where they stood on top of the Rock at Gibraltar and looked across at the mountains of Morocco! So far, they've visited 18 Caribbean islands, 7 Canadian provinces, 49 of the 50 States and 11 Mexican estados. He has no intention of visiting North Dakota. The family lives up on the Mogollon Rim of Arizona near the White Mountains. At the age of 55, he earned a private pilot's license and then built an all-metal, 2-seat experimental homebuilt airplane, which he has spent 19 years "refining". He has twice flown cross-country to the annual EAA fly-in in Oshkosh WI. Other hobbies include woodturning, sailing, canoeing, black powder cannons, hiking and jewelry making, especially casting of silver and bronze. A glimpse into his notions of what constitutes "good fiction" includes solid, realistic engineering principles based on hard scientific fact, extended in a linear manner to anticipate ongoing work not yet published. Philosophically, good fiction should teach not only new words, but also new concepts. Writing should be uplifting, positive and enlightening; Bujold has shown SF can also be romantic in her novel: "A Civil Campaign".