Reuters Pilotless aircraft played an important role in Afghanistan, and one model, the Gnat, was sent to the Philippines last month to conduct surveillance flights.
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ASHINGTON — From Homer to Hemingway, Sun Tzu to Churchill, humans have been fascinated by the violence and plotting, the heroism and sacrifice, the epic theater of what Dryden called "the trade of kings" — war.

But the Pentagon, energized by successes in Afghanistan, is moving ever closer to draining the human drama from the battlefield and replacing it with a ballet of machines.

Rapid advances in technology have brought an array of sensors, vehicles and weapons that can be operated by remote control or are totally autonomous. Within a decade, those machines will be able to perform many of the most dangerous, strenuous or boring tasks now assigned to people, military planners say, paving the way for a fundamental change in warfare.

Already, autonomous sentinels on the ground, in the air and in orbit are probing the battlefield with heat detectors, radar, cameras, microphones and other devices. Some can reveal decoys and pierce camouflage, darkness and bad weather.

In years to come, once targets are found, chances are good that they will be destroyed by weapons from pilotless vehicles that can distinguish friends from foes without consulting humans.

The rapid shift away from people — what the Pentagon calls manned units — to automation has several goals.

Many new devices will be much smaller and lighter, making them cheaper, more fuel efficient and easier to move, advocates contend. And because of their unlimited attention spans, machines should do better at tedious, time-consuming tasks that human warriors loathe, like standing guard or monitoring mountain passes.

But most important, many officials say, remote technology can shield and aid the the flesh-and-blood soldier.

"We seem as a society, thank God, very averse to taking casualties," said Dr. Gervasio Prado, the president of SenTech, a Massachusetts company refining book-size robotic sentinels that can be sprinkled on battlefields to listen for enemy vehicles.

"We'll continue putting as much effort as possible into keeping the humans in a safe location and do this dirty job remotely," he said.

In the short run, soldiers, pilots and sailors will still be essential components of any battle, military planners say. This will be particularly true in urban settings, where buildings, tunnels and people create confusing obstacles that no machine will be able to skirt for years to come.

But over time, experts largely agree, remote-sensing and piloting technologies will produce the biggest change in warfare in generations.

By 2020 or earlier, if the Pentagon and its many supporters in Congress and the White House have their way, pilotless planes and driverless buggies will direct remote-controlled bombers toward targets; pilotless helicopters will coordinate driverless convoys, and unmanned submarines will clear mines and launch cruise missiles.

"The promise is enormous," said Dr. M. Franklin Rose, an electrical engineer who is leading a study of driverless ground vehicles being done for the Army by the Board on Army Science and Technology of the National Academy of Sciences. "Robotics can do three things for the future army: keep soldiers out of harm's way, do the laborious and boring tasks and keep going long after a soldier is exhausted. And they have no fear, at least in current embodiments."

Some simple devices, like infrared and night-vision scopes, are available to enemies as well. But no country or terrorist group will have the ability any time soon to deploy these systems so widely and deeply in its forces, many military analysts say.

It is a dream long in the making that has been stunningly accelerated by the war in Afghanistan. There, several pilotless surveillance aircraft turned in unexpectedly strong performances, including the Air Force's Predator and its missile-toting cousin from the Central Intelligence Agency. They piped streaming video of Taliban and Qaeda movements to command posts in Saudi Arabia and the Pentagon, where commanders could then call almost immediate air strikes.

As a result, the Pentagon has requested $1.1 billion, an increase of nearly $150 million, in the 2003 budget to accelerate development of the Predator, Global Hawk and other pilotless planes.

"Why send a marine into harm's way when you can send an $8,000 vehicle instead?" said Brig. Gen. Douglas V. O'Dell, commander of the Fourth Marine Expeditionary Brigade, referring to the Marines' new pilotless aircraft, the Dragon Fly.

Today's advances in military technology are the result of an effort to extending forces' ability to see over the foxhole rim, the next ridge or across a national border and to speed the application of deadly force.

In Vietnam, troops dropped battery-powered listening devices, designed to track submarines, into the forest along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and broadcast the sounds of activity below to crews in planes circling above. The Pentagon also used remotely piloted surveillance drones, including ones armed with Maverick missiles, in Vietnam. But crude technology and limited range discouraged further development.

But the 1990's saw leaps in computer and sensor technology that reignited interest in remote controlled weapons. In Bosnia, the military tried an Army drone called the Hunter; in Kosovo, it first deployed the Predator. By the time American warplanes began attacking Afghanistan, the Air Force had learned out how link the Predator's cameras to video screens on AC-130 gunships, aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea and the Combined Air Operation Command Center in Saudi Arabia.

A few years ago, listening devices, called unattended ground sensors, weighed 30 pounds and were lugged into enemy territory by troops. Now they weigh three pounds. One model is designed to be dropped from aircraft. The sturdy sensors detect vibrations and sounds. Using a computerized library of the distinctive noises produced by a host of enemy engines, tank treads and the like, they recognize passers-by.

The next step will be to integrate data from the unattended sensors with information flowing from high-flying drones or satellites, said Dr. Prado, whose company builds the listening devices.

By using different sensors to scour the same landscape and comparing the information, it will be easier to unmask decoys or camouflaged weapons, officials say. As recently as the Kosovo bombing campaign, decoys regularly fooled American bombers.